(HOST) Memorial Day for commentator Bill Mares recalls a tour of battlefields of northern Europe and multiple memorials to the dead of three wars.
(MARES) Six weeks ago, my father-in-law, Fred Hadsel died at the age of 94. He was the last grandparent of our boys to go. He had quite a life. He went to the original McGuffey School in Miami, Ohio. He played French horn at a summer music camp where John Philip Sousa led the youth orchestra. He had a distinguished career as a diplomat rising to be ambassador to Somalia, and Ghana. During World War Two he was combat historian with the Sixth Army.
That experience was the origin of a memorable battlefield tour across Northern France and Belgium when he and I and my son Nick took in 1998.
In nine days, we visited Omaha beach, The Somme River, Verdun, Compiegne, Chateau Thierry, the Argonne Forest, the Maginot Line, Bastogne, and finally Waterloo. Between the museums, bunkers, beaches and parapets we saw a lot of cemeteries!
Our trip began as did the film Saving Private Ryan, on the green and white field of tombstones atop Omaha Beach. From there we drove to the Somme River in eastern France where British Empire troops suffered 20,000 DEAD and 40,000 wounded in ONE day.
At Beaumont Hamel, a bronze caribou now towers above a peaceful field of grazing sheep. It commemorates however, that black day of July 1, 1916, when an entire battalion of 800 Newfoundlanders were mowed down like wheat in less than 30 minutes.
At Thiepval we visited the towering Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, with the carved names of 72,000 officers and men of the United Kingdom and South African forces who died in that sector and have no known grave. Nearby are scores of gravestones with the simple inscription, "Known Only to God".
At Verdun, to commemorate the 11-month long battle of attrition the French build a vast ossuary on a hilltop that looks like a sandstone submarine with a conning tower in the middle.
Beneath its translucent floor are visible the bones of thousands of dead French and German soldiers, dug from the fields around.
From the ossuary, headstones flow down the slope like water. There’s a section of headstones facing east toward Mecca, bearing stars and crescents, instead of crosses. These are the graves of French colonial troops from Algeria and Morocco.
Trying to make sense of good wars, bad wars, just and unjust wars was too much for my brain.
It was better to go back 2500 years to the words of Pericles at the funeral of Athenian soldiers killed at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War:
For the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men’s lives."
(TAG) You can find more commentaries by Bill Mares on-line at VPR-dot-net.