Robert Service wrote extensively about the men who fought on the Western Front in the Great War, and he was well qualified, having served there as an ambulance driver from 1914 to 1916. I always think of this passage from "Ballads Of A Bohemian" on Memorial Day:
"Silence and solitude! How good the peace of it all seems! Around me the grasses weave a pattern, and half hide the hundreds of little wooden crosses. Here is one with a single name:
AUBREY.
Who was Aubrey I wonder? Then another:
To Our Beloved Comrade.
Then one which has attached to it, in the cheapest of little frames, the crude water-color daub of a child, three purple flowers standing in a yellow vase. Below it, painfully printed, I read:
To My Darling Papa -- Thy Little Odette.
And beyond the crosses many fresh graves have been dug. With hungry open mouths they wait. Even now I can hear the guns that are going to feed them. Soon there will be more crosses, and more and more. Then they will cease, and wives and mothers will come here to weep.
Ah! Peace so precious must be bought with blood and tears. Let us honor and bless the men who pay, and envy them the manner of their dying; for not all the jeweled orders on the breasts of the living can vie in glory with the little wooden cross the humblest of these has won. . . . "
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