The challenge of the dead : $b A vision of the war and the life of the common soldier in France, seen two years afterwards between August and November, 1920Graham, Stephen
History
The challenge of the dead : $b A vision of the war and the life of the common soldier in France, seen two years afterwards between August and November, 1920
Graham, Stephen
World War, 1914-1918
The generality of men and women however will not do that. The new-born
generations mask their grief, and you will see if you walk into Bernafay
Wood that a young Bernafay Wood is rising midst the dead masts of the
old--self-sown. It will grow higher every year till the old is hidden.
The masts will fall, will rot, will recede from this bright sunlight,
and relapse into the shade which the new trees will give them, and then
soon all will be forgotten. Near Bernafay too the crosses of the dead
lie spread out like rows of pins, memorial crosses where there is no
body, crosses for the unknown, more surely for the unknown British
soldier than for the known. So also it will be with them. The babies are
rising, the younger men are growing, growing to hide all and everything.
The nakedness of reality which we see to-day will be hidden in the shade
by and by. These brand-new cemeteries, looking often so fresh and rich
in their masses of brown-stained wood, will pass. They will first be
re-set-up in stone. 1921 will see them rolling out in new stone crosses,
at first startlingly pallid and virginal, but as the months go on,
getting gradually greyened and darkened, rain-washed, wind-blown, then
falling a little from the straight. Flowers will bloom as new summers
shine o'er the dead. Visitors will come. There will be a greater time of
visiting the cemeteries and the battlefields than there yet has been.
Gardeners will be conscientious, and then some less conscientious as the
years roll by and visitors become less. Most of the cemeteries in the
more obscure places will be half-forgotten and gone desolate. There must
come a time when no more visit the burial-places of the great war than
visit now the cemeteries of the Crimea. In 1914 the great cemetery
above Sevastopol, kept by a German gardener, had become from a national
point of view utterly unvisited and forgotten. A roll used to be kept
there of the visitors who came in their hundreds after the Crimean war
was over, dwindling to a score a year and then to less than ten, and
then to twos and threes and ones. The living who survived the Crimea do
not need to go to Russia now, for they have joined the dead long since.
So it will be with us; we shall join the authentic dead, and the young
ones will have forgotten whilst chattering of some other war.
Meanwhile look reverently at the graves of the men of the 32nd A.I.F.,
with little rising suns adorning the centre-posts of their crosses! See
where lies Capt. Claude with his high memorial, or Private Harry who
carried out an equal sacrifice with him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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