But that was not novel or new. Shell-hole
graves and destroyed houses were nothing. The thing I shall never
forget is the cemetery round the great church.
Continental cemeteries are always crowded. They are old, and graves
almost touch one another. The crosses which mark them stand like rows
of men in close formation.
This cemetery had been shelled. There was not a cross in place; they
lay flung about in every grotesque position. The quiet God's Acre had
become a hell. Graves were uncovered; the dust of centuries exposed.
In one the cross had been lifted up by an explosion and had settled
back again upside down, so that the Christ was inverted.
It was curious to stand in that chaos of destruction, that ribald
havoc, that desecration of all we think of as sacred, and see,
stretched from one broken tombstone to another, the telephone wires
that connect the trenches at the foot of the street with headquarters
and with the "chateau."
Ninety-six German soldiers had been buried in one shell hole in that
cemetery. Close beside it there was another, a great gaping wound in
the earth, half full of water from the evening's rain.
An officer beside me looked down into it.
"See," he said, "they dig their own graves!"
It was almost morning. The automobile left the pathetic ruin of the
town and turned back toward the "chateau.
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