OUR GRAVES IN FRANCE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XLVII, Issue 13047, 9 January 1917, Page 5

OUR GRAVES IN FRANCE.

SITES THAT WILL BE MEMORIALS OF THE WAR, AVERTING A HAUNTING FEAR. In France v In a graveyard west of Vimy there are buried 1320 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 botli 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, Tne. other day a Frenchwoman in deep mourning came here with a handful of white flowers to place upon one of these. Probably it wife her soir's, for she was not young. While- she was arranging them at its' head there came into the cemetery one of the usual little bare-headed processions —an 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 Frenchwoman 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 1 the new grave, the chaplain was reading aloud, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," 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. WHAT THE UNITS HAVE DONE. But for the work of the Army's' Graves Registration Units, this little scene and many other scenes: equally binding, in their d'egree, 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 fulS worth of what these units are doing now, one need's 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 fieJds, 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, and the beaded wire wreath of the French, with itsi "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 honored memory of "an unknown French soldier," "two unknown French eoldiers." "six unknown French soldiers, here buried. 1 ' CROSS LETTERED IN I>ENCI'L.

Near La- Boiselle, is a crosb inexpertly made of two i>ieees of Jath and lettered in pencil: "In loving memory of Secona Lieutenant X— —. Kegiment, '.killed here July I>, 1916." It standa scarcely ten leet in front of the line from which our army advanced on that morning. You- ti-ei, when you see it,, the thrill of the first moments of the long battle of theSomme —the subaltern giving the woru to his men, and himself springing nisi out of the trench, and falling aiiuosi at once, and the men pressing on.

In the autumn or 1914 the necessity for a. continued 6rganisation to undertake the supervision of graves was rerecognised, both from the point of view of national feeling and to discourage the disconnected and spasmodic efforts of private individuals which were threatening to create friction and coilfusion. The services of Mr Fabian Ware, whoy while employed under thci British Red. Cross- with, French troops, had already interested himself in the subject, were obtained by the Army, and later this gentleman was granted a. commission in order to supervise the department of which lie is now director. It was not until March, 1915, that the organisation of the Commission of Graves Rc-.gistration, and Inquiries finally assumed its present shape. NEAR THE TRENX'H.. Under the directorate are the GravesRegistration Units in the different spheres of military activity. When an officer or man i.s killed at the front or dies of wounds his burial is at once reported to the director as well as to the base. If killed in action he may still be buried, in the old way, somewhere near the trench. If so, the chaplain or officer who buries him reports the position of the grave, and one of the officers of the Graves Registration Units visits it, verifies the record, affixes, if necessary, a durable cross, with the date, the .man's name, rank, regiment, and regimental number upon it, clearly stamped on aluminium tape, and enters these particulars and the exact site of the grave in the register. Bxtt this mode of burial is becoming much less common. The army has been quick to realise the desirability of burying its dead' in the nearest of the 300 or more recognised cemeteries behind the line. The bodies are carried back by road or light railway to one of the little wooden, iron, or canvas mortuaries which the Graves Registration Units have set up in the cemeteries. There the soldiers in charge of the cerfetery <k> all that' remains to be. done, and an eye-witness can assure the friends of soldiers at home tflat there is nothing perfunctory about the-sM funerals. I

In all wars it has been one of the fears haunting a soldier's friends that his body may be utterly lost. Even in this war there have been such irretrievable losses. But in no great- war has so much been done as in this to prevent the addition of that special torment to the pains of anxiety and of bereavement.