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             THE CARE

                OF

             THE DEAD


          [Illustration]


             London:
    Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd.

              1916.




I.


In a graveyard west of Vimy there are buried 1,320 French soldiers
and more than 600 English. The earth is bare on most of the English
graves; the French ones are older, but all are cared for alike by the
Englishman now in charge of the place. "We leave you our trenches and
our dead," a French officer said to an English one when our army took
over this part of the line, and both parts of the trust are discharged
with a will.

What this means for the French, one feels when one sees the visits
of French soldiers' friends to their graves. The other day a French
woman in deep mourning came here with a handful of white flowers to
place upon one of these. Probably it was her son's, for she was not
young. While she was arranging them at its head, there came into the
cemetery one of the usual little bareheaded processions--a N.C.O.
showing the way; then an English chaplain with his open book; then,
on a stretcher, the body sewn up in a brown army blanket, a big Union
Jack lying over it; then half a dozen privates looking as Englishmen do
at these moments--a little awkward, but simply and sincerely sorry. As
they passed the French woman she rose and then, evidently moved by some
impulse which shyness made it difficult to follow, fell in at the rear
of the procession, with some of the flowers still in her hand. When I
next saw them, the men were standing round the new grave, the chaplain
was reading aloud, "dust to dust" and "ashes to ashes," and the woman,
a few yards away, was kneeling on the ground. The service over, and
the rest turning away, she came close to the grave, dropped the white
flowers in, and went back to the other grave empty handed.

One knew, though the woman could not, how all this would be told
to the dead Englishman's comrades; and one felt the truth of Sir
Douglas Haig's saying, that a kind of work which "does not directly
contribute to the successful termination of the war" may still "have
an extraordinary moral value to the troops in the field, as well as to
the relatives and friends of the dead at home." But for the work of
the Army's Graves Registration Units, this little scene and many other
scenes equally binding, in their degree, to the friendship of England
and France could scarcely have taken place. After the French Army had
left this district, the French soldier's grave might not have been
taken care of, perhaps could not have been even known to be his; the
Englishman might have been buried under cover of night in some vacant
space near the firing-trench, and all trace of the grave blown away
next day by a shell. To know the full worth of what these units are
doing now, one needs to see first what the state of things was in the
first months of the war.

In those days a man was commonly buried close to the place where he
fell. Wherever hard fighting had been, in France or Belgium, the eye of
the traveller along the roads is struck by many low crosses sticking
out of the ground--in the fields, in cottage gardens, in corners of
farmyards and orchards, even on roadside strips of grass. Where the
ground has changed hands a good deal in the course of the war, you may
see, within a few hundred yards of each other, the gabled and eaved
cross of the Germans, with "Hier ruht in Gott" and a name painted
white on a dark ground, the beaded wire wreath of the French, with
its "Requiescat" or "Mort pour la France," and the plain-lined cross
of the English, white or light brown or just the unpainted wood, "In
loving memory" of one or more officers or men. Even now a good many
of these isolated memorials are raised. The very position of some of
them is eloquent. Near Fricourt, on what used to be No Man's Land till
we won it this summer, a number of crosses, all of the English sort
and inscribed in English, stand to the honoured memory of "an unknown
French soldier," "two unknown French soldiers," "six unknown French
soldiers, here buried." Here, when our troops took the German front
line on the 1st July, it was one of their first cares to bury the
French comrades who fell while holding this part of the front during
