Gardens of stone

Homer Kilgo (left) a World War I veteran.



"In Flanders Fields the poppies blow between the crosses row on row . . . "

When I was a little girl in Ashburn, Georgia in the 1950s, it was the custom on Veteran’s Day for the American Legion to sell blood-red crepe paper poppies. People bought them to wear in lapels as a symbol of remembrance of the war dead.

No doubt the idea of the paper poppies came from what is probably the most quoted war-related poem of all time: Flanders Fields. In my growing-up years, no child escaped grade school without memorizing it. I had not thought of the poem in decades until this Veteran’s Day. When I reread it, it came as a shock to me to read its final lines in which the author urges the living to take up the same cause as those who have fallen. I had not remembered the poem as being so adamantly pro-war, but it sounds that way to me now.

Around the world “gardens of stone” tell one part of the story of war. Each gravestone represents, not just a death, but an end to possibilities: no begetting of offspring who might one day cure cancer or make other discoveries that would change the world for the better. Those who have fought for freedom for their homelands deserve to be remembered and honored, not just for their sacrifice of their lives, but also for the sacrifice civilization has made of all the might-have-beens in a life cut short.

Yet, all wars are not honorable; ego, lust for power or money, religious intolerance and ethnic prejudice have populated more gardens of stone than any disease might have. For every just and necessary war, there have no doubt been hundreds fought merely for power and gold.

I’m thinking of such horrific events as Alexander’s conquest of the known world or Hitler’s insane attempt at the same goal. There is no honor due to savage soldiers who, at the command of an egotistical madman, massacred because they could. Yet, even in those cases, it’s not always possible to condemn the individual soldier, the one who fought because he had no choice—the decent man caught in an indecent situation where to refuse to fight would be suicide and the death of his own family.

One of the oddest experiences I’ve ever had occurred at a friend’s house where we gathered with her German guests. We spoke no German and they spoke little English. However, we managed to communicate and, in the course of an evening made an astonishing discovery: of the three men present in the room—two Americans and one German—all three had a father at the site of the same World War II battle at the same time. Those three soldiers lived to tell the story and to escape the gardens of stone, thus making possible the gathering that took place that night some 50 years later.

Perhaps the real lesson from the gardens of stone and Flanders Fields is that while we rightly honor those who gave their lives for freedom, remembrance is not enough. It is the responsibility of the descendents of both the deceased and the survivors to teach subsequent generations to let old wounds heal and to forge the kinds of connections that will ultimately turn foes into friends.

Text and photograph copyright 2008 by Edith Flowers Kilgo. All rights reserved. May be used only with prior permission and attribution.