The correspondents alighted and followed Captain Crump across a broad open plain, pitted with shell-holes. The incessant thunder of the guns deepened as they went.
"Don't touch anything without consulting me," snapped Crump at the Spaniard, who was nosing round an unexploded shell and thinking of souvenirs. "The Boches have a charming trick of leaving things about that may go off in your hands. A chap picked up a spiked helmet here the other day. They buried him in the graveyard that Mr. Grant wants to see. It's a very small grave. There wasn't much left of him."
The burial-ground lay close under a ridge of hills, and they approached it through a maze of recently captured German trenches. It was a strange piece of sad ordered gardening in a devastated world. Every minute or two the flash and shock of a concealed howitzer close at hand shook the loose earth on the graves, but only seemed to emphasize the still sleep of this acre. It held a great regiment of graves, mounds of fresh-turned earth in soldierly ranks, most of them marked with tiny wooden crosses, rough bits of kindling wood. Some of the crosses bore names, written in pencil. There was one that bore the names of six men, and the grave was hardly large enough for a child. They had been blown to pieces by a single shell.
They passed through the French section first. Here there was an austere poetry, a simplicity that approached the sublime in the terrible regularity of the innumerably repeated inscription, "Mort pour la France." In the British section there was a striking contrast. There was not a word of patriotism; but, though the graves were equally regular, an individuality of inscription that interested the Spanish correspondent greatly.
"It is here we pass from Racine to Shakespeare," he said, pointing to a wooden cross that bore the words:
"In loving memory of Jim,
From his old pal,
The artful dodger,
'Gone but not forgotten.'"
"No, no, no," cried the Greek correspondent, greatly excited by the literary suggestion. "From Flaubert to Dickens! Is it not so, Captain Crump?"
Captain Crump grunted vaguely and moved on towards the soldier in charge. May Margaret followed him, the photograph in her hand.
"We want to find number forty-eight," said Captain Crump.
The soldier saluted and led the way to the other end of the ground. Many of the graves here had not been named. There had evidently been some disaster which made it difficult. Some of them carried the identification disc.