I said something like this last year, but I'll write it again now. It is inconceivable to an American (or it was to me) how deep the memory of that loss, and the dread of another such loss, exists in the British consciousness. The memorials are everywhere - every town and every village has its cross. Every business still going since then, banks and insurance companies and department stores. Every school that existed then and exists now. The plaques are lovingly preserved, transferred through rebuildings, displayed in lobbies. And though there are additions, names from the 30's and 40's, it's the long, long lists from the Great War that justify them.

And every year, at the feet of the crosses and the floors below the plaques, the wreathes of red paper poppies spread. Crosses with poppies dot the public greens. People wear them on their lapels, little splashes of color, and pause for a minute's silence at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when the guns stopped.

Moving to the Netherlands, which was neutral in World War I, I'm missing that scarlet thread through early November. Here it's Sint Maarten, and all the children have lanterns and collect sweets, seeming like ghosts from a more innocent world. (Seeming only - the Dutch remember their war dead on May 4, the eve of the anniversary of the liberation from the Germans).

And, like every mother, something in me looks at these pictures and says, Save me from that! To pour your life into sons for eighteen or twenty years, and then have the government take them away and waste them cleaning up after some failure of politics—no thanks.

Reminds me to get my absentee registration changed to my new address.

That memory goes so deep. It is unthinkable that a public figure or a celebrity doesn't wear a red poppy in the two weeks leading up to November 11th. Back in the 1980s Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party, was vilified for appearing too scruffy (he wore a duffel coat) at the parade in London. A few years ago, some May Day anti-globalisation protesters in London forfeited much sympathy for their cause by placing a turf on Winston Churchill's statue head and defacing the Cenotaph. I've known people wear white or black poppies, symbolising, as they see it, the sadness of war without glorifying it - and some of those people have been spat on and shouted at in the street for being disrespectful.

We think of all the lies, and all the crud
of rainy winters, and of spring and fall;
so many lives fallen in Flemish mud.

The only colour they had was their blood,
those who were silent, and the ones who'd bawl,
the brave ones, and the cowards who'd appall:
so many lives fallen in Flemish mud.

...
And I can't help but wonder now Willie McBride
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?
You really believed that this war would end war?
But the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame -
The killing and dying - it was all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it's all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again.
...

Eric Bogle
Someone seems to be making a movie based on this: The Last Parade. There are other articles and remembrances of World War I on that site as well.

p.s. I moved this here from OT94. I think that TNH stands for TimeLord Nielsen Hayden — her main post wasn't up yet when I posted my comment on OT94 — I checked specifically for it just before submitting this over there. All this jumping around in time may be a contributing factor to her narcolepsy.

I always listen to PPM wailing about Willie McBride on Veterans Day.

-- Sterling North, Rascal, Chapter VII.

I've run across a few too many people who assert that Bogle's song is mocking the soldiers -- they point at lines like "did you really believe that this war would end wars", not understanding that yes, in fact, they did.

In terms of items of the period, just this morning saw in The Register a story (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/11/great_war_diary/) about a personal diary kept by a Scots officer during his time on the Somme during WWI that is now available for download (http://www.grandfathersgreatwar.com/index.html). Excerpt:

"When I am very tired and just getting off to sleep with cold feet, in comes an orderly with a chit asking how many pairs of socks my company had a week ago; I reply 141 and a half. I then go to sleep; back comes a memo: 'please explain at once how you come to be deficient of one sock'. I reply 'man lost his leg'. That's how we make the Huns sit up."

Sounds fascinating.

Many towns in Australia have an Avenue of Honour, a road with one tree planted in the name of each of the fallen. The one outside Ballarat stretches for miles and miles, and perhaps fittingly, the trees look at their best at this time of year, newly green.

I wonder how long it persisted, the idea that the Great War would be the last one? There would have been some small comfort in that, for a time, for the families of the dead. Until the whole ghastly machine started up again.

It's a little strange, Remembrance Day. To me at least, mostly because the poppy sellers seem to pop out of the wood work in some silently planned manoeuver. I can also be as unobservant as a pea in a pod, but there you go...

You ask questions about it as a kid, but it just... goes without question. No one really talks about it, outside school and the media, and you have the poppies that seem to magically grow out of the concrete around the memorial in town (which, incidentally, needs a wash - the names are leaking green. Very noticeable on white). It Happens. It Happens with the momentum of something that will Happen for a Very Long Time, ingrained into you as a child because, well, everyone does it...

