When Helen finally makes it to the cemetery, the dead figuratively return to life through a blend of metaphor and personification. Kipling metaphorically compares the cemetery to both a sea and a field of weeds. In addition, he personifies the thousands of crosses by writing that they possess faces and by describing their motion towards her.
She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her.
The metaphor and personification at play in this passage are entangled. This simulates Helen's own experience upon climbing the steps and encountering the totality of the cemetery "in one held breath." Just as she is overwhelmed by the sight that meets her, the reader is inundated by the multiple layers of figurative language operating at once.
In one of these figurative layers, the cemetery is a "merciless sea of black crosses." The comparison of the cemetery to a sea is a metaphor, while the diction of the word "merciless" adds an element of personification. Kipling introduces another figurative layer in the second clause of that same sentence, when the individual crosses that form the sea acquire "faces." The collection of graves is simultaneously a sea and a crowd of people staring back at Helen.
In yet another figurative layer, as Helen fails to distinguish an "order or arrangement in their mass," the graves become a "waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead." No longer just a sea, the collection of graves is also an unruly field of dead weeds. Helen sees the graves, which represent death to begin with, as weeds that have been killed. This metaphor accentuates the graves' connotation of death. The crosses are not simply inanimate objects marking the location of a dead, buried body: they are themselves dead. However, these decaying weeds do not lie motionless on the ground. Rather, they rush at her as though they were zombies. Although the sight of the cemetery is characterized by stillness, Helen understands it through metaphors of motion, like a stormy sea and a mass of reanimated weeds.
The shifting points of metaphorical comparison and personification in this passage capture Helen's inability to make sense of the sight that meets her. Focalized from her point of view, the narration jumps between comparisons to people and natural phenomena—familiar things that she can grasp more easily than death. Nevertheless, none of these comparisons prove sufficient: beyond the graves she is blinded by "a line of whiteness" that represents her inability to extract meaning from the monstrosity before her. The narrator eventually includes her in the scene, contrasting the cemetery's stillness with her pacing: "She went forward, moved to the left and the right hopelessly, wondering by what guidance she should ever come to her own."
In the the story's second half, Kipling uses diction associated with manufacturing to describe the war and its sorrow. Through the metaphor underlying this motif, he compares the war to an industrial assembly line. On one conveyor belt, young men with their futures ahead of them are sent to their deaths. On another conveyor belt, their loved ones are sent into mourning. The mass scale of the war and immense number of its victims depersonalize loss and grief, making people like Helen feel as though their emotions are part of a cold, mechanized process without room for individual experiences.
The narrator touches on this several times, but elaborates most on it after the war is over and Helen finally receives an official letter stating that Michael's body has been found.
So Helen found herself moved on to another process of the manufacture – to a world full of exultant or broken relatives, now strong in the certainty that there was an altar upon earth where they might lay their love. These soon told her, and by means of time-tables made clear, how easy it was and how little it interfered with life’s affairs to go and see one’s grave.
Kipling uses this industrial metaphor to underline the senselessness of the war. Earlier in the story, when Helen receives the telegram announcing that Michael is missing, the narrator describes her "taking her place in the dreary procession that was impelled to go through an inevitable series of unprofitable emotions." As she moves through the process that countless family members have gone through before her, and countless others will go through in the future, she feels alienated from the experience. There are so many graves, and so many people going to visit graves, that paying respect to one's deceased loved one seems to merely revolve around following instructions and time-tables.
Kipling uses this manufacturing diction earlier in the story as well. For example, leading up to the shelling that buries Michael's body, the narrator writes that the Battle of the Somme "was being manufactured." In addition, Michael was initially "on the edge of joining the first holocaust of public-school boys who threw themselves into the Line." The word "line" carries many connotations that are relevant here. Primarily, the reader should interpret it to mean the battlefront. It also brings to mind a border or edge, such as England's border, the border between the Allies and the Central Powers, or the border between life and death. In a way, Michael throws himself into his ancestral line as well: he initially wanted to directly enlist because his supposed grandfather had been a non-commissioned officer. Being "in line" means being obedient and following orders. Furthermore, the word carries a vocational meaning, a reminder that all these soldiers were on the cusp of beginning their careers before the destruction of their futures. Finally, and most importantly for the motif in question, the word brings to mind the assembly line, which Michael and all of the young soldiers are metaphorically stepping onto as they join the fighting.
Before Michael died, he took Helen to visit a munition factory. At the time, it had struck her "that the wretched thing was never left alone for a single second." As she prepares various documents after Michael has gone missing in action, she recalls their visit to the factory and tells herself "I’m being manufactured into a bereaved next of kin." This shows that the manufacturing metaphor does not solely exist in the story's narrative layer: the characters themselves are aware of their experiences' resemblance to an assembly line.
