of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent. Bit by bit, the changes came. Trenches were filled in---and graves scooped out. A traitor's cemetary, oriented with almost primitive loathing, faced north and south---not the east of the rising sun, and redemption. The War to End all Wars----what hopeful naivete! what faith in humanity!---was over.
And yet the graves had scarcely been dug when the seeds of another war, inconcievible to the weary folk who had seen so much butchery, were perhaps being planted. The treaty forced upon Germany was so savage that the German minister cried, "May the hand wither that signs this treaty!" Germany's economy collapsed, as did that in much of the world, and in twenty years, more graves had to be dug, by the thousands, by the millions. Yet with the signing of new treaties, perhaps, came wisdom. Mercy, it turns out, wound up erasing many of the shadows of that war.
They're still unearthing bodies now and then in French fields to this day, you know. And when they do, the poppy seeds that lie dormant for years burst forth with those vivid orange red flowers, marking the place where a soldier has lain for decades, far from home, as if the earth itself sheds blood for the dead.
Speak a little French, and the French are niceness itself. When I was last there, before PTSD, before illness, George Bush was still President. "But you are not your resident, are you?" asked one person. A maitre'd shrugged. "You can speak English if you wish, or practice your French if not." He was not putting on an act; when a w word went AWOL, he hinted and treated us like approval. Make that effort, and the word that most often greets your efforts is 'charming.' France itself is impossibly beautiful, almost surreal at some points, as if it's achieved a perfection that's not scientifically possible. Even the Nazi who held Paris could not bear to destroy it. (William Manchester, Churchill's biographer, noted that the British also loved London, yet were prepared to sacrifice it house by house if need be. Different countries, different perspectives.)
The beaches of D-Day are preserved, frozen in time, as memorials to----how do you describe it? The achievement? Or the cost? The victory tends to overshadow the dead, and the balance is uneasy. Perhaps if we want to tell the truth of war, we'd balance out the heroic statues with the scenes of impossible suffering, loss, and grief. War becomes somehow sanitized for your protection. The WWII dead were our boys, our sons, our cousins, our nephews. The new dead now are somebody else's brother, somebody else's daughter. The yellow ribbon might as well be a mark of separation rather than commemoration.
The night before he sent tends of thousands of young men---some of them boys, really---into a meat grinder, General Eisenhower wept, because he knew how many of them would die. They were such young men, too---the average age was 22. Many never reached the beach, drowned by the weight of their gear in the surf. I find it shocking that they had no body armor, which would have just drowned them faster had the boats dropped their gangway too far out, but which might have saved some of them later on. They essentially fought naked, for all the good their uniforms did---which was none----and with steel pots for helmets.
My father spoke with awe of how, after they heard the news from Pearl Harbor, men got up from plates, from work, from chores, and walked to the recruiter's office to raise their hand and sign up. That was one of the few things he did say about the war. Mostly he talked to my Mother's brother-in-law Eddie, a man best described as a one tough bastard. Years later, when he'd fought off not just one but two bouts with pancreatic cancer and other ailments, he was alternating between a wheelchair and a walker, but that didn't slow him down. His doctor's wife caught a glimpse of him one day while driving past his and my aunt's house, not knowing he was a patient of her husband, and described the startling scene to her husband: "Do you know what I saw today? You'll never believe it. I was driving down Seventh Street, and there was this man, shoveling snow----"
"So?"
"From a wheelchair?"
"Oh, that's Eddie."
Like many WWII vets, neither of them spoke much to others, but often found a quiet spot in the garden at family gatherings, two men who looked rather like tough old bulldogs. For a man who looked like such a gruff old mutt, Eddie was unabashed in his adoration of his series of French poodles, who were just smart enough to be dangerous and yet just sensitive enough to shame many humans. They adored him back, and I always thought he loved the sharp contrast he and his pets presented to onlookers: Here's Beauty. And this? This is the Beast.
