Ten Thousand Graves

Ten thousand graves

Normandy

Ten thousand graves ... 

Tended with care ... lush grass precisely trimmed.

Crosses mostly ... and Stars of David ...

Young men and women cut down in the prime of life.

They were brave and they were afraid ...

Their pictures reveal that haunted look ...

Of soldiers too tired to be afraid, 

And too frightened to find sleep.

Seasick and wet, 

They hit the beach …

Under the cover of …

Steel and smoke.

Death and tears abound …

Ahead, my friends, ahead.

There’s no going back now.

No stopping for any of us.

A continent enslaved awaits the charge.

Nations, yes, and then some, to be unshackled …

And the years pass us by quickly …

Memories roll beyond the reach of words …

Silent tears still shed …

By those who made it home.

Slowly, now, they join their comrades,

As we all do … with the passage of time.

Hand-in-hand; arm-in-arm … a band of brothers …

A chorus of sisters …

Smoke and steel … 

And a victory in hand.

And may those 

Ten thousand graves remain ever well-tended!

© Tom Eggebeen, 2010

Strolling among those graves, on a bright, sunny, Normandy day, we each paused from time-to-time by a grave, for no other reason than our feet stopped moving … and we’d read the name, the dates … I set out to find the date of my birthday, July 7, 1944 … I found two graves - two soldiers who died, and who knows how, while a squalling baby Eggebeen entered this too often sordid world, in the early morning, it was, Sheboygan, WI, Memorial Hospital, on the north side of town, on the shores of Lake Michigan. I remember standing by those two graves in Normandy, and I kept saying “thank you.”

I didn’t have any choice to be born - that’s how it is for us - either by design, or by chance, we’re conceived, and if things work out, we make it nine months in our mother’s womb.

And those soldiers, too, they were born like most are, in the hopes and joys of a family … and they went to school and had big dreams, and played cops and robbers and then dated, and found love, and maybe lost it … and then a war … and however it was, those bright and eager lives were abruptly ended, too soon ended, and families received the news they all dreaded to receive, and they wept … the remains of a loved one, now, to remain in
Europe, where they fell … and life goes on, sort of, but something missing, always … death does that to a family, to towns all across America … the missing ones, buried across the sea … 

Do the buried ones have a voice?

Perhaps they do … a singular voice, a quiet voice, from the grave - “Why?” Their question, if they have one, to us … who yet live. “Why?”

The eleventh month, the eleventh day, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the Armistice was signed … to end the war that was so horrible and violent, folks thought it might be the “war to end all wars” … 

We do well today to honor the dead … and to hear their quiet voice, with their quiet question, “Why?”

We are a warring species … for good reasons, and for lousy reasons, we kill one another … if not with the tools of war, then with words … and a host of other devices so cleverly woven in our behavior - of how we treat one another, the things we say, the glance that says it all, the flipped eyebrow, and so on and so forth.

On this good day, to search our souls … and pay attention to the gospel of our LORD Jesus Christ … that by the Spirit of mercy, and kindness, to quiet within ourselves, the darker thoughts that breed the stuff of harm.

And to pray for our nation and its leaders, that the darker materials of violence and death would be better managed by faith, hope and love.

On this day, Nov. 11 … God’s Peace, and Amen!