The bones of his feet were still encased in his great boots,
their soles heavily studded with nails. Even a few shreds of his
uniform remained. But the flesh was all gone. The sun and the rats
and the birds had accounted for the last morsel of it.
Hundreds of years from now, I suppose, the bones that were strewn
along that ground will still be being turned up by plows. The
generations to come who live there will never lack relics of the
battle, and of the fighting that preceded and followed it. They will
find bones, and shell cases, and bits of metal of all sorts. Rusty
bayonets will be turned up by their plowshares; strange coins, as
puzzling as some of those of Roman times that we in Britain have
found, will puzzle them. Who can tell how long it will be before the
soil about Vimy Ridge will cease to give up its relics?
That ground had been searched carefully for everything that might
conceivably be put to use again, or be made fit for further service.
The British army searches every battlefield so in these days. And
yet, when I was there, many weeks after the storm of fighting had
passed on, and when the scavengers had done their work, the ground
was still rather thickly strewn with odds and ends that interested me
vastly. I might have picked up much more than I did. But I could not
carry so very much, and, too, so many of the things brought grisly
thoughts to my mind! God knows I needed no reminders of the war! I
had a reminder in my heart, that never left me.
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