All present sang the hymn most heartily, and we felt its
appropriateness. I never hear it now without thinking of that evening
service in St. George's Church at Arriane Dump. To those at home, I
suppose, it will appear strange that an incident of that kind would
not be almost too moving. At the front, however, death did not seem to
be such a terrible thing--it was part of our life and something to be
expected and met uncomplainingly. Every morning, until we moved, I had
a Celebration of the Holy Communion in the church at eight o'clock,
and every evening I had Evensong at six. I was told long afterwards
that when General Horne paid his first visit to our Battle
Headquarters, he pointed to the little iron structure with its belfry
and white cross, and asked what it was. When they told him it was a
church, he said, "A church! Now I know why the Canadians won Vimy
Ridge." Unfortunately, the point of the observation was lost by the
fact that the church was built, not before, but after we had taken the
Ridge.
When we left Arriane Dump, I handed over the church to the Senior
Chaplain of the British division which took our place, and he had the
building taken down, put in lorries, and re-erected in the village of
Roclincourt, where he adorned it with a painted window of St. George
and the Dragon.
Along the Arras-Bethune road are various cemeteries where the men of
the different battalions are buried. The greatest care was taken in
collecting the dead and making their last resting place as neat and
comely as possible. A plank road was constructed to connect the
Bethune-Arras road with the Lens-Arras road further forward. It lay in
a straight line over the broken ground cut up by trenches and huge
craters, and brought one to the headquarters of the siege battery in
which my son was a gunner. On all sides stretched the plain which our
men had won. Far off, on clear days, one could see in the distance the
little hamlets behind the German lines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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