[EVENT] Happy Remembrance & Veteran's Days!

[thrillingdetectivetales]

To all our friends in Canada and the U.K., a very happy Remembrance Day, and to all our friends in the U.S., a very happy Veteran's Day!* May those of you who are veterans bask in the goodwill of your fellow human persons, and may the rest of us do our best to appreciate you and all the others who have volunteered and fought and sacrificed in all measures.

* As an American, if I'm missing any other similar national holidays please let me know and I will add them to the calendar!

Comments

[muccamukk]

The war memorial that has always stuck with me most was the one in Strasbourg, France (formerly Germany, formerly France, formerly Germany, etc...). A city so on the border that the streets are all named in two languages. The monument depicts a women holding two naked young men, meant to be one French and one German, but death has stripped them of their uniforms and their nationalities.

[thrillingdetectivetales]

Oh this is lovely, and heart-wrenching in a lot of powerful ways.

I don't know that I have a favorite war memorial, but I think that has to do more with the fact that the ones I've seen are mostly the big national ones here in the U.S. which are all looming and make a statement in terms of being big and sleek and overbearing, which I think are powerful in that they're overwhelming, but lack a certain amount of humanity.

Anyway, this is beautiful, and thank you for sharing!

[muccamukk]

The tomb of the unknown soldier in Ottawa is very well done, here. Mostly I just notice them around, since every town has a little one. For the US ones, the black wall with names on it is well done, I think.

(Though frankly, my favourite, if one can have a favourite for such things, is the SPITE put in by Quartermaster General Meigs in the Civil War. The Union had seized some of General Lee's wife's property because she couldn't pay taxes on it ((HOW?)), and Meigs literally buried his son who'd been killed by the Confederates right in front of Lee's front porch. ie, where Arlington got its start.)

Going to France though, is a whole other kettle of fish. You notice how in say BoB they're always leaning against a cenotaph. Those are in TINY towns, and they're covered in names from WWI, like whole families just gone, in every town, and in bigger cities like Nantes, it's a whole wall.

Like, it just went on and on, the wall, probably the length of a block, and in the middle of it, there was a tiny plaque for WWII and Vietnam:


(There was also a great naked lady with her arms raised in victory for the Marne at the other end of the square, because nothing says "yay!" like a naked lady.)

I mean, we also found a monument that the French had built to thank the Americans for showing up in WWI, the Germans had blown up in WWII, and the French had rebuilt thereafter. It said ""They have destroyed it. We shell restore it."

Which I like as an overall sentiment for the day as well.

[thrillingdetectivetales]

Since I shared one of my other favorite war poems, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, on my personal DW the other day, I thought maybe I would share another here for Veteran's/Remembrance Day. This is also, incidentally, the poem that opens Robert Leckie's memoir, Helmet for My Pillow, which is probably my favorite of all the WWII memoirs I've read so far. The poem was written on my birthday a number of years before I was a distant thought, and as such I feel a kind of kinship with it.

I wouldn't say it's a technically innovative or even technically professional poem, though Leckie has a good sense of internal rhyme and meter and a way with lyrical turns of phrase, but I like it a lot nonetheless and think of it often:

The Ballad of the Tenaru, August 21, 1942
Robert Leckie

A helmet for my pillow,
A poncho for my bed,
My rifle rests across my chest-
The stars swing overhead.

The whisper of the kunai,
The murmur of the sea,
The sighing palm and night so calm
Betray no enemy.

Hear! River bank so silent,
You men who sleep around,
That foreign scream across the stream-
Up! Fire at the sound!

Sweeping over the sandspit
That blocks the Tenaru
With Banzai-boast a mushroomed host
Vows to destroy our few.

Into your holes and gunpits!
Kill them with rifles and knives!
Feed them with lead until they are dead-
And widowed are their wives.

Sons of the mothers who gave you
Honor and gift of birth
Strike with the knife 'til blood and life
Run out upon the earth.

Marines, keep faith with your glory,
Keep to your trembling hole.
Intruder feel of Nippon steel
Can't penetrate your soul.

Closing, they charge all howling,
Their breasts all targets large.
The gun must shake, the bullets make
A slaughter of their charge.

Red are the flashing tracers,
Yellow the bursting shells.
Hoarse is the cry of men who die
Shrill are the wounded's yells.

God, how the night reels stricken!
She shrieks with orange spark.
The mortar's lash and cannon's crash
Have crucified the dark.

Falling, the faltering foemen
Beneath our guns lie heaped.
By greenish glare of rocket's flare
We see the harvest reaped.

Now has the first fierce onslaught
Been broken and hurled back.
Hammered and hit, from hole and pit-
We rise up to attack!

Day bursts pale from a gun tube,
The gibbering night has fled.
By light of dawn the foe has drawn
A line behind his dead.

Our tanks clank in behind him,
Our riflemen move out.
Their hearts have met our bayonet-
It's ended with a shout.

"Cease fire!" the words go ringing,
Over the heaps of the slain.
The battle's won, the Rising Sun
Lies riddled on the plain.

St. Michael, angel of battle
We praise you to God on high.
The foe you gave was strong and brave
And unafraid to die.

Speak to the Lord for our comrades,
Killed when the battle seemed lost.
They went to meet a bright defeat-
The hero's holocaust.

False is the vaunt of the victor,
Empty our living pride.
For those who fell there is no hell-
Not for the brave who died.

[yourlibrarian]

Memorable final line, that.

I just watched The Hurt Locker yesterday night, and it's interesting to consider how different things are with endless wars far from home, where it's less a matter of short-term survival than adapting to a way of life.