Dad and Eddie were a few years apart, in age and in war. They fought in different wars: Dad was a Ranger in the South Pacific, Eddie saw the horrors of Korea, where men went to sleep at night and froze to death in their blankets. Both of them tended to choke on emotion, but Eddie found relief in labor, and Dad found it in poetry. Those were the days before the phrase PTSD was known at all. They called it, somewhat derisively, shell shock, and didn't know what to do about it. Men were men, in those days, went the phrase, and even the ones who saw the bloodiest of battles were supposed to act like men after it all. War wounds could be complained about, but not flashbacks, nightmares, or the things my found used to cope: he'd get up at three in the morning and drive till he'd left the ghosts behind, but they never really left. He quoted Churchill all the time, till years later, as a dutiful daughter, I somehow upheld my father's honor by translating some of Churchill's great speeches into Russian on a night train from Kiev. There was a great deal of vodka involved. Dad---and perhaps Churchill himself----would have approved.
Decades after the war, Dad remained in awe of the nearly poetic quotes that came out of the war. He repeatedly described the Battle of Midway, and how the Japanese soldiers----resting on the deck after they thought they'd annihilated the American fleet, looked up and saw a squadron that couldn't have, shouldn't have been there. The fighters were suspended against a jewel blue sky for a moment before they dipped wings and dived. "They looked," said one Japanese pilot, "like pearls tumbling from a broken string." Dad got to meet some of the men he once fought against. They did not speak a common language except 'soldier', but that was enough. Left to his own devices, Dad would have puttered through life, working some job, picking Mom up at work, stirring the pots of frosting that required endless, slow revolutions of the spoon, grating cheese and doing dishes as ordered. There were long family drives to relatives, and occasional trips to the drive in as a special treat. Some people regard a lack of ambition as a flaw. Maybe what they're missing is the contentment provided by simple pleasures.
Years later, the old men are fewer and fewer in number, and the memories lose their immediacy as fewer voices rise to give them voice and power. Few people know the significance of the humble, vivid poppy, nor much care, it seems. My niece, when she was given a big project about the second world war, approached me with a request to help her find the necessary facts: which countries were----what was the word?on our side?---and which countries were the bad guys? Who were their Presidents or Prime Minsters, and pre-eminent military leaders, and what was the capital city of each nation? That's it. Nothing else. No whys, wherefores, and most importantly, hows.
My father had nightmares till the Alzheimer's finally took them away. He spent three years fighting and fifty years suffering. He was not alone then, and he is not alone now. For all the time, and all the studying, and yes, all the wars since then----who would have, could have believed that we would become deadened to genocide?---our veterans are dying by their own hand or of their injuries while languishing in VA limbo, waiting for the simplest of recognition?
To care for him who shall have borne the battle.
Back then, few families were untouched by war. Now scarcely any are. The cost of bearing the battle is hidden----or ignored. Is it any wonder that the significance of the sacrifices of Omaha Beach are fading into dust while eighteen veterans a day commit suicide?
I have a picture of my grandfather, back from the trenches of Belgium in WWI, sitting in his wheelchair, making those poppies that veterans still sell to this day. The poppies meant something, but how long before they are lost to memory in this country? A soldier might be better off in France, a country that under George W.Bush, morphed into an odd kind of enemy for doing what old allies and friends do: France told us that the idea of a land war in Iraq was both foolish and unjustified, that our intelligence was flawed.
Americans have an odd attitude toward war. They cheer at parades, weep at the funeral processions of people who follow a profession none of them has any knowledge of, and.....that's it. Though Obama has lifted the ban on photographing the dead arriving at Dover----he did in fact, go there to greet the return of the fallen himself, something Bush never did------few people see closeup the cost of war, because they don't know anyone who pays that price. They Barbecue on Memorial Day, peruse the sales on Veteran's day, and tsk tsk at the odd news story here and there that they find while switching channels. They do not write their Congressmen. Their do not write the President. They do not get up and go visit VAs, or volunteer, or donate. Eager for war, amnesiatic when when it's over.
If we go to war, it should indeed, be a national effort. Ration gasoline and metal and food. Plant victory gardens and collect scrap metal. Let everyone bear the battle, no matter how rich the nation is. Halliburton, Blackwater, and KBR would be cut out of the equation if their places are taken by soldiers and Iraqis, but are we fighting a war or trying to make stock prices jump? War should take a toll on the nation that wages it, especially these two wars, especially after all the innocent civilians who died.
Today is not a holiday and thank God. There will be no sales, no cookouts, no stocking up on beer for the barbecue. But how many live today who remember the past---and more importantly, respect it?