The Care of the Dead

The Care of the Dead

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 processionsa N.C.O. showing the way; then an English chaplain with his open book; [4]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 momentsa 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. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 47149
Author: Anonymous
Release Date: Oct 19, 2014
Format: eBook
Language: English