Memorial Day, a day of remembrance for those who have died serving in America’s armed forces.
Have you ever wondered just how many have died in our country’s major wars? According to estimates from the Dept. of Defense and the Veterans Administration, the figure is around 1.1 million. This chart, from pbs.org, breaks it down:
Regardless of how one feels about the nature of war, remembering our fellow citizens who have fallen while serving the country is a good thing. Like Peter Rothberg, writing in The Nation, “I’ve always been sympathetic to the argument that the best way to honor the fallen is to make every effort to prevent needless deaths in the future. That means engaging in combat and military strikes only as a true last resort.”
In 1916, the great American poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), reacting to the horror of World War I, wrote a poem entitled “Grass” in 1916. In this short and spare piece, he looked beyond the wartime deaths of a single country and time, and used the personification of grass, to invoke the universal ruin of war:
Grass
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
In Carl Sandburg, scholar and biographer, Gay Wilson Allen wrote that in this poem “the scars of World War I will be covered by the perennial grass, not in a Pantheistic transmutation of men into vegetation, but as nature erases the scars of human violation of life.”
Photo: Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, France