GERMANY: At dawn, bodies were stretched out on the ground as far as the eye could see, and then a little further, writes Derek Scally in Cologne
At first glance, it looked like the famous scene of the wounded lying in the streets of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind. This wasn't the red soil of Georgia, though, but the trampled, spongy soil of the Marienfeld, near Cologne.
And the half-a-million bodies stirring in the morning mist, though chilled to the bone, were very much alive and waiting anxiously for Pope Benedict.
Half-a-million young people, participants in the World Youth Day festival of the Catholic faith, stayed on after the Saturday evening vigil, sleeping under the open sky in sleeping bags wrapped in blue bin-liners. In the middle of the crowd were 2,157 Irish, flying the flag, cold but happy.
"It was very cold and I kept waking up, but some slept through. I'm kind of sad and emotional. When will I get to see the Pope again?" said Maria Rice, from Salthill, Co Galway, who met Pope Benedict on Thursday.
"The Mass was very beautiful, showing us how a real Mass should be. Every time I do a pilgrimage, I feel my faith increasing. After World Youth Day, I feel like trying to be a bit more spiritual."
By 9am, organisers were sending out television and radio messages urging the people of Cologne to stay away: the 270-hectare Marienfeld, a coal mine until 1986, was full.
The crowd had swelled to more than a million by the time Pope Benedict arrived, shortly after 10 am, and he could be seen easily amid the swarm of black suits around him at the altar on top of the so-called "pope hill".
"On the Epiphany, we came here with representatives from all over the world. Each had brought soil from their homeland," said Cardinal Joachim Meissner, Archbishop of Cologne. "So this hill is not just German soil, but the soil of the world."
Set up on the hill was a specially constructed canopy, providing shelter and light for the Mass celebrants. From a distance, it looked more like a flying saucer up on stilts for repairs.
"I would have loved to go through the field in the papamobile to be close to everyone, but it wasn't possible. However, I greet everyone from my heart," said Pope Benedict in his charming Bavarian twang at the beginning of the Mass.
Among the guests who did not spend the night in a bin-liner in the field were Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, his predecessor, Helmut Kohl, and President Hörst Köhler.
Father Jim Caffrey, director of the Catholic Youth Council in Dublin, said World Youth Day had been a huge success, giving the young Irish visitors an experience of the church they could not get at home.
"There is a prejudice against young people with faith. They're not goodie-goodies, they're right in the middle of life. And I think they're brave, because they're seeing the need for something more than the consumer culture," he added.
After final, multilingual greetings, Pope Benedict ended the Mass, and World Youth Day, saying in German: "The peace and joy of Christ be with you always."
Then the chaos began as one million people went on their way, to meet again at the next World Youth Day in Sydney in 2008.