OPINION: The Meaning of Memorial Day
“I to my pledged word am true.” That, to me, is the essence of Memorial Day.
By George Solley
GUEST OPINION
Editor’s Note: Monday’s Memorial Day column drew of number of powerful responses. George Solley of Fredericksburg shared with the Advance a speech he delivered in 2013. We are honored this morning to reproduce that speech.
Memorial Day – May 27, 2013
Good morning. It’s an honor to be with you this morning. On behalf of Mayor Mary Katherine Greenlaw and the rest of City Council, I thank you for your attendance.
I would like to begin my remarks with a few lines from a poem.
Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
These words by the English Poet, Siegfried Sassoon, a highly decorated officer in the British Army during World War I, ask the question that we as a nation should ask ourselves each year at this time. The world’s events have rumbled on, and we do take our peaceful share of time, and particularly on this lovely first weekend of summer we feel joy in being alive, in sharing time with our families, in just enjoying ourselves over the course of a long weekend.
I myself have enjoyed this Memorial Day weekend, spending it with friends and family. We did the usual things often associated with this weekend – cooked out, went to a picnic, just enjoyed each others’ company. But we also went to the Fredericksburg National Cemetery for the Luminaria, and our thoughts were forced away from the immediate to the magnitude of the sacrifice made by those thousands who are buried here, and we talked about the meaning of this weekend and this day.
Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day, and it is officially celebrated as a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation’s service. Memorial Day is a time for remembering the dead.
It began after the Civil War as a grass-roots ritual, where the people of both the North and South began to gather on one day of the year to decorate the graves of those who fell during that war. Memorial Day was first officially proclaimed on 5 May 1868 by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, and was first observed on May 30, 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. The first state to officially recognize the holiday was New York in 1873. By 1890 it was recognized by all of the northern states.
For many years, the day was solely to celebrate and remember the dead of the Civil War, and while the veterans, mothers, and widows of that awful war lived, the celebrations were a part of American life. But, as inevitably happens, interest began to wane as veterans aged and a new generation took the place of the old. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a veteran of many battles of the Civil War, explained why the day should continue to be important.
So to the indifferent inquirer who asks why Memorial Day is still kept up we may answer, it celebrates and solemnly reaffirms from year to year a national act of enthusiasm and faith. It embodies in the most impressive form our belief that to act with enthusiasm and faith is the condition of acting greatly. To fight out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might. So must you do to carry anything else to an end worth reaching. More than that, you must be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out. All that is required of you is that you should go some whither as hard as ever you can. The rest belongs to fate.
Interest in and the importance of Memorial Day took on a new life as a result of World War I and France, Belgium, and the nations of the British Commonwealth celebrate their own Memorial Day, Remembrance Day, on November 11 – the day the First World War ended and the day we celebrate as Veterans’ Day. In the United States, as the Civil War veterans started to disappear, veterans of the First World War – that most hideous of wars – had their own need to remember the dead, and the day continued to hold an important place in the nation’s psyche as the ranks of the fallen were replenished by World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It is now celebrated in almost every State on the last Monday in May to ensure a three day weekend for Federal holidays.
What does Memorial Day mean to us now? I see many interpretations of the meaning of the day. Many say it is a day to honor all veterans, and there are frequent eloquent letters in the newspapers to that effect. I tend to disagree with that interpretation. As a veteran myself, I know we have another day for Veterans, on November 11. This is a day for honoring those who gave their lives in the service of their country.
We all have our thoughts on this day. I can tell you some of mine. I think of my ancestors who fought in the Revolution. I think of an uncle who fought here in December 1862 and who died attacking Little Round Top at Gettysburg the next summer. I think of other members of my family who served in other wars. I think of friends who died in Vietnam, in Beirut, or in preparation for conflicts that would surely come at some time, and I think of the sons and daughters of friends who gave their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan or some other corner of the world.
