In the quiet of the day!
We took a road trip yesterday with an old, old friend down to Missouri where we partook of a fine meal at a nationally known restaurant visited by hundreds of thousands of people per year. On our way back up the interstate we saw the brown sign that we see each time that we make this trip. It simply stated that there was a national cemetery at Mound City, Illinois. The friend whom we were with had a father who was lost in one of America’s many and frequent wars. He never saw his father and only knows him through the memories of others. His father is buried in a cemetery not unlike this on the peninsula of Korea.
We pulled off of the beaten path and took a drive down memory lane to the Mound City area and found the cemetery neatly protected by a black fence. All national cemeteries are neat and well kept in honor of those who now have no where else to go. There have been homeless veterans who have, we are sure, finally found their last resting place in cemeteries like this one scattered across the national landscape. It is the very least that a nation born of war can do for those who, in so many cases, gave their last full measure of devotion to causes that were far bigger than their individual or collective abilities to really understand or comprehend. The last thing that so many of them saw was that flag carried by a friend that they were determined to protect, even unto the giving of their very lives.
Who are mainly buried at Mound City are civil war soldiers because that was the reason that the ground was consecrated so many years ago now. Located just a few hundred yards across a levy from the Ohio river that flows restlessly nearby, Mound City was among the first stretches of northern soil that the government could find to lay its many casualties to a final rest. We were in Springfield, Illinois recently where the leader of this struggle that took so many is also laid to rest.
As we looked out over the row after row of neat, well kept, white tombstones, all government issued, we thought back on the time, now only a part of history, that led them to this place. Each one of these who rest here had a story to tell that only their comrades could fully understand. One northern soldier who fell in the civil war called it, in his diary, simply “a pure Hell!” We are sure that there are really no words that can adequately describe what those who lie so peacefully under the sod that these tombstones represent went through or that can tell us how they died.
War is, in its ultimate definition, really nothing but a thing as wordlessly described as those who stand so perpetually at attention like those in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town play by their graves in a setting so stark and simply as to not really be able to be described at all. If they could but speak to us and to our leaders perhaps there would never be another war. Although we have not seen it, we are sure that there are those times when the fog comes across Mound City and gives this place a ghostly appearance where the stones seem to stand levitated above it all. And, just perhaps, if one listens quietly one can hear the stories of those who now live here as they try to describe to us what it is to die in a war. It is something that only the dead can tell us which is why we will never really know of it at all. For those who died and who are buried here who fell in the advancing line are a part of a fraternity that only they can truly know. They are the forever young as that is what dies mainly in all wars. Those who survive so often refuse to tell their stories because they do not want to remember a time that traumatizes them to the very end of their days.
A soldiers war never really ends until the envelopment of death finally takes the voices and the sounds and the fury and the Hell away!
And so we ended our visit to a place that holds the stories of those who have fallen in every American war since the civil war. We left dry eyed because we have cried too much before. We have stood in opposition to war before and we, among so many others, always seem to be unable to stop the inevitable march of history brought on us all too often by those who have never known the horrors that come with the decisions that they so easily make. They say that these decisions come with great difficulty but we do not believe them because we have spent too much time in places like this and with gentle people made hard by the horrors of what they have been forced to see. And, the hardest thing to view, really, is the row upon row of gravestones with those silent sentry’s standing beside each one, frozen in their youth, who would gladly do it again if their nation called. A devotion like that should bring out of each and every one of us a determination, as Lincoln said, that they shall not have died in vain! It has been said that there will always be wars and rumors of wars but we simply wish that those who perpetuate them could simply spend more time in places like this. The deafening silence that comes from here might drown out all of the saber rattling that goes on if only it could only be heard. However, in all embarrassment, there truly are the lovers of war.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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