The Oases of Death
While the German guns were pounding Amiens and the battle of dull
Prussianism against Liberty raged on, they buried Richthofen in the
British lines.
They had laid him in a large tent with his broken machine outside it.
Thence British airmen carried him to the quiet cemetery, and he was
buried among the cypresses in this old resting place of French
generations just as though he had come there bringing no harm to
France.
Five wreaths were on his coffin, placed there by those who had fought
against him up in the air. And under the wreaths on the coffin was
spread the German flag.
When the funeral service was over three volleys were fired by the
escort, and a hundred aviators paid their last respects to the grave
of their greatest enemy; for the chivalry that the Prussians have
driven from earth and sea lives on in the blue spaces of the air.
They buried Richthofen at evening, and the planes came droning home as
they buried him, and the German guns roared on and guns answered,
defending Amiens. And in spite of all, the cemetery had the air of
quiet, remaining calm and aloof, as all French graveyards are. For
they seem to have no part in the cataclysm that shakes all the world
but them; they seem to withdraw amongst memories and to be aloof from
time, and, above all, to be quite untroubled by the war that rages
to-day, upon which they appear to look out listlessly from among their
cypress and yew, and dimly, down a vista of centuries. They are very
strange, these little oases of death that remain unmoved and green
with their trees still growing, in the midst of a desolation as far as
the eye can see, in which cities and villages and trees and hedges and
farms and fields and churches are all gone, and where hugely broods a
desert. It is as though Death, stalking up and down through France for
four years, sparing nothing, had recognized for his own his little
gardens, and had spared only them.
Read next: Tale 25 - Anglo-Saxon Tyranny
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