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 — John Shaqi
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
Not a few farmers were killed; they also were heroes, for they died at
their posts. But no patriotic cockade marks their humble graves.
Plentiful now are the crosses ornamented with flowers and the red, white
and blue, for those _morts pour la patrie_. Above Ardoye the
first-noticed wayside cemetery of German soldiers appears, and there
lies Franz Delmann, of Chemnitz, and many others who died in November,
1917. It is high up on a ridge beside the position of an old German
battery. How the shells used to howl from this eminence over Roulers,
over Passchendaele and leagues of destruction right into Ypres itself!
Here in old days the grubby war-worn Germans plied the guns, and here
the British guns found their prey also, and our enemies were put to
sleep in this acre of death. Now most of the crosses are down, the
cross-pieces of others have been taken away, part of the field has been
dug up with a spade. For after all the ground is appropriated Belgian
property. It was never paid for and it reverts to its owner, dead and
all. What a pathetic tragedy is that of the dead the Germans left
behind! Each cross, each dead one, refers back to some living family,
some home, some set of human circumstances. What thoughts, what
questions do not go out on the air from obscure homes to the dead who
have been left behind! The reins which go from the living to the dead!
But enemies take little stock of one another's dead. Roulers, which is
vis-à-vis to Ypres, lay partially destroyed and now it is being builded
up again. If the dead could be made to pay for it the dead would. The
living for the living! Roulers was a fine city once. The creative eye
sees that it can be so again. The British gunners could have laid it
flat as Ypres but they did not. Ypres can never be raised. But Roulers
will be Roulers once again. As one approaches it, behold, what activity.
New houses have sprung up overnight. There are thousands of piles of
bricks. Every Belgian has learned bricklaying. Clerks, shopkeepers,
salesmen, porters, in shirt sleeves and plaster-sprinkled hats, are at
work--_without trade union rules_. Hundreds of thousands of whitish
vermilion flesh-coloured old bricks are being made fit to use again,
new bricks in tiers are apparent in improvised kilns, and all day and
every day sounds the chipping and slapping of real reconstruction. Iron
girders are being fitted into the gutted depths of old shop-fronts, and
with foundations and framework it is marvellous how speedily old houses
are built up. The city is poor. Its many factory chimneys are innocent
of smoke. Roulers for flax! It was famous for its linen industry. Two
Scotch engineers, met at a hotel, are fitting in new machinery in the
factories. Typical uncommunicative Britons, they volunteer no
information, but sit face to face over their meals, lean over their food
and chuckle to one another in private monosyllables. When asked how they
are getting on, one of them replies:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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