Walking Shadows: Sea Tales and OthersNoyes, Alfred
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Walking Shadows: Sea Tales and Others
Noyes, Alfred
Sea stories, English; Short stories, English; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
The correspondents alighted and followed Captain Crump across a broad
open plain, pitted with shell-holes. The incessant thunder of the guns
deepened as they went.
"Don't touch anything without consulting me," snapped Crump at the
Spaniard, who was nosing round an unexploded shell and thinking of
souvenirs. "The Boches have a charming trick of leaving things about
that may go off in your hands. A chap picked up a spiked helmet here the
other day. They buried him in the graveyard that Mr. Grant wants to see.
It's a very small grave. There wasn't much left of him."
The burial-ground lay close under a ridge of hills, and they approached
it through a maze of recently captured German trenches. It was a strange
piece of sad ordered gardening in a devastated world. Every minute or
two the flash and shock of a concealed howitzer close at hand shook the
loose earth on the graves, but only seemed to emphasize the still sleep
of this acre. It held a great regiment of graves, mounds of fresh-turned
earth in soldierly ranks, most of them marked with tiny wooden crosses,
rough bits of kindling wood. Some of the crosses bore names, written in
pencil. There was one that bore the names of six men, and the grave was
hardly large enough for a child. They had been blown to pieces by a
single shell.
They passed through the French section first. Here there was an austere
poetry, a simplicity that approached the sublime in the terrible
regularity of the innumerably repeated inscription, "_Mort pour la
France_." In the British section there was a striking contrast. There
was not a word of patriotism; but, though the graves were equally
regular, an individuality of inscription that interested the Spanish
correspondent greatly.
"It is here we pass from Racine to Shakespeare," he said, pointing to a
wooden cross that bore the words:
"_In loving memory of Jim,
From his old pal,
The artful dodger,
'Gone but not forgotten.'_"
"No, no, no," cried the Greek correspondent, greatly excited by the
literary suggestion. "From Flaubert to Dickens! Is it not so, Captain
Crump?"
Captain Crump grunted vaguely and moved on towards the soldier in
charge. May Margaret followed him, the photograph in her hand.
"We want to find number forty-eight," said Captain Crump.
The soldier saluted and led the way to the other end of the ground. Many
of the graves here had not been named. There had evidently been some
disaster which made it difficult. Some of them carried the
identification disc.
"This is number forty-eight, sir," said the soldier, pausing before a
mound that May Margaret knew already by heart. "May I look at the
photograph, sir? Yes. You see, that's the rosary--that black
thing--round the cross."
"The rosary! I don't understand." May Margaret looked at the string of
beads on the cross that bore the name of Brian Davidson.
"I suppose he was a Roman Catholic, sir. They must have taken it from
the body."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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