Jutland - Black September

It was the end of September. It was Sunday and sunshine: the sound of
the church bells reached afar, even to Nissumfiord. The churches up
there were like rocks with spaces hewn out in them: each one of them
was like a piece of a mountain, so heavy and massive. The German Ocean
might have rolled over them, and they would have stood firmly. Many of
them had no spires or towers, and the bells hung out in the open air
between two beams. The church service was over. The congregation had
passed from the house of God out into the churchyard, where then, as
now, not a tree, not a bush was to be seen—not a single flower, not a
garland laid upon a grave. Little knolls or heaps of earth point out
where the dead are buried; a sharp kind of grass, lashed by the wind,
grows over the whole churchyard. A solitary grave here and there has,
perhaps, a monument; that is to say, the mouldering trunk of a tree,
rudely carved into the shape of a coffin. The pieces of tree are
brought from the woods of the west. The wild ocean provides, for the
dwellers on the coast, beams, planks, and trees, which the dashing
billows cast upon the shore. The wind and the sea spray soon decay
these tree monuments. Such a stump was lying over the grave of a
child, and one of the women who had come out of the church went
towards it. She stood gazing upon the partially loosened piece of
wood. Shortly afterwards her husband joined her. They remained for a
time without either of them uttering a single[7] word; then he took her
hand, and led her from the grave out upon the heath, across the moor,
in the direction of the sand-hills. For a long time they walked in
silence. At last the husband said,—