Four Days by Vsevolod Garshin
How am I to recapture the numbed feeling that came over me after that horrible event? I lay motionless, my eyes half-shut. The wind kept changing, sometimes blowing pure, fresh air my way, sometimes enveloping me in the stench. That day my neighbor became so hideous as to beggar description. Once when I opened my eyes to look at him, I was appalled. His face was gone. It had slid off the bones. His frightful bony smile, his eternal smile, struck me as more revolting, more awful than ever, though I've often held skulls in my hands and even prepared whole heads in anatomy class. This skeleton in uniform with its shiny buttons made me shudder. 'This is war,' I thought, 'this is how it looks.'