rings from skeleton fingers. They left the bones of our ancestors, and
of our friends whose living faces we could remember, scattered over the
ground, as if to feed the dogs. In our empty coffins they placed their
own dead. On the stone or marble of monuments they cut away the names of
those whose sacred sleep they had disturbed. Instead, they inscribed the
disgusting names of their Boche generals and colonels. Where they could
not change the inscriptions they destroyed the tombstones and set up
others. You will see them now. But wait--you have not heard all yet. Far
from that! When the Tommies came to Nesle--your English Tommies--they
did not like what the Boches had done to our cemetery. They said
things--strong things! And while they were hot with anger they knocked
the hideous new monuments about. They could not bear to see them mark
the stolen graves. The little crosses that showed where simple soldiers
lay, those they did not touch. It was only the officers' tombs they
spoiled. I will show you what they did."

We let him hobble ahead of us into the graveyard. He led us past the
long rows of low wooden crosses with German names on them, the crosses
with British names--(good, sturdy British names: "Hardy," "Kemp,"
"Logan," "Wilding," planted among flowers of France)--and paused in the
aristocratic corner of the city of the dead. Once, this had been the
last earthly resting-place of old French families, or of the rich whose
relatives could afford expensive monuments. 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,"