The first stanza is populated by hunchbacked beggars (line 1), coughing hags (line 2) and soldiers who are more like zombies than men as they lamely march asleep, blind and drunk with fatigue(lines 5, 6, 7). It is this trifold simile, quickly dropped onto the reader with the juxtaposition of a fluid iambic pentameter, that inaugurates the representation of war as three things: identity stripping, individualism forbidding and both body and mind haunting.