"In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire."

Not long ago I heard a young man ask why people still kept up Memorial Day, and it set me thinking of the answer. Not the answer that you and I should give to each other-not the expression of those feelings that, so long as you live, will make this day sacred to memories of love and grief and heroic youth--but an answer which should command the assent of those who do not share our memories, and in which we of the North and our brethren of the South could join in perfect accord.

So begins perhaps the most famous Memorial Day address of all time.  It wsa spoken in Keene, NH, May 30, 1884, well before this day became movable as to date while fixed on a Monday for our convenience.  The author had served in the Massachusetts 20th, where once, at the Battle of Fort Stevens, he had pulled down a tall figure trying to see what was happening by saying "Get down you fool" only to realize that he had just addressed President Abraham Lincoln.    The speaker was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  
Holmes also gave a speech on May 30, 1895, entitled The Soldier's Faith, at a meeting called by the Harvard graduating class, that so impressed Theodore Roosevelt that he would later, when president, appoint the speak, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to the Supreme Court, where he served into his 90s, into the 1930s, including under the Chief Justice who had also been president, William Howard Taft.

The texts of both speeches are well worth considering this day.  I will offer an additional selection from the 1884 speech, whose title is the same as that of this diary.  But I will begin with a reflection of my own on this day.

Although I served in a time of war (Vietnam) I myself saw no combat.  Of course I served with those who did.  And as a child born in the baby boom of 1946, I knew many adults of my father's generation who served.  While Louis Bernstein only served in the Bureau of Ships in Washington DC, my mother's brother had been in the Battle of the Bulge, as had the older of the two Italian-surnamed brothers who remodeled our house for us.  Some of the parents of my schoolmates had also seen serious combat, a few even for a second time in Korea, the war that overlapped with my first consciousness of Memorial Day.

In Larchmont we had, as did many towns, a Memorial.  Ours had a list of the names of those who had served in World War II.  It was the ending point of the annual Memorial Day Parade.  Other towns I have since visited had similar memorials, some also of the war of what Brokaw has labeled "The Greatest Generation," others the names of those who died, perhaps in the Civil War, perhaps in The Great War, as it was called until less than a generation after the Armistice of 1918 the World was yet again consumed by armed conflict, only this time with entire cities destroyed.  It is worth remembering how many of these list of names on bronze plaques there are around this country, and that the idea of commemoration by listing names did not begin with the Black Marble monument off Constitution Avenue, designed by Maya Lin and built in large part through the efforts of Jan Scruggs.  

Our Parade was a combination of joy and sadness, because Memory is not unalloyed.  We saw men dress up in uniforms into which in some cases they no longer fit.  But they were not the only ones in uniforms.   There were Cub Scouts and boy Scout, Bluebirds and Campfire Girls, Brownies and Girl Scouts.   There was always at least one band, the political figures also marched even if they had not served, and there were others from the community involved.  Of course the local American Legion and its Auxiliary and if I remember correctly also a chapter of the VFW.  And for all the ceremony and joy, the flags flying, the real focus was at the end, at the Memorial.  It was not the speeches that mattered, although there were some, but the reading of the names, the firing of memorial volleys for those who had passed.  At the distance of more than half a century since I last participated I do not remember if the list of those who passed was only those who had died in combat - of which our small community did not have that many - or of those who had passed since their service had ended, perhaps because their lives had been shortened by that service on behalf of the nation.  It does not matter - they had served, and they were remembered.

In the 1960s I was a Marine.  Today I am a Quaker. I am now reluctant to take up arms for any reason, because I so value all human life.  But it would be wrong of me - or of anyone - to believe that those who did bear arms valued human life any less than I do.  And perhaps the reason so many who saw combat are reluctant to discuss their experience is because the killing they had to do unavoidably altered them for ever.  For all our glorification of military service - perhaps necessary to encourage people to be willing to die and to kill - there is still something in most people that recoils, draws back from the occasion when one is presented with the ability to take another human life, even to save one's own, even under the most justifiable of circumstances.

For the old Soviet Union, the period of the early 1940's is known as The Great Patriotic War, when that nation suffered immeasurably, when millions died after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941.  For other nations, the reluctance initially to oppose Hitler's rearmament can be inexplicably linked to the horrors of the trench warfare and the suffering of the previous war, less than 30 years past, and their commemoration is often in poetry, of men like Owen and Brooke.

And for our nation, it was the war in which brother fought brother.  Living as I do in Virginia I am never far from a site of significant combat, whether it is the series of battles around Fredericksburg, or going through Winchester, a key junction which changed hands more than twenty times during the Civil War.  It is to go only about half an hour west on an Interstate to pass Manassas and cross the Bull Run, or to drive south on US 29 past Brandy Station.  

The Civil War almost destroyed this nation.  But in a sense it began the process of making us a nation.  Robert E. Lee thought of himself as a citizen of Virginia, thus he turned down the command of what became the Union Army to serve his homeland.  The units representing the United States were organized by state, not only the 20th Massachusetts in which Holmes served, but also the famous 20th Maine of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a man who won the Medal of Honor for his gallantry at Little Round Top at Gettsyburg, who commanded the Union troops when Grant accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House (yes, here in Virginia) and later served as Governor of Maine.  It was only after the war that the 14th Amendment first defined US Citizenship on a national basis.  And it was the coming together even as old enemies - in the reunions at Gettysburg that foreshadowed our modern day reenactments and in the decoration of graves of those from both armies.  We honored the living as well as the dead.

I do not presume to understand all of the emotions behind a day such as this.  We could hope, as did those veterans in the parades in Larchmont in the 1950s, that their service had been sufficient that their children would not have to go to war.  Now they may if still alive be watching grandchildren and great-grandchildren in combat, far from home, in a war that does not make the nation any safer.  That does not matter.  They serve, and so long as that service is on their part honorable it mattes not the mistaken leadership that has placed them there, they are entitled to respect, to be honored for their willingness to serve.

So let me end as Holmes did.  I encourage you to read the entirety of both speeches, this and that of 1895, to which I linked above the fold. The words again of a man who served this nation in combat in the 1860s, including at Antietam, and on the Supreme Court from 1902 until 1932.

Comrades, some of the associations of this day are not only triumphant, but joyful. Not all of those with whom we once stood shoulder to shoulder--not all of those whom we once loved and revered--are gone. On this day we still meet our companions in the freezing winter bivouacs and in those dreadful summer marches where every faculty of the soul seemed to depart one after another, leaving only a dumb animal power to set the teeth and to persist-- a blind belief that somewhere and at last there was bread and water. On this day, at least, we still meet and rejoice in the closest tie which is possible between men-- a tie which suffering has made indissoluble for better, for worse.

When we meet thus, when we do honor to the dead in terms that must sometimes embrace the living, we do not deceive ourselves. We attribute no special merit to a man for having served when all were serving. We know that, if the armies of our war did anything worth remembering, the credit belongs not mainly to the individuals who did it, but to average human nature. We also know very well that we cannot live in associations with the past alone, and we admit that, if we would be worthy of the past, we must find new fields for action or thought, and make for ourselves new careers.

But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.

Such hearts--ah me, how many!--were stilled twenty years ago; and to us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death. Year after year lovers wandering under the apple trees and through the clover and deep grass are surprised with sudden tears as they see black veiled figures stealing through the morning to a soldier's grave. Year after year the comrades of the dead follow, with public honor, procession and commemorative flags and funeral march--honor and grief from us who stand almost alone, and have seen the best and noblest of our generation pass away.

But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death--of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen , the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.

Peace.  

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