As we left the car to walk through the plot I found myself taking off my cap and I kept it off all the while I was there. For even before I had been told the full story of what went on there I knew I stood in the presence of a most high and holy thing and so I went bare-headed as I would in any sanctuary.
We walked all through this God's acre of ours, the general and I. Some of the women who laboured therein were old and bent, some were young but all of them wore black gowns. Some plainly had been recruited from the well-to-do and the wealthy elements of the resident population; more though, were poor folk and many evidently were peasants who, one guessed, lived in villages or on farms near to the city. Here would be a grave that was heaped high with those designs of stiff, bright-hued immortelles which the French put upon the graves of their own dead. Here would be a grave that was marked with wreaths of simple field flowers or with the great lovely white and pink roses which grow so luxuriantly on this coast. Here would be merely great sheaves of loose blossoms; there a grave upon which the flowers had been scattered broadcast, until the whole mound was covered with the fragrant dewy offerings; and there, again, I saw where fingers patently unaccustomed to such employment had fashioned the long-stemmed roses into wreaths and crosses and even into forms of shields.
Grass grew rich and lush upon all the graves. White sea-shells marked the sides of them and edged the narrow gravelled walks. We came to where there were two newly made graves; their occupants had been buried there only a day or so before as one might tell by the marks in the trodden turf, but a carpeting of sods cut from a lawn somewhere had been so skillfully pieced together upon the mounds that the raw clods of clay beneath were quite covered up and hidden from sight, so that only the seams in the green coverlids distinguished these two graves from graves which were older than they by weeks or months.
Alongside every grave, nearly, knelt a woman alone, or else a woman with children aiding her as she disposed her showing of flowers and wreaths to the best advantage. The old men were putting the paths in order, raking the gravel down smoothly and straightening the borderings of shells. There were no soldiers among the men; all were civilians, and for the most part humble-appearing civilians, clad in shabby garments. But I marked two old gentlemen wearing the great black neckerchiefs and the flowing broadcloth coats of ceremonial days, who seemed as deeply intent as any in what to them must have been an unusual labour. Coming to each individual worker or each group of workers the general would halt and formally salute in answer to the gently murmured greetings which constantly marked our passage through the burying-ground. When we had made the rounds we sat down upon the edge of the flag-dressed platform and he proceeded to explain what I already had begun to reason out for myself. Only, of course I did not know, until he told me, how it all had started.
“It has been a good many months now,” he said, “since we dug the first grave here. But on the day of the funeral a delegation of the most influential residents came to me to say the people of the town desired to adopt our dead. I asked just what exactly was meant by this and then the spokesman explained.
“'General,' he said to me, 'there is scarcely a family in this place that has not given one or more of its members to die for France. In most cases these dead of ours sleep on battlefields far away from us, perhaps in unmarked, unknown graves. This is true of all the parts of our country but particularly is it true of this town, which is so remote from the scenes of actual fighting. So in the case of this brave American who is to-day to be buried here among us, we ask that a French family be permitted formally to undertake the care of his grave, exactly as though it were the grave of their own flesh-and-blood who fell as this American has fallen, for France and for freedom. In the case of each American who may hereafter be buried here we crave the same privilege. We promise you that for so long as these Americans shall rest here in our land, their graves will be as our graves and will be tended as we would tend the graves of our own sons.
“'We desire that the name of each family thus adopting a grave may be registered, so that should the adults die, the children of the next generation as a sacred charge, may carry on the obligation which is now to be laid upon their parents and which is to be transmitted down as a legacy to all who bear their name. We would make sure that no matter how long your fallen braves rest in the soil of France, their graves will not be neglected or forgotten.
'"We wish to do this thing for more reasons than one: We wish to do it because thereby we may express in our own poor way the gratitude we feel for America. We wish to do it because of the thought that some stricken mother across the seas in America will perhaps feel a measure of consolation in knowing that the grave of her boy will always be made beautiful by the hands of a Frenchwoman whose home, also, has been desolated. And finally we wish to do it because we know it will bring peace to the hearts of our French women to feel they have a right to put French flowers upon the graves of your dead since they can never hope, most of them, to be able to perform that same office for their heroic dead.'”
The general stopped and cleared his voice which had grown a bit husky. Then he resumed:
“So that was how the thing came about, and that explains what you see here now. You see, the French have no day which exactly corresponds in its spiritual significance to our Decoration Day and our Memorial Day. All Souls' Day, which is religious, rather than patriotic in its purport, is their nearest approach to it. But weeks ago, before the services contemplated for to-day were even announced, the word somehow spread among the townspeople. To my own knowledge some of these poor women have been denying themselves the actual necessities of life in order to be able to make as fine a showing for the graves which they have adopted as any of the wealthier sponsors could make.