Reburying the Dead
SPRINGTIME had come again, but so different from the spring of that other year. Then the voices of spring had been deadened by the thunderous guns around Verdun, Soissons, and Chateau Thierry. Then those guns with their deep and ominous challenge were holding the whole world in tense and fearful waiting. Women of every land were listening with tender yearning and burning anxiety for a word from their heroes on the fields of France. Men of mature years who had been a part of the conflicts of other days could scarce conceal their eagerness for the fray as they gently encouraged those anguished women and commended their wonderful spirit of endurance and patriotism. It was springtime, but the Crown Prince still hammered on Verdun, the Hindenburg line was still unbroken and the foe was not yet hurled back from the Marne in sure defeat. It was the springtime when late, but with grim determination to win or die, the American Forces had at last taken their place in the World Conflict.
But all that was now a part of the past and springtime had come once again in France. Meantime a spirit of change had crept over all the land. After one tremendous shout for victory the world had fallen into the silence that follows a supreme struggle—the silence of exhaustion, the silence of death. Many of the thousands who had pressed forward in those terrific battles crying “Victory!” had fallen and lain together under the bleak, dark winter skies of France. It was a period, too, of reckoning and realization of the price paid. But springtime had come again in France with its song-birds and blood-red poppies, and with it the quick consciousness that the dead lying en-masse on the battlefields must be given resting places befitting heroes.
Here was a tremendous task for the surviving American soldiers, but far more sacred than tremendous. Whose would be the hands to gather as best they could and place beneath the white crosses of honor the remains of those who had sanctified their spirits through the gift of their lifeblood? It would be a gruesome, repulsive and unhealthful task, requiring weeks of incessant toil during the long heavy days of summer. It also meant isolation, for these cemeteries for the American dead would be erected on or near the battlefields where the men had fallen. But it would be a wonderful privilege the beauty and glory of which would reveal itself more and more as the facts of the war should become crystallized into history.