“KEPT WONDERFULLY”

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 September 1923, Page 7

“KEPT WONDERFULLY”

WAR GRAVES IN FRANCE. Amongst those who returned to New Zealand recently by the Marama was Miss Hodge, of Napier, who has been in Europe for some two years, holiday making. One of her trips while away was to France, whither she went to visit the grave of a relative lost in the Great War, and her impressions in connection with the graves of British Empire soldiers in. France will be received with pleasure by those many in New Zealand whose menfolk were left behind never to return to the land that sent them to protect it. Miss Hodge said the graves were kept wonderfully, and no one who had relatives or friends lying in the fields of Flanders need worry for a moment that the graves were neglected in the slightest degree. At the time she was there only one of the cemeteries had been completed. , This one had been completed early so that visitors from overseas might see what the other cemeteries would be like when finished. During the time she was in France she visited twelve of the war cemeteries, and at all of them except the one the men employed by the British Government were still at work. Describing the finished cemetery she stated that the rows of head stones were about four feet apart. Each was axactly like its fellow, standing about three feet high, curved on the top, and bearing the coat of arms of the regiment, the name, number, and

company of the dead soldier. Running straight along the line of headstones was a beautifully kept garden area two feet wide without break, and between this and the next row of stones there was a walking path laid in velvety grass and kept as smooth as a billiard table. Each of the headstones faced the Cross of Sacrifice, and the Stone of Remembrance which would be repeated in each of the plots. The Cross of Sacrifice was the .Crusader sword in bronze mounted in stone, while the Stone of Remembrance was plain, standing about five feet high, and bearing the one inscription, “Their Name Liveth Forever.” Outside France the only cross and stone she had seen were erected at Adelaide, by the women there, to all the soldiers who fell in the war. Another Cross of Sacrifice and a Stone of Remembrance Were being erected at the entrance to the Napier Cathedral. “I asked our chauffeur who had been a captain in charge of a tank in the war, whether the spot we were passing at one stage was covered in the remains of a barbed wire entanglement,” said Miss Hodge. “He stopped the car and we went to have a look at it, to find that it was a spot where some half-dozen German soldiers had been buried. We were told that the French authorities had several times told the German Government of this 'cemetery, but their communications had not even been replied to, and the graves were being left to the care of themselves. The Germans have not worried about their dead. There were several German graves in a portion of one of the British cemeteries. These were kept in good order with ’ our own, but they did not bear headstones. We could not leave them just going to waste alongside our own .. graves, which were kept so beauti- ' fully.” J 5