May 28 2001
Memorial Day
It’s Memorial Day, and I am thinking about my grandfathers. Both were named Ernest, though one was American and the other English. Both fought in World War One, or as I think of it, the Great War, and both survived. My American grandfather, a farm boy from New York State, was the only survivor of his entire unit. My English grandfather, a streetwise Londoner, was gassed.
This painting, by John Singer Sargent, the great portrait painter, is of soldiers who have been gassed like my grandfather and who are helping each other blindly to the first aid station somewhere in rural France. Sargent painted this on the spot as it actually happened, hence the power of the painting, which is only enhanced by the children playing soccer in the backgroud.
Both of my grandfathers were plagued for the rest of their long lives by nightmares of what they had seen and done while in France, but they never once doubted that what they had done was right and good and worth the sacrifice.
An old friend of my father’s, Allie Cave, whom he had known since he was three years old, once told me that her fiance had been killed in the Great War. Allie had never married, and I, at 15, thought this was because she had loved her fiance so deeply that she couldn’t think of marrying anyone else after he had perished so nobly. Allie laughed at this notion and said, “My dear, you don’t understand. There were no men left. Only old men and little boys.”
That day, she showed me vividly the heavy cost of war, no matter how right the cause. Allie took me to St. Clement Danes, a beautiful church in the center of London built by the great Sir Christopher Wren in 1680.
The church is now dedicated to the Allied soldiers of World War II, and contains several glass cases, each with a book listing the name of a man or woman who was killed. It’s a very moving experience to see all those books, all those names, and to think of the lives they might have had and the loss of those who loved them.
So on this day, I am thankful to my grandfathers and their fellow soldiers who were not so fortunate. Thank you for our freedom. You are not forgotten.
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