Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western FrontHornung, E. W. (Ernest William)
History
Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front
Hornung, E. W. (Ernest William)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives; World War, 1914-1918 -- War work -- Young Men's Christian Associations
'Plains that the moonlight turns to sea,' the boy had quoted in
describing the plain we were crossing now; but it had become a broken
plain since his time; covered with elephant huts and pill-boxes, scored
by light railways; the roads on which no man might live in those days,
themselves alive with traffic in these, with lorries and men and all the
abundant activities of a host behind a host. The car stopped one or two
hundred yards from our destination, towards which we threaded our way
over duck-boards, through and past these mushroom habitations, till we
came to the green open space which was all that remained of the farm.
Not a stone or a brick to be seen; not even a heap of bricks, or a
charred beam, or the empty socket of pillar or post; only the two
gate-posts themselves, looking like the stumps of trees. But what better
than a gateway to give a man his bearings? It led the bandsman straight
to a regular file of such stumps, which really had been trees: and in
his path stood a white cross, new and sturdy, at which I had been
looking all the time: at which he stopped without looking twice, still
studying the ground and the bits of landmarks that survived. It was the
place.
It was the boy's grave; and the discoverer's--nay, the
diviner's--instinct stood vindicated as wonderfully as his evidence had
been discredited. Almost adjoining it was a great shell-hole full of
water; but it was not our grave that the shell had rifled. Our grave had
been dug too deep. It was as though the boy himself had said: 'It's my
grave all right--but I don't want you to go thinking those were my
things! All that was me or mine is just as they left it.'
So we took off our helmets and stood listening to the young priest
reading the last office, in Latin first and then in English. And many of
the beautiful sentences were punctuated by loud reports, which I took
for our guns if I thought of them at all; for as yet I had heard hardly
anything else down south; but after the service I saw little black
balloons appearing by magic in mid-air, expanding into dingy cloudlets,
and presently dissolving shred by shred. It was enemy shrapnel all the
time.
Then the two Sergeants prepared the ground with gentle skill; and we
knelt and put in the narcissus bulbs, the primroses and pinks, the phlox
and the saxifrage, that the boy's mother had sent him; and a baby
rose-tree from an old friend who loved him, in the corner of England
that he loved best; it must be climbing up his cross, if it has lived to
climb at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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