Remembrance

       From Loretta:
      
      Jo’s post about war was timely, since today is a day of remembrance.  It used to be Armistice Day.  In the U.S., it’s now Veterans Day.  It’s Remembrance Day in the British Commonwealth.  Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_Day
      The Library of Congress has an interesting “Today in History” page about Veterans Day:  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/nov11.html
      In the city where I grew up, on many street corners one sees stone markers about three feet tall, with brass plaques on top and a sign above, usually decorated with a memorial wreath.  The sign tells us the street corner is named after a soldier who died in one of the wars.  I have not seen any markers older than WWI but I do see new markers from time to time.  I have a notebook filled with the names and information found on various markers I encountered in the course of my walks about the city.  Don’t know why I did this, except that I wanted to remember.  It’s the same reason I’ll pause sometimes, to read the inscriptions, even the ones I’ve read several times before.
      I usually try to remember to stop at 11AM for two minutes’ silence on Veterans Day but I find myself thinking of the soldiers a good deal more than once a year.  It seems we can’t go very long without having a war of some kind. so there’s always somebody to think about.  I was not surprised to learn that a very large segment of the British population feels the same:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6118520.stm
      Yesterday I spent some time at the Korean War Memorial.  I read the names and cried.  This always happens when I visit war memorials.  It doesn’t matter if I recognize a single name.  When I travel in the U.K., I inevitably visit war memorials.  I read the tributes and the names and cry there, too.
       World War I is the most heart-breaking for me, perhaps because it seems completely senseless and appallingly managed.  Unlike WWII, it’s hard to see that it accomplished anything:  http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/armistice.htm. 
      The Blackadder series dealing with it seems to capture the futility and stupidity wonderfully, with that marvelous Blackadder black humor.  Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That offered another viewpoint that puzzled me at first, because it seemed so matter-of-fact about the horrors of WWI.
      I think his attitude is something like what Jo and others talked about, regarding the memoirs and letters of soldiers in the Napoleonic era.  I was astonished, reading Captain Gronow’s Reminiscences, to come across sentences like this:  “I was much elated at the thoughts of being Picton’s aide-de-camp, though that somewhat remote contingency depended upon my friends Tyler, or Chambers, or others, meeting with an untimely end; but at eighteen on ne doute de rien.”  Yet elsewhere he writes movingly of the bravery and gallantry of the men, soldiers and officers alike, and of the devastation.
       Wellington wept when Dr. Hume read him the list of casualties.  “Well, thank God, I don’t know what it is to lose a battle; but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends” (from Wellington: The Years of the Sword by Elizabeth Longford).
      I’ve read that men are genetically programmed to kill one another and they have a different outlook on war and on sacrificing for ideals, to protect what’s dear to them, and simply, to do what they view as Something a Man Does.  This doesn’t mean they don’t grieve for lost comrades or their own loss of innocence.  If war doesn’t maim or kill them, it still changes them in ways those of us who have not experienced it cannot understand. 
      So it’s not very surprising that I, who don’t see the world as a man does, weep so easily for what has been sacrificed.  Sometimes, even the poppies choke me up.  The U.S. Dept of Veterans affairs has information about “The Flower of Remembrance,” and a copy of the famous poem, “In Flanders Fields.”  http://www1.va.gov/opa/feature/celebrate/flower.asp
      Interestingly, though, school was not where I had any real clue what Veterans Day was about.  Enlightenment came from books and movies, and what I learned from them awakened a desire to learn more.
      Here are a few examples:  Anne Perry’s Monk series opened my eyes to the Crimean War and the work of Florence Nightingale and her nurses there.  Various BBC productions shown on our PBS stations ignited the spark of interest in WWI, and gave me a sense of social history, as opposed to the politics and dates and battles one gets in history classes in secondary school.  Most recently, Foyle’s War has given me a completely new perspective on WWII in England.
      The writers and moviemakers are like the bards of old, keeping the story alive for us, and I’m grateful to them for doing so.  Because of books and movies, I first stopped to read the inscriptions on the markers.  Because of the books and movies, I have a better understanding of the sacrifices made by so many men and women, and so I know what I’m grateful for.
      At the end of most posts, I ask for your thoughts.  Today, yes, I want to know your thoughts about Veterans Day, Armistice Day, Remembrance Day.
      But because this day is about remembrance, please feel free simply to put down a name or names or event that has special meaning for you.
      

