Anonymous

Name: The Care of the Dead
Author: Anonymous

The Care of the Dead

Summary

“The Care of the Dead”, is a work by Anonymous. It explores elements such as graves, cemeteries and units.

Quotes from The Care of the Dead (Anonymous)

Anonymous, The Care of the Dead

“ But not every man can be buried just where he falls. As a rule, the spot remains under fire for some time after his death. Even if it could be done, and the history of the war be left written in this way on the face of the country,—a long dotted line of graves representing a trench, a cluster of graves a skirmish, a dense constellation a battle—the record would not be durable. France could not fence off a strip of country 300 miles long and many miles wide, and keep it up as a historical museum. And nothing else could preserve all the graves, or most of them. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Anonymous, The Care of the Dead

“ 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, the beaded wire wreath of the French, with its "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. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Anonymous, The Care of the Dead

“ Some would be treasured and tended, as they are now, by farmers and cottagers. Others would soon be lost sight of. In a few months the earth of a newly made grave sinks in, the cross falls awry, and may split, the writing on it is weathered away. Unless something is done, and done promptly, every trace of an outlying grave may be gone in a year. That is [9] what might have happened to thousands of British and French soldiers' graves if an Englishman, full of goodwill and energy, had not noticed the danger in time, and stepped in, with a few like-minded friends, to avert it. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Anonymous, The Care of the Dead

“ 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 cemetery do all that remains to be done, and an eye-witness can assure the friends of soldiers at home that there is nothing perfunctory about these funerals. Everything is done as tenderly and reverently as if the dead man were in an English churchyard among themselves. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Anonymous, The Care of the Dead

“ You feel, when you see it, the thrill of the first moment of the long battle of the Somme—the subaltern giving the word to his men, and himself springing first out of the trench, and falling almost at once, and the men pressing on. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Anonymous, The Care of the Dead

“ In a graveyard west of Vimy there are buried 1,320 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. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Anonymous, The Care of the Dead

“ To know the full worth of what these units are doing now, one needs 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 [6] sticking out of the ground—in the fields, in cottage gardens, in corners of farmyards and orchards, even on roadside strips of grass. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Anonymous, The Care of the Dead

“ The Director and his officers co-operate with the French engineers, sanitary authorities and communal councils in making arrangements to take [14] advantage of the noble and moving gift made by the French nation on December 29th, 1915, when the law was passed which acquires for ever, in the name of the French Government, the special cemeteries where most of our dead in France are buried.
No money is wasted, and no energy is diverted that might have been spent in fighting; all the officers of the units are men disqualified by age, or other disability, for combatant service ”

Anonymous

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