Mercer papers, 9 December 1917-19 June 1919 / Harold Mercer - Page 64

[Page 64]

is rare and makes one envious. The track of the light railway runs over the line of some old German trenches and in a gutter they have made to carry out the water, erosion have exposed the top-boots of a German soldier sticking out, with a bone showing through a tear in one of the boots. He was evidently buried by a shell explosion before the territory became ours; and the light railway track has been piled over a grave of which, noone, realised the existence. The feet are small, and letting imagination play I picture him as a dancing man – jovial & fickle, - & probably well-loved: and he will remain amongst the missing of whom no one knows the fate.

All over All over the ridges at the hereabouts from Messines north there are tremendous craters, the work of explosions caused by our engineers who sapped under the German positions, & blew them up bodily. These explosions started the British advance. In some of the craters a cathedral might be lost. There must be hundreds of Germans buried & unrecovered in these places.

Great care is taken of graves, usually, and all over these ridges there are many with two pegs each with different numbers. One is the German registration number, the other the British. Where men falling in No Mans land, long fought over, had to remain unburied until the ground was captured, there are graves, like the one in the Irish House burying