Comments

[Jo Beverley]

Lovely post, Loretta.

I enjoy Foyle's War for all kinds of reasons but especially for that sense of ordinary people dealing with a war, and in that case a necessary war.

Leaving aside any issues to do with stopping the Germans from trampling all over Europe, Britain was under direct and imminent threat. The Battle of Britain wasn't strategic, it was a desperate defence, which is why the many, many young men -- it's nearly always young men, often in their teens and early twenties -- had to fly, fight, and die.

But also, defending the shores is etched into the soul of the British, perhaps especially the English, as the Scots and Irish have often been siding with the invaders!*g*

Today I remember as I always do, my father, John Robert Dunn, a very reluctant participant is WWI, that most pointless of wars.

My sister's recently been doing some research on his army time; something he didn't talk much about.

The government had to work really hard to get its cannon fodder, so in 1915 they came up with this. Enlist now and choose your regiment, or be conscripted later and go where you're sent -- probably to the trenches. That's when my father signed up, and he was sent to the East. We don't know if that's what he wanted, but it might have been anything but the trenches.

He ended up in the Mesopotamia campaign -- Mesopotosh, as he always called it -- which was in many ways the worst place to be. He missed the disastrous attempt to raise the siege of Kut by getting dissentry or malaria, but his regiment went and many of them died there.

I grew up after WW II but with many living memories of WW I in my father's friends. One had lost an arm, and I remember watching in fascination how well he shuffled and dealt card. Another had been gassed, and was very frail.Then there were the two lovely ladies who lived together with pictures on the sideboard of two handsome young men -- both fiances killed in the war.

My father's veteran friends were all very, very gentle men, which is why I don't agree with the portrayal of men in general or soldiers in particular as inevitably aggressive and domineering.

I think that's portrayed very well in Foyle's War, too.

Every Remembrance Day my father would walk down to the War Memorial and take as many of us with him as would go, but I never grasped what it really meant to him, and I'm sure he preferred it that way.

In Britain, the 11th hour of the 11th day is always marked by sirens. Or were. Are they still? The same sirens used for air raid warnings in WWII. I think there should be something similar everywhere. Useful to alert people to hazards when necessary.

I know that war is sometimes necessary, but I feel strongly that any unnecessary war is evil. And I think we should go back to the old days when the generals were on the front lines, or even to the times when leaders of nations led their armies into battle.

Not that that stopped unnecessary wars, mind you. History is full of them.

Jo

[Liz]

I think about different things different years. this year I find myself thinking quite a bit about my Robert Symons. He had what was considered a 'cushy' assignment in WW2 - driver at a base in Italy. He was killed in an night accident shortly before he was due to return home. My mother (his niece) whispers it was probably drunk driving - why else would he be on the road at night? His father wouldn't talk about it. The records are lost. Recently a BBC article stated that some of those drivers ran secret missions to aid the peace talks and a jeep was lost at night, possibly under attack, on one of those runs.

He was the family favorite - my grandmother often said life would have been very different if he'd lived. Would it really? I don't know. But I do know his death was a visible hole in my childhood. Not as big as my jewish cousin's multitude of holes, but big enough.

[AgTigress]

Most individuals learn, as they mature, to deal with differences of opinion and ideology without physically attacking one another; yet it seems that the human species as a whole, after millennia of civilisation, has not been able to learn this.

