WHERE THE SOLDIERS LIE

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 3, 5 January 1922, Page 7

WHERE THE SOLDIERS LIE

FRENCH AND BELGIAN :'" CEMETERIES.

Mr. H. Baldwin, Lower Hutt,. when recently in France, visited some thirty soldiers' cemeteries. He saw "forests" of ; crosses, all numbered, marking the places where, soldiers were buried. At Etapleß he. saw 13,000 graves, and wiw. told, that although this place was but half an hour's railway journey from. Boulogne, and there was no actual fighting there, yefc terrible havoc was wrought among ; the troops'by German aeroplanes. Mr. Baldwin took innumerable photographs of the cemeteries, and many individual crosses arid headstones erected to Wellington city and Hutt Valley lads whom he knew, oi, with whose relatives here he was acquainted. He found that in some cemeteries a red sandstone memorial was being placed over the graves. Believing that all were to be white, which he himself 6hou|?ht most suitable, he interviewed the High Commissioner, Sir James Allen, or this matter and on soldiers' gvavee generally in France. Sir James said the red stone was a 1 Scotch stone known as corestule, a. good stone for the purpose ih\the opinion of experts. Other stones used were from the Forest of Dean, Hoptori',' "and elsewhere in England. Mr. Baldwin was on the whole very favourably impressed with the neat order and good care generally taken of the soldiers' burial places. They would in time become v very impressive in their beauty, he thought, judging from the planting and lay-out of the grounds.1 All the wooden crosses were to be replaced by stones, which would be of a uniform shape and size for officers and men alike. The French people too, Mr. Baldwin found,": were very particular in regard to neat order in cemeteries.' 'It- was most pathetic .to stand in one of these cemeteries, with its thousands of crosses, to see here and there some loving touch imparted by a ribbon, a wreath, or a few flo.wers. Much of the country had almost lost all traces of the terrible scars of war, and was being cultivated with restless energy. Mr. Baldwin would have preferred to see on the headstones something more weather-proof than a merely incised inscription, but this "was a difficult and costly thing to do properly considering the. hundreds of thousands 'of men who lie buried in France and Belgium. The making of one uniform stone in pattern and size for officers and men, utr. Baldwin thought, was a very wise provision on the part of the authorities.