OLD GRAVESTONES ABROAD.
"Abroad" is a big place, and no sufficient treatment under the head
of this chapter is possible except to one who has had very great
experience and extended research. Nevertheless I may, with all due
diffidence and modesty, tell the little I know on the subject. My
opportunities of investigation have been few, and restricted to a
limited area--so restricted and so limited that I cannot tell whether
or not the observations I have made may be taken as indications of
national habits or merely as idiosyncrasies of the people inhabiting
the particular localities which I was able to visit. All the
churchyards which I have seen in France, Belgium, Germany, and
Switzerland very much resemble each other, and are altogether unlike
the graveyards of Great Britain and her children. It is to the
villages we should naturally go for primitive memorials of the dead,
but in all the continental villages which I have visited memorials
of a permanent character, either old or new, are scarcely to be seen.
Occasionally a stone slab may be encountered, but almost always of
recent date. At Laufen in the Canton of Zurich, near the Falls of the
Rhine, I selected almost at random the examples of memorials shewn in
my sketch (Fig. 96), one or other of which was at the head of nearly
every grave.
FIG. 96.--AT LAUFEN.
The average height of these mementoes was about 2 feet, and all the
dates which I saw were of the last twenty-five years. Permanence
indeed is apparently not considered as it is with us in the like
circumstances. The British gravestone is trusted to perpetuate at
least the names of our departed friends down to the days of our
posterity, but the provision made by our neighbours seems to have
been for the existing generation only. Posterity does not trouble the
villagers of Switzerland nor their prototypes of other nations around
them. This fact was strongly exemplified at Neuhausen, a small place
on the other bank of the Rhine, "five minutes from Germany" we were
told.
FIG. 97.--AT NEUHAUSEN.
In the churchyard at this place was one handsome tombstone, shewn in
the drawing, erected apparently in 1790. This was evidence of somewhat
ancient art, and I looked about for the old gravestones which should
have kept it company. Erect in its place there was not one, but in
the remotest corner of the enclosure I came upon several stones lying
flat, one upon another, the uppermost and only visible inscription
bearing the recent date of 1870! Only twenty years or so "on sentry"
at the grave, and already relieved from duty! There was likewise a
miscellaneous heap of old crosses, etc., of iron and wood, the
writing on which had disappeared, and they might reasonably have been
condemned as of no further service; but that gravestones in perfect
preservation should have been thought to have served their full
purpose in a little over twenty years, and be cast aside as no longer
requisite, was a remarkable lesson in national character. All the
graves were flat, and at the head of every recent one was a small iron
slab bearing a number. Many of those which had crosses were hung with
immortelles, composed generally of glass-beads.
[Illustration: FIG. 97. NEUHAUSEN.]
In Neuhausen Graveyard, at the end of the row of graves, are seen two
rings protruding from the ground. Lying near is an iron shield with
two similar rings surmounting it. It is readily supposed that the
first-named rings are also attached to a shield buried in the earth,
and so it proves. In order that no space may be lost between the
graves, the shields are used alternately to serve as the dividing
wall, and are then drawn out, thus enabling the sexton to pack the
coffins close together.
The towns and cities abroad have their cemeteries beyond the
outskirts, as is the practice here. Occasionally an old churchyard is
to be met with, but never an old gravestone as we know it. Still there
are instances in which ancient carvings of the same character have
been saved by attachment to the church or churchyard wall. Several
such are to be seen in German churchyards long since converted to
purposes of recreation, and one at Heidelberg may be taken as an
example.
FIG. 98.--AT HEIDELBERG
To "Barbara Fosterii," died 1745, aged 67.
Beneath is the text from the First Epistle of Peter, chapter i. verses
24 and 25.
"All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower
of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth
away: but the Word of the Lord endureth for ever."
At Lucerne, tinder similar conditions, the striking figures of two
skeletons, partly in military garb, keep guard over the tablet which
records the virtues of a departed hero. He was probably a soldier, but
the figure of a _lictor_ on the left with his _fasces_ of axe and rods
seems to betoken some civil employment. In ancient times the _lictors_
walked in advance of the magistrates, and executed sentence when
pronounced.
[Illustration: FIG. 99. LUCERNE.]
[Illustration: FIG. 98. HEIDELBERG.]
FIG. 99.--AT LUCERNE.
To "Iodoco Bernardo Hartman," died 1752,
aged 67 years.
The two last-given illustrations may possibly belong to the category
of mural tablets rather than that of gravestones, being fixed
apparently by original design, and not by afterthought, as in our
"converted" burial-grounds, against the outer walls of the church.
There are, however, no other remains which I could discover bearing
any resemblance to the old British headstone, and the evanescent
character which seems to have attached for a certain period to
the memorials of the dead among our neighbours abroad forbids the
expectation that any such as those which have appeared in our earlier
chapters are to be found in Europe outside the boundaries of our
Empire. In more modern observances, especially in the centres of
population, English and continental manners more nearly approximate;
and in the many new cemeteries which are now to be found adjacent
to the cities and large towns of Western Europe there are tombs and
gravestones as many and as costly as are to be found in any round
London. In Germany the present practice appears to be single
interments, and one inscription only on the stone, and that studiously
brief. Thus:
[Transcriber's note: inscriptions below enclosed in a border]
Eduard Schmidt
Geb d. 8 Oct., 1886.
Gest d. 10 Jan., 1887.
This I copied in the cemetery at Schaffhausen. But at Hendon, a
north-west suburb of London, has recently been placed against
the church wall a still simpler memorial, a small slab of marble,
inscribed:
Carl Richard Loose
B. 21. 1. 52: D. 14. 10. 81.
For brevity _in excelsis_ the following, from the cemetery at
Heidelberg, can hardly be eclipsed:
Michael Seiler
1805.--1887.
Sometimes the asterisk is used by the Germans to denote birth, and the
dagger (or cross) for death, thus:
Hier Risht in Gott
Natalie Brethke
* 1850 ± 1884