BURIAL OF GENERAL JOHNSTON

New Zealand Tablet, 1 November 1917, Page 22

BURIAL OF GENERAL JOHNSTON

Mr. Malcolm Ross, war correspondent with the the New Zealand Forces in the field, writes under date August 8, as follows regarding the burial of the late Brigadier-General F. E. Johnston: Another of our Brigadiers has been laid to rest in the soldiers’ burial ground at Bailleul. Many rows of wooden crosses front the more solid stone monuments of the dead of that old city. Here, practically in the one cemetery, lie civilian dead of France, and heroes from many parts of the British Empire, who have given their lives in defence of this fair land. At a rough count there are at least one thousand five hundred graves there now. As the days pass new graves are dug, and the brown earth is heaped up again over the mortal remains of other brave men. In the days to come this bit of hallowed ground will be a place of pilgrimage to men and women from many a far-distant home. Into the town itself the German shells still drop from a long range, and the night raiders harry it with their bombs from the sky. But the life of the town goes on much as if nothing unusual had happened. Around an open grave in the Soldiers’ Burial Ground this morning was gathered a group of New Zealand officers to pay the last tribute to a dead com-—Brigadier-General F. E. Johnston. On the preceding day, in the course of his duty at the front, he was killed by a German sniper’s bullet. The little group included Generals Bird wood, Godley, and Russell. His body, in a plain coffin, was borne from the motor ambulance van to the grave on the shoulders of brother officers. At the conclusion of the burial service the chaplain said that no panegyric was needed in the case of a brave soldier who was shot through the heart while doing his duty at the front. All they could do now was to show their respect for his virtues, and for those who were near and dear to him. In peace he had shown the virtues of modesty and humility, and in war he had shown by the manner of his death the great virtue of courage. As the padres intoned the service their voices mingled with some of the sounds of war —the firing of a machine-gun being tried by an aviator, the droning of The planes that flew overhead. A few villagers in an , adjoining field looked up curiously from their work as the bugles blew the melancholy notes of the “Last Post.” ' There we left him, three graves away from the last resting place of our other dead brigadier. It is a fairspot in which to lie—on the lower slopes, green field in which the wild flowers were blossoming, and in the

background the quaint towers and spires of the old fourteenth century Flemish town. -~."-' *? ""- V-~ ' ;