Happy Memorial Day…
The tragic waste of war…
Dear Reader,
It is Memorial Day… when the nation pauses to honor its war dead.
Most Americans did not, of course.
It merely represented an opportunity to lie flat on a beach… to munch frankfurters… to dream the tall dreams of approaching summer.
I was among them.
I did not plant tiny American flags atop forgotten graves today.
I did not bugle taps.
I did not thank a veteran for his service — not out of disrespect — but because I scarcely know any.
I nonetheless recall strolling the American military cemetery above Omaha Beach one day… and how it brought me up short.
The rows and rows and rows of bleach-white crosses — and an occasional Star of David — seeming to span from horizon to horizon.
I wandered among the dead… and listened for their ghostly counsel.
Beneath the rustling breeze, I detected a faint murmur. It seemed to whisper a poem from the First World War:
In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row,That mark our place, and in the skyThe larks, still bravely singing, fly,Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead; short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved, and now we lieIn Flanders fields.
Flanders Field
Standing above Omaha Beach that day, what fetched me was not so much the gravity of those events so many years distant — but the soul-numbing waste of it all.
What great things may have awaited that 21-year-old second lieutenant if a German bullet hadn’t cut him down on June 6, 1944?
What did life have in store for that sergeant of the 2nd Ranger Battalion… who never made it up Pointe du Hoc that morning?
What about this young paratrooper of the 101st Airborne Division, whose bones lie beneath a shady tree above Omaha Beach?
The American military cemetery above Omaha Beach
What might they have amounted to?
Perhaps much. Perhaps nothing whatsoever. But it makes no nevermind.
They had lives to live — and every right to live them.
Let us also not forget the pulverized and unidentified dead, known only to their Almighty creator.
What about the futures they never had?
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,” lamented poet John Greenleaf Whittier, “the saddest are these:
“It might have been.”
What might have been… had they lived?
Alas, we will never know.
Let us finally spare a thought for the vanquished…
Not all the German dead were Nazi devils. They were rather conscripts taking orders.
Most were broken and wrecked veterans of the Russian front, dispatched to Normandy to recuperate.
And not all Germans in Normandy were… Germans.
Many were Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians, conscripted into German service, and sent to man the Atlantic Wall.
Conscripts from Azerbaijan, India, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Indonesia — and Thailand — were likewise among the “Germans” defending the French coast.
“Germans”
But this is America’s day of remembrance. And so as we conclude this Memorial Day weekend…
Let us lower our heads in mournful reflection of America’s martial departed — and what might have been.
Requiescat in pace.
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News