Over the Canadian Battlefields: Notes of a Little Journey in France, in March, 1919Dafoe, John Wesley
History
Over the Canadian Battlefields: Notes of a Little Journey in France, in March, 1919
Dafoe, John Wesley
World War, 1914-1918 -- Battlefields; World War, 1914-1918 -- Canada; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, Canadian
Everywhere as one goes through the battle area, there can be seen one
ever-recurring mark of battle that will endure—the graves of those who
fell. The war area is in truth one vast cemetery. Look almost where
one will from the road and he will see, here and there, the white cross,
or clusters of them, showing where soldiers were buried where they fell.
(A stick driven in the ground with a helmet on the top of it—there are
almost forests of these along the Cambrai road—marks the grave of a
German soldier). There was never a war where so much care was taken to
keep a record of the resting place of fallen soldiers; and as time
passes bodies will be taken from their isolated graves on the
battlefields and placed in great military cemeteries where they will
receive in perpetuity the care of a reverent posterity. In the main the
unplaced dead will be those who fell in territory which, as the result
of the action, passed into enemy hands for the time being. Everywhere
along the roadways there are small Canadian graveyards, many of which
will doubtless remain undisturbed for all time. Thus no one will ever
propose to disturb the slumbers of the seventy or eighty Canadians—among
them Lance-Corporal Sifton, V.C.—who rest in a huge mine crater on Vimy
Ridge. The crater has been rounded and smoothed; a huge cross outlined
on the earth at the bottom of the hole marks the common grave; and at
the rim of the crater, visible from the roadside, is a modest, temporary
memorial bearing the names of the fallen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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