Cover Stories

A GARDEN PARTY FOR THE DEAD

The cover for A Garden Party for the Dead is taken from an original illustration by the talented Darlington artist, Roger Birchall – who also painted the author's portrait (oil on canvas) on this website, in a slightly more portly period than now, happily!

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Entitled "Temporary War Graves", Roger Birchall's illustration is a representation of the very early cemetery graves created by the mobile garden parties as they were gradually undertaking the process known as 'concentration'. In those early months and first two or three years after the Armistice in November 1918, existing battlefield cemeteries with sufficient numbers of interments were being made permanent and given a semblance of order by the gardeners. Concentration involved exhuming and reburying the bodies from small groups of battlefield graves – too few to warrant their own permanent sites. To the larger cemeteries, too, would be brought the many isolated bodies discovered all over the former battlefields. Black wooden crosses were used – sometimes the original crosses that had marked the hasty battlefield burials, which would probably have been inscribed with a soldier's name and regiment in hard pencil. Curiously this had been found to be more enduring than indelible ink. Many of these graves, of course, would have been disturbed, for want of a better word, by subsequent artillery barrages and fighting, so would have been difficult to locate, and then in a poor state.

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The flowers Roger Birchall has depicted on the temporary graves are cornflowers and calendula (marigolds). These were found by the gardeners to thrive in those early days when the soil they were working with had been so churned up. Naturally, there are poppies as well. Poppies are remarkable for reappearing in earth that has been heavily turned over and where their seeds have lain dormant, perhaps for years.

It was not until the mid-1920s that all the war cemeteries had been provided with the white headstones, so familiar to us now as we pass through the countryside of Northern France and Belgium. The reason they do not suffer the fate of many headstones in the cemeteries and churchyards, where we see them fallen at all angles with the passage of time, is that their rows are set in slotted concrete beams buried just beneath the surface.

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THE EQUAL SKY

The cover for The Equal Sky was created from a photograph Steve took at the valley of the Little Bighorn River in Montana. He was standing at the top of the rise, the site of Custer's last stand. The ground drops away in two shallow slopes to the river itself and so out of sight of this higher ground.

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Although not taken on the anniversary of the battle, which happened in June, the conditions on the day the picture was taken were as near identical to those on that mid-summer's morning. As the sun rose a heat haze had formed creating an almost mirage-like atmosphere. This may well have been the reason why Lieutenant Colonel Custer was unable to see the dust being kicked up by the huge herd of Indian ponies tethered in the valley when this was reported to him by his Crow Indian scouts. He could well have assumed it was heat haze, leading him to doubt the existence of such a large hostile force as he subsequently encountered.

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Now, in the distance, the railway crosses Steve's picture on the far side of the Little Bighorn, but the mile-long freight train travelling on it at a snail's pace has been brushed out by technological magic. Perhaps it, too, was just a mirage caused by the heat haze.

Some of Steve's sources for this part of The Equal Sky were Ralph K. Andrist's The Long Death – The last Days of the Plains Indians and Gregory F. Michno's Lakota Noon – The Indian Narrative of Custer's Defeat.

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