But mostly I think of my father, a B-24 pilot in World War II. My father survived the war, but the stress of his experience took a slow but deadly toll on him. I didn’t realize the extent of that toll as I was growing up, only paying attention to those aspects of war that fascinate young boys. It was only much later that I realized how much the war took from him, that his increasing nervousness and anxiety owed much to the almost daily duel with death that he faced in the skies over Europe. I am now convinced that his death from a heart attack at the age of 48 was as much the result of the war as of anything else. And still, every day, we see the passing of combat veterans, too young, whose deaths surely come as a result of their participation in the stress and horror that is war.
What my father and others have in common is their willingness to risk all in order to honor the contract they made with their country and their comrades. Alan Seeger, an American poet who died in World War I as a soldier in the French Army, talks about that contract.
I Have a Rendezvous with Death Alan Seeger (1917)
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air —
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath —
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
“I to my pledged word am true.” That, to me, is the essence of Memorial Day. The men in the graves on Marye’s Heights or over on Washington Avenue – the men and women in all the graves – were true to their word. That pledge cost them their lives. We remember their willingness to serve and the price they paid for doing so. As Oliver Wendell Holmes says, “But as surely as this day comes round we are in the presence of the dead. For one hour, the dead come back and live with us.”
So, it is the dead we honor. Here, in the shadow of the memorial to those who did not return, we remember the dead. We celebrate their lives, their sacrifice, their willingness to risk all for something greater than themselves. Some were heroes and some failed the test of courage. Some died of accident and disease and some in the full glory of the charge. But all were willing to take the risk – for their country, for their ideals, for their comrades.
We will join them one day. But while we are here we must ensure that those who follow us understand their sacrifices.
I would like to close, as I began, with the words of Siegfried Sassoon.
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack-
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads - those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.
Thank you for remembering.
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Thanks for your Memorial Day speech George, the quotes and poetry, and especially a reflection of your father's service during WWII as a B-24 pilot.
Would you consider taking out the word 'celebrated'?, as in : 'It is now celebrated in almost every State on the last Monday in May to ensure a three day weekend for Federal holidays'.
Memorial Day is not 'celebrated'. It's true, solemn purpose is to mourn and honor U.S. military personnel who died while serving.
On May 30, 1868, a crowd of 5,000 gathered at Arlington National Cemetery for the FIRST DECORATION DAY exercises. Before strewing flowers upon the graves of the dead, the crowd listened to an address by James A. Garfield (1831–81), then an Ohio congressman who had also served as a major general in the Civil War. In this first of such annual addresses at Arlington National Cemetery, Garfield, who in 1881 would become the 20th president of the United States, sets a standard by explaining what DECORATION DAY is all about and why it should be commemorated.
And now consider this silent assembly of the dead. What does it represent? Nay, rather, what does it not represent? It is an epitome of the war. Here are sheaves reaped in the harvest of death, from every battlefield of Virginia. If each grave had a voice to tell us what its silent tenant last saw and heard on earth, we might stand, with uncovered heads, and hear the whole story of the war. We should hear that one perished when the first great drops of the crimson shower began to fall, when the darkness of that first disaster at Manassas fell like an eclipse on the Nation; that another died of disease while wearily waiting for winter to end; that this one fell on the field, in sight of the spires of Richmond, little dreaming that the flag must be carried through three more years of blood before it should be planted in that citadel of treason; and that one fell when the tide of war had swept us back till the roar of rebel guns shook the dome of yonder Capitol, and re-echoed in the chambers of the Executive Mansion. We should hear mingled voices from the Rappahannock, the Rapidan, the Chickahominy, and the James; solemn voices from the Wilderness, and triumphant shouts from the Shenandoah, from Petersburg, and the Five Forks, mingled with the wild acclaim of victory and the sweet chorus of returning peace. The voices of these dead will forever fill the land like holy benedictions.
What other spot so fitting for their last resting place as this, under the shadow of the Capitol, saved by their valor? Here, where the grim edge of battle joined; here, where all the hope and fear and agony of their country centered; here let them rest, asleep on the Nation’s heart, entombed in the Nation’s love!