The name is Clem Snide. I am a private asshole. As a private investigator, I run into more death than law allows... I mean the law of averages. Here's a routine case of industrial sabotage - and the factory blows up, killing 23 people. Well, these things happen! I am a man of the world - going to and fro, and walking up and down in it

Now, death smells. I mean death has a special smell, over and above the smell of cyanide, chloride, blood, carrion or burnt flesh. It's a gray smell. It stops the heart, cuts off the breaths. The smell of the empty body. The smell of field hospitals and gangrene. I got a whiff of it when Mr. Green walked into my office

Now, Ernest Hemmingway could smell it on others too. Here he is in a jeep with General Lanham, known as Bucky to his friends. And Ernie was a real general lover... It's worse than being a cop lover

Well, hey, here they are, and it's, returning from the front line. Where, uh, Major Jones was in charge. After leaving, that man says "Bucky."
Bucky, he says "Ernie?"

"You won't have to relieve him. He won't make it. He stinks of death."

When the jeep reached regimental command post, it would stop by the turn of Colonel John Ruggles. "Uh, General?" said Ruggles, saluting. "The Major has just been killed. Uh, who takes the first battalion?"