In 1999, my husband and I, on our way to the Siwa Oasis during one of our regular trips to Egypt, toured the Second World War cemeteries along the Mediterranean coast near El Alamein. We visited the vast Commonwealth cemetery, with the graves of more than 7000 young men (and the names of thousands more) from Britain and from Australia, South Africa and elsewhere who fought and died in the North African campaign on the Allied side. Then we went to the German and Italian cemeteries; different names, different languages, but exactly the same ambience of sorrow and regret. To me, born during that war, and with personal memories of it, there was no emotional difference when contemplating the graves and the names of those who were on ‘our side’ and those who, less than sixty short years before, had been ‘the enemy’. In October of that same year, I was in Hawaii, and I went to the Pearl Harbor memorial. The scores of Japanese tourists who stood with me above the sunken remains of the USS Arizona, and who scanned the heartbreakingly long list of names of those who lie there still, beneath the water, were every bit as sad, sombre and respectful as the Americans and the European tourists.

The dead have no nationality. I wonder if humankind will ever learn that truth.

[maryjoputney]

Loretta, like you, I tear up at memorials, from the Vietnam memorial on down. Living in England visiting country churches whenever I could gave me some sense of the totality of Britain's losses in WW1. Every town, every church, every school, had lists of names of the men who had died. America's participation in that war was a walk in the park by comparison.

When I see those names--or read stories in the local paper about young men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's impossible not to weep for the loss of so much human potential.

May they all rest in peace.

Mary Jo

[Susan Sarah]

Wonderful post, Loretta.

My father is a WWII veteran, 81 yrs. old now -- he slogged through the mud in Italy for 4 years and earned medals for bravery (he saved his buddy's life by digging him out of a collapsed trench and six feet of mud using just his hands and his helmet, working all night under gunfire). He was 19.

Having three sons, I couldn't imagine my kids doing something like that at 19, yet there are way too many kids in that situation now, sadly so. So I'll raise a glass (virtual, natch) to current and future veterans.

BTW, 11-11 is my husband's birthday, so Veteran's Day usually gets a little overshadowed in our house.

Susan Sarah ;)

[RevMelinda]

Growing up in the South close to Appomattox, I took it for granted that "THE" war was the Civil War. Every small hamlet and crossroads has its own Confederate war memorial with a statue and the names of the Confederate dead. The South is also the burial place of thousands of soldiers (from both sides of the conflict) in its historic battlefields and cemeteries.

This year my daughter did a project in school about family history. Some of her ancestors (my husband's) fought for the North, and others (mine) for the South. We looked together at some old family letters from the Civil War that I had never read in any detail before.

My great-great-grandfather, who fought in a Texas regiment, wrote an amazing letter about the Battle of Mansfield in Louisiana, describing the battle in great detail. About one skirmish, he said:

“ By dusk the firing had almost ceased. . .I was congratulating myself upon the fact that the fight was over and that I was safe and out of danger, when all of sudden the most terrible fire, as I thought, was opened with small arms, making the very woods to ring, and resound with its roar. The enemy it seemed had advanced a reg. across a field, a reg. of our men were ready for them, then they got at the proper distance from our men, they delivered their fire and charged the enemy. The enemy returned the fire, but our boys drove them back whooping and yelling . . . The roar of. . .artillery was absolutely deafening, while fell as thick as hail. It would be impossible for me to give you even a faint idea of what such a battle really is. No one can know what it is until they go through one and see for themselves.”

His wife Harriet, left to manage at home alone, wrote him letters alternating between loneliness ("I feel like that if you should never live to get back I would have nothing to live for”) and desperation (“Good deal of stealing and deserting going on, every person out of heart, that is all the women, no men here, bad prospects for crops, people had to replant their corn, some are not done planting yet, still continues to be cold and frosty, good deal of sickness. . . The hundred dollar bill you left me is not worth a cent.").

My husband's great-great grandfather fought for the North, in a Michigan regiment. I suppose I should say he intended to fight for the North, because he died of dysentery in Tennessee before he ever saw action, leaving a wife and children behind in Michigan. He's buried in the cemetery at Stones River Battlefield in Murfreesboro along with thousands of others, Union and Confederate, who perished in and around that area during the war.

