For the purpose of getting this down on paper, I have placed these items in reach: a cannon ball from the Civil War, a bayonet fitted to the barrel of a Spanish War krag, a 1918 German pistol, a shattered World War II Arisaka rifle from Saipan and my son’s Vietnam medals.
Each represents military service by a member of our family. Expect for my son’s experiences, which were relatively recent, the history of the memories behind these war souvenirs are pretty much faded or gone.
These articles make me think of Southey’s poem, “The Battle of Blenheim.” Little children find the skulls of soldiers in their grandfather’s fields. The old man recount that battles were waged and victories won. But, he can’t answer his grandchildren’s questions: “Why and what were they fighting for?”
He can’t remember.
My father liked to talk about his experiences as an ambulance driver in France in 1917 and 1918. “La Gloire de la guerre” meant something to him — Memorial Day and Fourth of July parades always saw him in uniform with his legion and VFW buddies.
As a child, I witnessed this. I thought the uniform and the hard-fought fight for one’s country should be supreme elements in a man’s life.
When Hitler and his cohorts came goose-stepping to center stage in the 1930s, I knew my time had come. “La gloire do la guerre” would catch me up in its pomp and ceremony. Heroes were to be made.
The year before we went to war, my senior adviser in college was a slim lad by the name of Roy Phillips. Roy was the New England cross-country champion, undefeated in the indoor mile run. He was a first-rate boy of sound character and unimpeachable virtue.
Because he was older, Roy got first crack at the heroic game — first taste of “La gloire de la guerre.” He went “over there” in the first wave of Americans. Anyone who knows anything at all of the history of war knows that poor Roy was doomed. War doesn’t skim from the bottom of the bottle. It takes the cream.
Where did he die? Within a stone’s throw of Flanders Field, where poppies still grow between the crosses, row upon row, that mark the graves of earlier Americans who had gone off, like Roy, to serve a noble cause.
Here, in addition to these mute tools of war, I have one articulate memento: a copy of the letter from the chaplain who attended Roy as he lay dying. Among other things, the chaplain had this to say: “Roy threw himself into being a soldier, like a man convinced of a sacred duty to his God and fellow man.
“The afternoon he was wounded, five men tried to get in touch with me so that I might go see him. He seemed unconscious, but when I knelt to observe him closely, he opened his eyes and tried to smile. He told me that he couldn’t live and it was one of God’s great mercies.
“I spoke to him of fighting through the back stretch. Being an old and experienced runner, he said ‘the race was done, a good finish.’
“With the coming of his death, his friends and I felt the loss and shock. Tonight we pray for the end of this.”
Four times in the last century or so, the world has tapped its resouces of young man power. You can “go to the well” just so many times. Our gene pool, like all our natural resources, is not exhaustible.
Young men must register. The are not the unsophisticates their fathers and grandfathers were before them.
Patriotism, beside the “Uncle Sam needs you” sort, suffers. Love for our country, a natural and noble emotion, is put in jeopardy.
Our sons are not cowards. Old men who have learned to make simplicities of diplomatic complexities continue to force predicament upon the world’s young.
Our youth cannot be scolded and shamed to submit to war. “Slackers” and “draft dodgers” will never again coerce young men to take up arms as a proper and right expression of patriotism.
I once looked down into the face of a Japanese boy floating in the ocean. It was the face of a fine-looking young man. It was eloquent: Why? I could not answer this question then. I still can’t answer.
Our enemies have become our allies and our ally has become our enemy. There is not a little insanity in this. Our young people perceive it, and the world must understand their response.
It is time to listen more to the young. Their protesting against nuclear weapons is an expression of hope for the future. Their refusal to “sign up” to carry guns is not an act of cowardice, nor does it limit their love of country. If the child is, in fact, father to the man, it is high time we took note of it.
Roy Phillips, and all of the millions of boys who lie beneath the crosses, tell us this is wrong — that war and the continuing threat of war are too bad.
Paul Seamans is a permanent resident of the Charlene Manor nursing home.