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
Further on, beside the light railway which runs north to Ecoust, there
are tiny cemeteries. In one of these Germans and British are mingled,
thus--Gefreiter Luckenmeyer of the German Field artillery betwixt a man
of the Londons and a man of the Devons, and a German unknown and a
British Tommy lie in a little plot together by themselves. In some
cemeteries the bodies of our foes were buried just outside those of our
own kindred, but as exhumed bodies were brought in, ever increasingly,
it has come about that we have surrounded German graves with our own,
and as it were accidentally forgiven our enemies and received them into
the midst of the family.
Over the way at Vraucourt Copse, perched high in a sun-kissed wheatfield
lies Lieut. A. S. Robinson of the Royal Scots, with 22 private soldiers'
names inscribed on his cross. One wondered if it would be true to
say--"Here he lies where he longed to be" and did he love Stevenson and
often quote
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig my grave and let me lie.
These Royal Scots have the widest of all starry skies above them and the
unbarred gate of heaven in its midst.
A little further still and you have the Australian cemetery at Noreuil
at the corner of the road, rectilinear, handsome, clean and cared-for,
neatly fenced in with wire and having a little white gate by which to
enter. But outside the cemetery and as it were falling back in every
attitude of banishment and despair, the old faded wood and broken
crosses of the Germans, overgrown with weeds, crazy-roofed crosses,
aslant, tumbled. In 1916 the enemy began to bury here. In 1917 he left
his dead behind. In 1918 he recaptured them and repaired the
crosses--and added to them. In 1918 it was a decent graveyard; one could
read the names of all the dead. But their kindred went away and forgot.
Their crosses are the monuments of the forgotten and the vague memorial
of a useless sacrifice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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