For the WeatherCat "Yanks" - Remembering the Gettysburg address.

[elagache]

Dear WeatherCat users in the USofA,

For that crowd, we are in the 3-day holiday weekend of Memorial day.  I try to make a point of doing something to help me remember the fallen and to ponder why human life has been always so punctuated by warfare.  For whatever reason, I was compelled to reread Lincoln's Gettysburg address, given at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  This location was part of the Battle of Gettysburg where Union forces halted the last major Confederate advance of the American Civil War.

While not literally connected, there is no doubt that Lincoln?s Gettyburg address moved many Americans toward creating Memorial day.  This weekend is a good time to reread the address and reconsider Lincoln?s plea to all Americans. 

It seems to me that Lincoln?s call to us - the living of today -  rings just as true as it did 152 years ago.  Otherwise the sacrifices of the dead in all wars may yet be in vain.

That new burst of freedom that Lincoln was pleading for in the face of the Civil War is now desperately needed for an increasingly divided world. Today?s prospects seem just as bleak as those Lincoln faced that cold November day in 1863  - with two bloody years still to go before the Civil War was finally won.  The last two years of Abraham Lincoln's life.


Edouard

_______

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us?that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion?that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain?that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom?and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

_______


For more information on the Gettysburg Address, see the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address

[Blicj11]

Thanks Edouard. I recently watched a PBS documentary about the Gettysburg Address. I was privileged a few years ago to go to Gettysburg and remember what happened there as I went around the battlefield. It was poignant. I had similar feelings at the Alamo, and the memorials in DC. I have also stood on WWI and II battlefields, Culloden Fields, and at the gates of a Nazi death camp. I am grateful that honourable men have done the hard thing and left home to defend their  freedom.

[Felix]

I too have had the opportunity to visit all the places you mentioned, Blick.

From personal experience, it's just not possible to visit places like Gettysburg National Cemetery, Normandy American Cemetery, Ardennes American Cemetery and Arlington National Cemetery without getting a huge lump in your throat and shedding more than a few tears of sadness for our fallen soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. Those long rows of perfectly straight grave markers are a mighty sobering sight. A lot of young men and women have given their all to ensure the way of live we Americans who are left behind enjoy today.

[xairbusdriver]

Thank you, Edouard.

[elagache]

Dear Blick, Felix, X-air, and WeatherCat users who remember the true meaning of Memorial day.

I've never had the opportunity to visit the battlefields of the Civil War.  Perhaps my trusty wagon will give me that opportunity someday.  I have spent some time in France and had the good fortune of hearing the stories of some of the World War II veterans.  My Dad as a 15 year old boy served in the French resistance and was part of at least one really important operation.

Yet my Dad's stories was most poignant when he spoke about the sacrifices of World War I.  For France, the greatest disaster of the war was the battle of Verdun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdun#Battle_of_Verdun_.28First_World_War.29

The utterly callous Germans deliberately attacked the fortress that the France would hold on to at all costs.  Verdun had fallen in the war of 1870, just 40 years earlier, and that opened the door to the surrender of Paris in that war.  The German strategy was literally to "bleed France to death."  As all things in World War I, the strategy didn't work and the Germans did plenty of bleeding of their own.

My Dad must have seen Verdun's "bayonet trench" when it still looked like a line of bayonets with the troops manning them buried alive underneath:

http://www.worldwar1.com/heritage/bayonet.htm

In 1990, my uncle took me to the memorials and one was so mind boggling and yet moving at the same time.   The bayonet trench is now covered and I suspect some of the bayonets had rusted away before a cover was provided.  My uncle took me also to Fort Douaumont and a monument that I couldn't believe at the time - the Douaumont Ossuary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douaumont_Ossuary

As we approached the building, I saw what was plainly human remains - lots of them.  I couldn't believe my eyes and until this day I had never checked to see how many human remains were housed in this building.  According to Wikipedia, the skeletal remains over 130,000 unidentified combatants of both nations are housed in this monument.  It is staggering expression of the human folly of war and the stubbornness of nations and peoples to continue a pointless struggle.

If you get a chance to visit this monument - literally, you'll never forget it.

Edouard