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 the winter, whose bodies could not be retrieved at the time of their death, from under the fire of German machine-guns, and, when recovered at last, were beyond all chance of identification. Near La Boisselle, again, is a cross inexpertly made of two pieces of lath, and lettered in pencil: "In loving memory of 2nd Lieut. X., —— Regiment, killed here, July 1st, 1916." It stands scarcely ten feet in front of the line from which our army advanced on that morning. You feel, when you see it, the thrill of the first moment of the long battle of the Somme—the subaltern giving the word to his men, and himself springing first out of the trench, and falling almost at once, and the men pressing on.
That is a special case of a grave on a site more monumental than Westminster Abbey itself. A few such graves, and some part of the trenches near them, will probably be preserved for ever by village communes or private owners of land, as memorials and relics of the great war. But not every man can be buried just where he falls. As a rule, the spot remains under fire for some time after his death. Even if it could be done, and the history of the war be left written in this way on the face of the country,—a long dotted line of graves representing a trench, a cluster of graves a skirmish, a dense constellation a battle—the record would not be durable. France could not fence off a strip of country 300 miles long and many miles wide, and keep it up as a historical museum. And nothing else could preserve all the graves, or most of them. Some would be treasured and tended, as they are now, by farmers and cottagers. Others would soon be lost sight of. In a few months the earth of a newly made grave sinks in, the cross falls awry, and may split, the writing on it is weathered away. Unless something is done, and done promptly, every trace of an outlying grave may be gone in a year. That is what might have happened to thousands of British and French soldiers' graves if an Englishman, full of goodwill and energy, had not noticed the danger in time, and stepped in, with a few like-minded friends, to avert it.
How the work was begun, and how it has grown, may next be described.
