As we approach Memorial Day, it is fitting to take some time to consider an important anniversary. One hundred years ago, America entered the "Great War for Civilization," the war to end all wars. It was all-too-soon followed by World War II, thus proving the futility of hoping that worldwide conflict might end with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
Civil War Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman notably proclaimed that "war is hell." That has no doubt been true since homo sapiens first took up cudgels against Neanderthals. History is full of the horrors of bloody conflict, but the forces of darkness raised the ante considerably during World War I, due in no small part to technology. The inventive geniuses who gave us steam and combustion engines were also capable of devising the most fearsome engines of war ever seen.
Combatants and civilians experienced the unimagined horrors of submarines sinking passenger ships with silent torpedoes, aircraft that rained death from the sky, all-but-impervious tanks that could destroy almost any barrier, machine guns that fired bursts amounting to 250 rounds per minute, flamethrowers, long-range artillery and poison gas. The terrible sum of all of this technology was more than 17 million deaths and 20 million wounded.
There is a cemetery in Belgium where 411 American service members are buried. Most were members of the 91st Infantry Division. Their deaths and the deaths of other Allied soldiers were commemorated in a poem by Canadian Maj. John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields." The last stanza exhorts surviving combatants to:
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.
The poem resonated strongly on the home front and gave birth to the custom of selling paper poppies around Memorial Day in remembrance of those who gave their all in WWI.
Some U.S. veterans lucky to have survived the battlefield returned home with loss of limbs, or throats and lungs permanently seared by chlorine, mustard and phosgene gas. Others suffered from what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Weeks of hearing nonstop artillery fire, narrowly missing a shell or mine explosion, and seeing your comrades shredded by machine gun bursts caused some veterans to bring this hell home with them. They experienced memory loss, insomnia, nightmares and even convulsive, epileptic-like seizures. I remember my father telling me that, as a boy, he commonly saw unshaven men in tattered clothes on the streets of Philadelphia acting erratically and asking for a hand-out. He called them "shell-shocked" as a result of their World War I experience.
More horrors continued with World War II, the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf wars, and the multiple battles we find ourselves engaged in today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and other world trouble spots. American combatants are still making the ultimate sacrifice, and it is their memory we honor on Monday.
Memorial Day began in the years following the Civil War and was initially called Decoration Day because families had begun decorating the graves of their fallen war dead with the flowers of spring. A local proponent of the holiday was Carroll County's own Mary Shellman. In response to an 1868 General Order of the Grand Army of the Republic to observe an annual Decoration Day in May, 18-year-old Shellman organized a parade to honor fallen veterans. Participants marched to the Westminster cemetery to decorate the graves of soldiers buried there. Perhaps her motivation was the memory of a young Union private she had nursed as he died of typhoid. Over the next 60 years, Shellman led the town's annual Memorial Day procession. Today, Westminster claims one of the longest-running Memorial Day parades in the nation.
There is no better way to end these thoughts than with the concluding words of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "It is … 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."
Frank Batavick writes from Westminster. His column appears Fridays. Email him at fjbatavick@gmail.com.
