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.
1. Burial at Sea. 2. Writer’s Tent at Romagne Cemetery. 3. Among the Ruins of Dunn-sur-Meuse 4. Belleau Woods.
Strange that the value of such a task did not gather full significance in the minds of all American soldiers. Strange that when other hands refused it, swarthy hands received it! Yet, perhaps, not so strange, for Providence hath its own way, and in those American cemeteries in France we have strong and indisputable evidence of the wonderful devotion and loyalty and the matchless patience and endurance of the colored soldier. The placing of this task—the most sacred of the whole war—in his hands may have been providentially planned. It may have been just another means, as against the force of arms, to hasten here at home the recognition and enforcement of those fundamental principles that for four long years had held the world in deadly struggle.
We looked upon these soldiers of ours—the splendid 813th, 815th and 816th Pioneer Regiments and the numerous fine labor battalions—as they constructed the cemeteries at Romagne, Beaumont, Thiencourt, Belleau Woods, Fere-en-Tardenois and Soissons. We watched them as they toiled day and night, week after week, through drenching rain and parching heat. And yet these physical ills were as naught compared with the trials of discriminations and injustices that seared their souls like hot iron, inflicted as they were at a time when these soldiers were rendering the American army and nation a sacred service. Always in those days there was fear of mutiny or rumors of mutiny. We felt most of the time that we were living close to the edge of a smoldering crater. At Belleau Woods the soldiers en-masse banished some who mistreated them. We recall an incident at Romagne. Even though it was May the nights were winter cold, so that when one snuggled between army blankets in the tent, it required a bit of heroism to crawl out. This particular night we had just retired when shots were heard, fired in rapid succession. Without thought of the cold we began dressing and were sitting wrapped in cloak thinking rapidly about what was happening when someone called, “It is only a fire!” What a relief it was! What did it matter if the whole camp burned in comparison with our boys being goaded by prejudice beyond reason! Rations were often scarce and poor at Romagne because we were so far from supplies, hence we prepared and served food for the soldiers all day long. But this was but a small task compared with that of keeping the men in good spirits and reminding them again and again of the glory of the work they had in hand. Always, whether in the little corner set aside in the Y barracks as our reception room, or among the books they liked so well to read, whether by the side of the piano or over the canteen, we were trying to love them as a mother or a dear one would into a fuller knowledge and appreciation of themselves, their task and the value of forbearance.
We had gone from Romagne—women of fine spirit had taken our place and were lovingly ministering to the needs of these soldiers, when things happened too grievous to be calmly borne. At one stroke down came tents of discrimination and injustice, but the work there went on and the soldiers completed the difficult task assigned them.
1. Military Cemetery at Romagne.
2. Bearing the Cross.
For weeks at Romagne we watched these men fare forth with the dawn to find the dead on the 480 square miles of battlefield of the Meuse-Argonne. At eventide we would see them return and reverently remove the boxes from the long lines of trucks and place them on the hillside beside the waiting trenches that other soldiers had been digging all the long busy day. Far into the night we would sit in our darkened tent looking out on the electric-lighted cemetery, watching the men as they lowered the boxes into the trenches. Sometimes we could hear only a low murmur of voices, and sometimes again there would come to us a plaintive melody in keeping with the night hour and its peculiar task.
Mr. William G. Shepherd, in the New York Evening Post, gives the following picture:
“As we moved about the battlefield later, we saw in fields, in groves, on hillsides, and even in the yards of what had been the houses of French villages, groups of Negro soldiers at their worthy but infinitely slow task of calling the roll of our American dead and gathering them together at the hillside rendezvous of Romagne.
“One of the burning pictures of all this war to me was a view of these Negro sexton-soldiers working on a hilltop one rainy evening at dusk. They were outlined against the gloomy sky. Their huge motor-truck stood near by, ready to carry their burden to Romagne. I thought of the home back in the United States where this one doughboy’s empty chair held its sacred place; of how the ‘home fires,’ of which our doughboys had so often sung, had been kept burning for him. I thought of how the heart-love in that home would flash across the Atlantic to this bleak French hilltop faster than any wireless message—if the homefolk only knew.
“It was good to know that he was being taken from his solitary bed, in the midst of the battlefield’s desolation, back to the crowd of his buddies at Romagne. This, that I saw on the sky-line, was his second mobilization. Not this time will he sing and romp and play and joke and fight; after his second mobilization at Romagne he will just lie still and rest with all the other thousands of his fellow soldiers, his job well done, until it is time for us he saved to take him back home.”
We have yet another picture. It was the day before the 30th of May, 1919. Every soldier was helping to put the Romagne cemetery in readiness for its dedication by General Pershing on the next day. Looking out from our little kitchen window of the Y barrack, we saw what seemed to us a wonderful sight. Two long lines of soldiers were before us—one moving slowly over the hill and the other coming up the main road—each man bearing on his shoulder a single white cross that would rest above the grave of a fellow-hero. Quickly our mind traveled back over the centuries to Him who had borne the cross toward Golgotha, and we saw in these dark-skinned sons of America bearing those white crosses, something of the same humility and something of the same sorrow that characterized the Master, but we also beheld in them the Christ spirit grown large, beautiful and eternal with the ages. Behind the vivid picture drawn by Mr. Shepherd and behind this other picture, one sees not only the twenty-two thousand homes represented by these crosses at Romagne, but the ten thousand real Americans, colored men of the Pioneer Infantries and labor battalions, who, through the sweat of toil, linked that place of sainted pilgrimage on the Western Front with those American homes.
Our outstanding impression of those faithful ones who wore the insignia of Alsace-Lorraine is their strict allegiance to the trust imposed upon them, with heart and purpose fixed to pay the price entailed in the completion of their severe task.
Whether they sought their comrades by the winding Meuse or on the battle-seamed heights of “No Man’s Land;” whether they found their bodies in the shadows of the ruined cathedrals of Rheims, Soissons or Ypres, always they were making an unconscious challenge to the very heart of the United States for the rights of the twelve millions of its citizens whose loyalty had thus endured the test.
May we not hope that as the heart of this homeland finds its way to those American shrines in France, a real peace, born of knowledge and gratitude, shall descend upon us, blotting out hate and its train of social and civil injustices? Then shall we realize the value and meaning of the pain and sacrifice of these dark-browned heroes of ours.
What are the things that make life bright?
A star gleam in the night.
What hearts us for the coming fray?
The dawn tints of the day.
What helps to speed the weary mile?
A brother’s friendly smile.
What turns to gold the evening gray?
A flower beside the way.
Paul Laurence Dunbar.