But the war had changed all
that. German names had replaced the ancient French ones on the vaults,
as German corpses had replaced French bodies in the coffins. Stone and
marble monuments had been recarved, or new ones raised. There were
roughly cut figures of German colonels and majors and captains. This
rearrangement was what the "Tommies" had "not liked." They liked it so
little that they chopped off stone noses and faces; they threw red ink,
brighter than blood, over carved German uniforms, and neatly chipped
away the counterfeit presentment of iron crosses. In some cases, also,
they purified the vaults of German bones and gave back in exchange such
French ones as they found scattered. They wrote in large letters on
tombstones, "_Boch no bon_," and other illiterate comments unflattering
to the dead usurpers; all of which, our old man explained, mightily
endeared the Atkinses to the returning inhabitants of Nesle.
"Those brave Tommies are gone now," he sighed, "but they left their dead
in our care. You see those flowers on their graves? It is we who put
them there, and the children tend them every day. If you come back next
year, it will be the same. We shall not forget."
"A great statesman paid us a visit not long after Nesle was liberated,"
our officer guide took up the story. "He had heard what the Tommies did,
and he was not quite sure if they were justified. 'After all, German or
not German, a tomb is a tomb, and the dead are dead,' he argued.
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