In 1863,President Abraham Lincoln commemorated the sacrifice of our fallen soldiers at Gettysburg, when he declared his purpose--our purpose--in honoring them:
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Many years later, in my 2011 novel, Smoke, we find a character, a young American whose father had never returned from World War I. In the story, in 1937, Philip Morrow is en route to the gravesite. Shortly before arriving at the battlefield, Philip poses a question to his companion, Mel Leblanc, because . . .
. . . something was moving deeply inside of him. “Mel?”
“Yes?”
“How could this place have been a battlefield for a world war?”
The old Frenchman cast his eyes on the passing landscape, and seemed to join Philip in this musing. He answered slowly, “War is a terrible thing, an ugly thing. I did not fight in the war; I had already served my military duty, long before the Archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo and the whole damn world flew apart, like shrapnel. But I had many friends who fought here, and back there, where we just came from in my France, back there at the Somme, the Marne, Amiens. Our soldiers drove the Germans back across their fortified lines, the Hindenberg line they called it. By summer of 1918 the Germans were in full retreat, although it took them a hell of a long time, and rivers of spilt blood, to admit it. And so it all ended here. Those trenches, over there in France, that had been held and occupied for two hellish years by both armies, those muddy hellholes were finally left behind, vacated, and afterward . . . filled up again with the soil of France and Flanders and Belgium, and green grass was planted where warfare had formerly blasted its way out of the dark human soul and the dark humus of lowland dirt and now we see that grass, trimmed, manicured and growing so tidily around those rows of white crosses out there, most of them with some soldier’s name carved on them, many just unknown, anonymous, and how could this have happened? You might as well ask how could. . . a grain of sand get stuck in an oyster? And how could that oyster, in retaliation against that rough, alien irritant, then generate a pearl—such a beautiful thing, lustrous and white—coming forth in response to a small, alien presence that had taken up unwelcomed residence inside the creature’s own domain? The answer, my friend, is floating in the sea, blowing in the wind, growing green and strong from soil that once ran red with men’s blood.”
Half a century later, soldiers of our nation served in Vietnam on behalf of an expanding "new birth of freedom" about which Lincoln had earlier spoke. In Washington today, you will find their memorial:
And there have many other men and women who, since those times, have fallen while defending "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" . . . including those police who were killed while defending our US Capitol against an attempted coup on January 6 of this year.
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