Honoring the dead by working for peace
There was a time when Memorial Day meant a quiet day to remember the war dead. In other decades, Americans were closer to the loss of family members in the World Wars, Korea and Vietnam. Even though young men and women are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan today, Memorial Day ain’t what it used to be, if a quick look at the store sales and promotions planned for the weekend is any indication.
Leave it to commerce to turn even a solemn day of remembrance of the casualties of war into a time for blowout sales and deep discounts.
Memorial Day was once called Decoration Day and it honored the dead of the Civil War. Many of us remember the artificial poppies used as Memorial Day remembrances and In Flanders Fields, the poem that inspired their use:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
A little background on the poem: It was composed by Lt. Col. John McCrae, who wrote it in 1915 after the death of a fellow soldier. The author was a Canadian surgeon who died of pneumonia in 1918 while he was stationed in France. The poem has been used to justify endless war and revenge because of its third stanza, which is sometimes omitted in Canadian schools, where the poem is still remembered. Some have agreed that there’s a disconnect between the tone of the first two stanzas and the third:
“Critic Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, points out the sharp distinctions between the pastoral, sacrificial tone of the poem’s first nine lines and the ‘recruiting-poster rhetoric’ of the poem’s third stanza; he argues that, appearing in 1915, the poem would serve to denigrate any negotiated peace that would end the war, and calls these lines ‘a propaganda argument.’”
We can consider the third stanza in another way. Breaking faith with those who die can also mean dishonoring the memory of those who have always lost their lives to senseless, cruel wars that they themselves never declared. The farmboys and new Irish immigrants who died by the droves during the Civil War and yet had no quarrel with their opponents on the battlefield certainly didn’t want to fight. The boys who were drafted and sent to Vietnam didn’t want to die there. Today’s soldiers who are on their third and fourth tours in Iraq want to come home.
The dead in Flanders Fields and in countless sites of carnage around the world would have us honor their memory by creating a world where the young don’t have to suffer mean deaths and disfigurement in mudfield and rice paddies, but the pride of the rulers and demagogues who send them there never flags. Politicians and propaganda masters never go to the battlefields to fight the wars they start.
Witness Dick Cheney’s endless deferments and Dubya’s “service” in Texas during Vietnam as proof that, the more cowardly the politician, the more likely he is to send others to die for them in conflicts fueled by lies. The young people who have returned in caskets, who are brain-damaged, disfigured and missing limbs will weigh heavily on all of these criminals in tribunals here on Earth or, more significantly, before our Almighty God.
From Flanders Fields to Fallujah, the dead wanted nothing more than to live, to feel the dawn, see a sunset glow, hug their loved ones and come home. We honor their memory when we work for a lasting peace, not when we continue to wage unceasing war.
