Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/90

70 " Who can explain the vagaries of the Boches?"

I think we all questioned if the charming hamlet had been spared because one lived there who had been of service to the enemy.

Spies —" the Quaker began.

But what I learned about the vital work of the spies in Europe I shall relate in another chapter. Moreover, the subject was forgotten at that moment, for we left the village and crossed a broad, flat plateau in whose grass innumerable French tricolours waved lazily, like the fronds of a strange and beautiful plant.

We saw beneath the tricolours mounds varying in size from the grave of a single man to a trench tomb of a hundred bodies. There were mounds from which no flags waved. These were decorated with plain black crosses.

"The German dead?” I asked.

The staff officer nodded.

"As far as possible," he said, "we have taken care of their dead as carefully as our own. On that cross you will find a row of numbers. The families of those German soldiers can know where their men are resting."

He pointed to a tiny mound with a small black cross set at an angle above it.

An officer," he said. "There is a German