Going Out

By ED WESELY

The eleventh month

	(Click for larger image)

At the edge of our meadow is a family cemetery that prompts me, each November, to visit and to reflect on the small flags that decorate each of several gravesites. For many reasons, I prefer the stillness and fading autumn colors to the speeches and parades of Veterans Day.

And I believe it’s partly because of the flags. Two of them, that memorialize veterans of World War I, remind me that November 11 was Armistice Day before it became a general-purpose holiday.

Growing up with fathers who’d served in World War I, I can no more forsake the idea that November 11 is Armistice Day than I can the idea that we should honor Lincoln’s birthday on February 12, and not on a Monday proclaimed President’s Day.

The cemetery also prompts images of winter afternoons when we boys played with helmets and gas masks we found in a dusty corner of one friend’s attic, along with a moth-eaten khaki jacket. Or rummaged through aviator’s caps and gear we discovered in another friend’s attic, keepsakes of a father whose biplane had been shot down over France.

Shortly before he died, that same father told me that his adult life had been a kind of “bonus”—he never expected to survive spiraling into no-man’s land, into a crazed moonscape of shell holes between the trench lines.

Both men lived quiet lives, driving to government jobs in Washington during the week and throwing baseballs or footballs with us on occasional Saturdays. But November 11 always seemed special, as if the frosty sunlight and pallor of burning leaves held residues of old battles, and of the day the great guns fell silent.

Little did I dream, in those days, that a few years later one of the “big kids” on my block would disappear during the first days of World War II, his obsolete fighter plane shot down in the South Pacific. Or that I myself would share a barracks with men of the First Cavalry Division who’d endured a hellish December retreat in Korea.

In “A Rendezvous with Death,” Alan Seeger, killed on the western front in France on July 4, 1916, gave immortal voice, shortly before his own death, to premonitions distilled from the ghoulish trenches of the Somme and Flanders:

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade

When spring comes round with rustling shade

And apple blossoms fill the air.

I have a rendezvous with Death

When spring brings back blue days and fair…

God knows ’twere better to be deep

Pillowed in silk and scented down…

Where hushed awakenings are dear.

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When spring trips north again this year…