Battle flags furled for many vets

War is, at best, barbarism,” the old warrior, William Tecumseh Sherman, told graduates of the Michigan Military Academy in June 1879. “Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

Damn good thing, too, in the opinion of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. “It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it,” Lee is purported to have remarked upon witnessing a Federal charge repulsed at Fredericksburg in December 1862.

The observations strike home on this long Veterans Day weekend as the nation honors its war veterans – the more so when our young people are off dying on yet another foreign battlefield and the steadily building body count makes many Americans skittish.

In yesterday’s ceremonies marking the solemn occasion when the World War I armistice was signed at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, a certain reality struck home: For many an old soldier, the battle flags have been furled and the war drums throb no longer. As time takes its inevitable toll, their numbers dwindle daily.

Too soon, the last of the World War II vets, followed closely by their Korean War counterparts, will take one final hill and fade into the mists of history, leaving veterans of Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq I and II and other struggles to carry on.

The old soldiers were immortal young men when they entered military service, more than a few likely harboring dreams of romantic adventure. Those thrust into combat soon learned first hand that war is hell, its glory “all moonshine,” yet they remained steadfast in their duty to country.

In author Peter Shelton’s book, “Climb to Conquer,” a story of the 10th Mountain Division’s ski troops in World War II, John Jennings, a 21-year-old infantryman with the division’s 87th Regiment, described a weather-related 24-hour lull in an April 1945 battle with German troops in Italy’s northern Apennine Mountains.

“Each stay of 24 hours bringing great relief and jubilance,” Jennings wrote in his diary. “Like a prisoner receiving a brief stay of execution…

“It was in those hours that one really noticed the beauty of the world around him. It was spring. The drabness was gone. The grass was a delicate light green. Some of the trees were in bloom. Nameless birds twittered. The sun shone warm and restful from a clear blue sky. Yes, you could see now that Italy was beautiful.”

Then zero hour approached again, and Jennings’ thoughts turned darker:

“The brass hats way back there in Corps or Army headquarters, the rear-echelon men, and the people at home welcome a big offensive, for it brings the end of the war that much closer.

“However, infantry soldiers don’t see it that way. They are the ones who will have to do the killing and the dying, and nearly every one would be just as happy if it didn’t come about, if it could be won on some other front.

“Nevertheless, when the final order comes, the infantryman loads his rifle, grits his teeth and sets off into Hell. That’s how wars are won, I guess…”

Author James Brady, a young Marine lieutenant in the Korean War, knew the drill. In his masterful memoir, “The Coldest War,” published by Thomas Dunne Books some 15 years ago, Brady described his rapid education in the realities of war.

In the closing chapter he wonders “whether anyone ever became really good at war. An unnatural act, killing, and trying to kill…” He knows “it wasn’t ability or courage that had gotten me through [combat] as much as it was extraordinarily good fortune.” And he also knows there’s no way in hell he will ever revisit the battlefield:

“I used to read how old soldiers sometimes went back, to walk over the ground. They even had organized tours, men from World War I going back to Flanders to trace where the trenches had been, where they had crouched and fired, where friends had died. Tours for men from the Second War revisiting Normandy and walking the beaches, seeing again Monte Cristo and places in the Pacific…

“I knew I would never go back to Korea, never sign up for an old soldiers’ tour. I didn’t want to see the hills again or feel the cold or hear the wind out of Siberia, moaning. I didn’t want to disturb the dead…”

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.