THE CARE
OF
THE DEAD
London:
Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd.
1916.
I.
In a graveyard west of Vimy thereare buried 1,320 French soldiers and more than600 English. The earth is bare on most ofthe English graves; the French ones are older,but all are cared for alike by the Englishmannow in charge of the place. "We leave youour trenches and our dead," a French officersaid to an English one when our army tookover this part of the line, and both partsof the trust are discharged with a will.
What this means for the French, one feelswhen one sees the visits of French soldiers'friends to their graves. The other day aFrench woman in deep mourning came herewith a handful of white flowers to place uponone of these. Probably it was her son's,for she was not young. While she was arrangingthem at its head, there came intothe cemetery one of the usual little bareheadedprocessions—a N.C.O. showing the way;then an English chaplain with his open book;[4]then, on a stretcher, the body sewn up ina brown army blanket, a big Union Jacklying over it; then half a dozen privateslooking as Englishmen do at these moments—alittle awkward, but simply and sincerelysorry. As they passed the French womanshe rose and then, evidently moved by someimpulse which shyness made it difficult tofollow, fell in at the rear of the procession,with some of the flowers still in her hand.When I next saw them, the men were standinground the new grave, the chaplain was readingaloud, "dust to dust" and "ashes to ashes,"and the woman, a few yards away, was kneelingon the ground. The service over, and therest turning away, she came close to thegrave, dropped the white flowers in, andwent back to the other grave empty handed.
One knew, though the woman could not,how all this would be told to the deadEnglishman's comrades; and one felt thetruth of Sir Douglas Haig's saying, that akind of work which "does not directly contributeto the successful termination of the[5]war" may still "have an extraordinary moralvalue to the troops in the field, as well asto the relatives and friends of the dead athome." But for the work of the Army'sGraves Registration Units, this little sceneand many other scenes equally binding,in their degree, to the friendship of Englandand France could scarcely have taken place.After the French Army had left this district,the French soldier's grave might not havebeen taken care of, perhaps could not havebeen even known to be his; the Englishmanmight have been buried under cover of nightin some vacant space near the firing-trench,and all trace of the grave blown away nextday by a shell. To know the full worthof what these units are doing now, one needsto see first what the state of things was inthe first months of the war.
In those days a man was commonlyburied close to the place where he fell.Wherever hard fighting had been, in Franceor Belgium, the eye of the traveller alongthe roads is struck by many low crosses[6]sticking out of the ground—in the fields, incottage gardens, in corners of farmyards andorchards, even on roadside strips of grass.Where the ground has changed hands agood deal in the course of the war, you maysee, within a few hundred yards of eachother, the gabled and eav