Recently we went to see Rogers and Nienhaus at the Veterans Park in Pontoon Beach.It is new, so it lists out more recent wars than one often sees in public monuments. Well over a million soldiers have perished in the long succession of wars. We have at least 28 Revolutionary War veterans buried in Madison County.Memorial Day honored the graves of the fallen in the terrible carnage of the Civil War by decorating their graves.It honors that sad fact that in the midst of killing, some of our virtues shine: courage, comradeship, self-sacrifice.
Of course, Alton has deep and abiding traditions for what became Memorial Day. This week I went to the National Cemetery on Pearl Street. I parked with the familiar Alton sound of crushed liquor bottles along the curb. It is a well-kept patch of land, as opposed to some of the adjoining cemetery. While not large, it has three sections of burial plots; some names date from the Mexican War. It started as a civil War burial ground. An Alton native,Lt. E.F. Fletcher, was concerned for his life the night before a battle in Buena Vista. Tomorrow we expect to have an engagement with a superior Mexican force, and on the eve of the affair, ...the object nearest my heart is the welfare of my little child; . ...Should I fall, I leave her entirely with you and your wife; but I have written to my brother, requesting him to throw his brotherly protection over her; and he should receive her as his own child and protect her... I wish that she should receive as good an education as the little means left her will afford: and above all things, teach her that truth and virtue are to woman, what the soul is to the body - the life of its life. Teach her that to be just to all - -in thought - in word - in deed, is the true - the great aim of a good mind; and those who strive to accomplish that purpose, seldom fail to live at peace with the world, and accomplish the "Great Destiny" for which they are created. I would say a thousand things more about her, and my wishes for her...In death as in life,
It has a fine speaker's rostrum at the entrance, built toward the end of the Works Progress Administration's great work. As one enters, the entire Gettysburg Address is posted on a plaque.It is a fitting reminder tha tlincoln’s words were to consecrate the huge cemetery in the Pennsylvania countryside.
Too many graves of the fallen dot our country’s cemeteries.Regard words from a letter in WWI.”Shells were landing all around us. Machine guns were shooting at us and everything else. It was there that another Alton boy got hurt. Charles Kuhn got hit with a piece of shrapnel, and our commanding officer got killed with a shell. I was about 20 feet from him when a shell landed right under his head and blowed the top of it off. I won't try to tell you all that happened, but will say that Sherman was right. There were shells bursting all around us and a few of our men got knocked off and a bunch got wounded. I have never figured out yet how any of us got back alive “( From .DEGERLIA, THOMAS S.: Alton Evening Telegraph, November 18, 1918 )
No parade, no flowers can make amends for the widowed spouses and orphaned children from war. No festive atmosphere can erase the horrors of war. May we pray and work for a peace that will have memorial Day recall only deaths from a distant past.
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