My daughter's project brought Civil War history to life for all of us and gave us new insights into the terrible hardships faced by "ordinary people dealing with a war" (as Jo said above)--in this case a war about the future of our nation, fought on our own soil, pitting brother against brother and family against family. I've always found it nice that my husband and I bring our Southern and Northern heritages together in our marriage and have blended them in our kids.

At the Stones River cemetery a little poem is engraved on a plaque. It reads:

Your Own Proud Land’s Heroic Soil
Must Be Your Bitter Grave
She Claims From War His Richest Spoil
The Ashes Of The Brave.

Thank you, Loretta, for giving all of us the chance to remember. May the memories of all the fallen--and their families--be a blessing.

[Val Jones]

Wonderful thoughts, Loretta.

My father fought in WWI for Britain (he was Welsh) and in WWII for the US and he is always in my thoughts during this time of year.

As I was driving home on Friday, I was listening to a wounded Marine being interviewed on the radio. He was returning home from Germany, and he had lost his legs and an arm in Iraq. He said that he thought there were about 800 or so currently in the amputee section of the hospital there. His story made me cry.

[Nina P]

Thank you, Loretta, for your post. Very thought provoking.

I can not leave a list of names of those in my family who have been in a war. Truth be told, there really isn’t much of a military history in my family. Not one that I know of, anyway. So, I will leave here my experiences felt though other’s eyes.

In Southern York County, PA, where I live, parts of York Road are lined with sycamore trees. Just after the Civil War, one was planted for each Pennsylvanian who fell. Most of the trees are gone now due to the ravages of disease, development, wind and ice storms. The ones that remain are mammoth beasts, providing summer shade and fall color to those driving past. When I was about six, my father dug up a sapling cast off by one of those trees and planted it in our back yard. He was a history war buff who always wanted to serve his country. But he was tagged 4F and watched his brothers go off to Vietnam. Both returned, but I'm told they were never the same. I was barely a year old.

When I was 17 I worked with a pharmacist at a local mom & pop drug store. He was a very tall fellow with a long hooked nose and oddly rough skin. One hot summer day the air conditioning conked out and he rolled up his shirt sleeves. I will never forget the sight of the tattoo on his forearm. A series of numbers sloppily etched. He had spent his childhood in the Nazi concentration camps. He lost his mother, father and brother. His stories were sobering.

Before I married I worked in a plastics factory. There I met a woman with a very thick German accent who came across as a few short of a full deck. As our relationship moved from acquaintance to friend, she told me her story and I learned why. She and her twin sister were in the camps as well. I will not remunerate here the experiments Hitler’s men inflicted upon captured twins. I will only say her stories still make my skin pucker with goose flesh and my eyes burn with angry tears. The day before my wedding she gave me a teardrop ruby necklace. It was the only thing that remained of her sister. She asked me to wear it in memory of her twin who never had a chance to be a bride. I did.

About ten years ago I read DEAD MAN’S DIARY. It was the personal account of Ira S. Pettit, a simple soldier who fought for the north during the Civil War. The last two months of his life were spent in the filth of an open air prison camp among men who were going mad with hunger as they watched officers partake of choice meals. He finally succumbed to dysentery.

I can understand the need to fight to protect one’s shores and even the drive to enter war as an ally, supporting those who are trying to protect their homeland. I believe those men and woman to be honorable souls who have done and are doing great and noble deeds. Their sacrifice humbles me. But what I will never understand is the ambition of those who think it necessary to conquer. Captain Alexander Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery wrote as he surveyed the carnage of Waterloo by moonlight, “Long I continued to gaze on this sad and solemn scene; and all this slaughter, I said, to gratify the ambition of one man, and that man –whom? – one who has risen from a station humble as my own, has already devastated Europe, and filled it with blood and mourning – who only recently left behind him 400,000 gallant men, a prey to the sword and the intemperance of the northern clime – fearful holocaust on the alter of that ambition!”

