I’ve been to Flanders Fields, although I didn’t see any poppies growing.

    It was the summer before I moved to Maine. Myself
and two girls, one Spanish the other Belgian left Paris on a bullet
train to Luven, a Belgian college town. The next day we took a slow
train to Ypres to see Katrien’s family.

    Ypres is a beautiful medieval city, or so it
appears. Katrien told us the city had been completely rebuilt following
the First World War. It looked exactly like it did before the war; yet
it was a completely different city. By the enormous Cloth Hall, which
only looked as if it had stood since the 13th Century was a photo
exhibit of what the city looked like during the war. Think Dresden.
Ypres had the unfortunate luck of being someplace between where the
Germans were and where they wanted to go. And it was in the city and
the fields that the Allies dug their trenches and tried to hold their
ground. Officially there were three battles of Ypres. Two lasted for a
month and one lasted for four months.

    Katrien’s father picked us up in town and we held
back to their small farmhouse, where the father raised pigs. Katrien
gestured to one of the fields across the road as if pointing out a
neighbor’s house. She said, every once in a while, a farmer tilling his
field will hit an artillery shell and blow himself up.

    Katrien’s father took us to one of the Allied
Cemeteries, where the soldiers are buried. It was not as large as I
imagined it would be, but then I realized they dot the entire
countryside. The gravestones try to be as specific as possible: name,
rank and unit. But the information is not always complete, that is, the
remains found were not always complete. Some gravestones say something
like: “Fourth Infantry Soldier,” or “a British Infantry Soldier,” or “a
British Soldier,” or “a Soldier.”

    That night the three of us met some of Katrien’s
friends in Ypres. We drank strong beer and listened to music and then
spilled out into the night. We walked a little ways until we came upon
a giant structure, which I took to be some sort of tunnel. Inside the
tunnel was a giant hallway with a cathedral room. Etched onto every
surface was the name of a soldier from the British Empire who died at
Ypres. Hundreds of thousands of names filled what Katrien told me was
the Menin Gate and when the names filled the interior, they continue up
a set of stairs and outside on to more walls.

    I lived in Gettysburg, when I attempted to attend a
college there. One thing people don’t realize about the Battle of
Gettysburg: it gets very hot there in southern Pennsylvania in July,
when the battle took place. Each year dozens of war re-enactors faint
in their wool weekend clothes. From the days after the battle there are
photos of bloated bodies, but the smell must have been something most
of us will have to imagine. I have taken the audio-enhanced bus tour of
the battlefield as it morphed over three days, which ends at the
Cemetery and with the words of Abraham Lincoln.

I was reminded of these memories at Cape Elizabeth’s Memorial Day
celebration and I couldn’t help but put them in the context of today’s
war.

    The Marine who recited the poem, “Flanders Fields,”
gave a brief history of the man who wrote it, a Canadian named McCrae.
McCrae was first baptized into the logic of war during the Boer War. As
the Marine spoke, I searched my mind for “Boer War,” and settled on the
theory it was one of those colonial adventures of the late-19th
century, probably in South Africa. One of those wars fought not for God
and Country but for Queen and Commerce (locked in the eternal matrimony
of taxation).

    When the gentleman rose to deliver the Gettysburg
Address, I concentrated on the words as one does when they almost have
something memorized.

    I realized the purpose of Memorial Day is not to
honor Veterans as individuals, but a chance, as a nation, to
contemplate the tragedy we are willing to endure for a cause. And I
wonder, what the dimensions of the tragedy will be before we cannot
endure it any longer.

    At Gettysburg, more than 50,000 men died. More
Americans were killed in the Civil War than all other wars combined. At
Ypres, an estimated 500,000 men died in a single battle. An entire
generation of men was wiped out. In Vietnam, over the course of the
war, more than 50,000 men died. But it is not the number of bodies that
we should use as our measurement; it is the cause that should inform
our endurance.