Memorial Day has been problematic for me for a very long time.  When I was a teenager, a quartet of jet fighters performed stunts over the cemeteries of Minneapolis, which I thought a bit strange--I thought it stranger when two of the planes clipped each other's wings wings during a barrel roll maneuver, sending them both to earth.  One of the pilots parachuted into the front yard of the house of one of my friends, and asked to use the phone to call his wife.  The other pilot stayed with his plane to the last minute to direct it to a stone quarry and away from housing.  I don't remember precisely what happened to him, but think he survived.  But I couldn't understand how trick flying memorialized the dead.


Later, as I delved deeper and deeper into history, I realized that every side of every conflict memorialized its war dead--frequently in words which were mutually interchangeable.  I memorized the Gettysburg Address in high school:  we all had to do that back then.  But it was later that I encountered what I still think is one of the most profound public comments on war ever delivered.  Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.

Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully
.
* * *
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Shortly he would become our first Presidential Martyr, and his profoundest hopes remain just hopes, as current the current political scene reminds us.

New questions arose during my graduate school years in Cleveland Ohio, where I was a member of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, and encountered Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, and through it the poetry of Wilfred Owen.  Forty plus years later the piece and the poetry bring tears to my eyes.

How much we've learned, if anything, in the intervening years, is open to debate.  The events of the weekend past would seem to indicate not much.  Owen's poem, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, seems to me to speak to the recent blockade and bloodshed off Gaza as much as it did to the era of the "War to End All Wars".

THE PARABLE OF THE OLD MAN AND THE YOUNG by WILFRED OWEN

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went, And took the fire with him, and a knife. And as they sojourned both of them together, Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron, But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering? Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, And builded parapets and trenches there And stretched forth the knife to slay his son. When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven, Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him, thy son. Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns, A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Sung in German and Latin, I hope you get something of the flavor of the piece.