Nina, not personally touched by war but who will never forget.

[Susan Wilbanks]

Around this time last year I was putting together a care package for Nathan, my oldest nephew (only 8 years my junior--I've been an aunt since I was 6, and was a great-aunt before I was a mother), who was then serving in Iraq with his National Guard unit. I'd spoken to him on the phone a few weeks earlier and asked him what he liked to read, and he answered, fervently, "Anything with words." Faced with a Barnes & Noble full of possibilities, I picked out some sports magazines and books by Neil Gaiman, CS Lewis, and Bernard Cornwell. And Nathan liked them, so I guess I picked good words!

Words cannot express my relief and joy when Nathan came home safely, and I hope and pray that he doesn't have to go back.

Other members of my family have served in the military, but aren't combat veterans. Nathan's father spent two years in the Marines after graduating high school. Another of my brothers went to West Point and had a lengthy army career, retiring at lieutenant colonel a few years ago, but he was a math instructor at West Point when the first Gulf War broke out. And my dad also joined the army after graduating from high school, serving from 1950-52, but he was stationed in Germany rather than Korea.

Before Nathan got sent to Baghdad, the most recent combat veteran in my immediate family was my great-great-grandfather, who fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War. If I recall the story correctly, he was captured and held prisoner at Rock Island, but survived the war to come home to his third wife and father several more children (he had something like 17 all told).

While my nephew was in Iraq, I was working on a manuscript with a Peninsular War soldier for a hero. In a small way, I felt like I was honoring his service. I loved being able to write about a soldier, a man who like my nephew was brave and honorable, without having to deal with present-day politics.

[susannac in alabama]

Thank you for the post, Loretta, and all of you for your moving comments. Only a few of my family have served - an ancestor in the Revolutionary War, a few on both sides in the Civil War, a great-uncle in WWII, an uncle in Korea. My dad was in the Army Reserves and he was mobilized for the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was 1, but he never was sent into battle. I still remember crying when he was gone to summer camp, afraid they'd not send him home.

I do remember with great clarity 9/11/01, seeing smoke rising from the WTC towers as I drove to work, hearing on the radio that it was a terrorist attack, arriving at work at the Jersey City police headquarters to find all the officers pouring in and mobilizing to respond. I remember the smell that came across the river for days, the ruins at Ground Zero when I was taken on a tour of it a few weeks later. I remember the officers' stories about what they found there. And the thousands of flyers with faces of the lost taped to every surface reachable in lower Manhattan. It gave me a keen sense of what bombed cities feel like in war.

My parents are both teachers, and we visited many battlefields and war memorials as I grew up. I've always felt a sense of responsibility to read the plaques, to read the names as much as possible, to try to envision the real people who lost their lives. One snowy winter, I watched Ken Burns's Gettysburg series, an hour at a time, interested in the material but also again as a kind of thank you and tribute. I cried a lot, which is why it took the whole winter to get through it.

During our current war, I've sent care packages and donated to various soldier related helping organizations. One effort - Valour-IT - is buying voice-activated laptops for soldiers who can no longer use standard ones. What I do doesn't touch the edges of what they've done. But it's a practical way to show my appreciation and respect.

[susan sarah]

For a great personal account of being a British soldier in WWII, try George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here (yes, the Flashman author) -- his account of being a teenage soldier sent to Burma. Moving, funny, biting, readable and nearly impossible to set aside -- Fraser writes with immediacy, humor and a razor sharp sense of the humanity and cruelty he saw during those years.

~Susan Sarah

[LorettaChase]

I have been reading these comments with tears in my eyes. Thank you everybody for sharing your thoughts, and your stories. Ag Tigress wrote: "The dead have no nationality. I wonder if humankind will ever learn that truth."
I wonder if they ever will.
Peace.