I don't know how it is in America - or indeed, anywhere else - but from my point of view here in Blighty, we don't use it to push whatever military endeavours are currently going on. It's a solemn, quiet, give thanks and clap a lot, sort of day. And then you dump the poppies in the bin, put the pin somewhere (because a pin is a pin) and get on with it all.

And the Eric Bogle tearjerker, And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

My high school has a war memorial, half of which can be seen here. (Look carefully at the lowest picture on the right.) The photo of the father of a fellow a year ahead of me appears on the opposite wall; he was killed in Vietnam. This was a place that started out embodying the gestalt of the British public boarding school, a sentiment which has faded under the pressures of the current private school market.

It was the first film to show American soldiers scared in combat. (The Belleau Wood sequence is realistic -- the Vidor's cinematographer had been there.)

See also: film description and summary (spoilers).

We went to the Vietnam and Korean memorials. The Korean Memorial is stunning, but the Vietnam memorial broke me up. There were pictures that people had left at at the base of kids who were the peers of the (angry, middle-aged) Rolling Thunder guys who were crowding the mall.

I have nieces and nephews older than they were when they died.

To my mind, they were babies, but they made braver choices than I ever have.

I'm terribly sorry they're gone. I'm sure the families on the other side feel the same.

I can't figure out a way to reconcile all of this, but I wish to God it wasn't still happening.

Some interesting pictures there.

Also, just want to say thanks to my little brother, who is a two time Iraqi war vet. I might not support the war, but he is a great person and a shining example of a marine. Kudos to him.

I'd just also like to say thanks, and honor and respect, to Jim and Terry and the rest of the fluorospherian veterans (I'm sorry, I can't remember which ones you are).

But I'd like to stick up for people who choose not to. Doesn't necessarily mean they're not remembering, any more than wearing one means you're a pro-war conservative.

Saying this, because I was noticing every TV news person was wearing one. This bothered me, because one or two of them might prefer not to (this is Quebec, a little different than other parts of Canada), but they were doing so simply to please an audience, the way political candidates pretend to be religious.

Another vaguely interesting story while I'm here. A friend of mine had an ancestor in a group that refused to go "over the top." They decided that was a crazy idea, they'd all be killed, and so they didn't go. No "Paths of Glory" court martials or trouble afterwards, according to her. I wonder if it's a true story?

Thank you.

The colour photos really do make WWI seem real....

Wearing virtual poppy, and using PixelFish's desktop, because I didn't have a real poppy to wear this year.

Solemn thanks.

"He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."
- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet On The Western Front

don't forget bruce cohen (SpeakerToManagers)*

& probably more lurking veterans & veterans who haven't chosen to so identify themselves.

*or as i can't help calling him in my head, SpeakerToMatojuice.

What you said, plus CRV.

Don't forget the Remembrance Driveway between Sydney and Canberra. I don't know why trees are so wonderful for these kinds of purposes, but they always are. I think every small town in Australia has a war memorial: I have even been to places where there's no town left, but the monument is still there, still showing the names of those who died. I've been reading over at www.anzacday.org.au. It's all so horribly sad. Unimaginable bravery and loss.

My own grandpa fought in WW1, in the German army. He volunteered to go to the Western Front twice that I know of. He had powder burns on his face for the rest of his life, and never spoke very much about it, except to say that after the war, he didn't believe in God anymore.

The way the US abuses their military right now also makes me incredibly angry. War is not a game of Risk, Eddie Izzard aside. Some days I want to whistle and stare past humanity in the I-don't-know-this-person sort of way.

At least Teresa knows her Chumbawamba. And is a Time Lord.

Can we have a Making Light colony ship?

The blame for this enormous fiasco belongs with the elected leadership and their political appointees. Blaming the people in the front line at State is not right.

To be honest, I'm not sure there's any meaningful comparison to be made. So far, in more than four years, the Iraq was has cost 4,164 coalition dead. In 1914-18, that was a better than average day for the Allies.

It's a beautifully designed book, full of lost promise.

Agreed with those above who've commented on European war memorials. I've spent a lot of time in France. It's only when you see a ton of them--every village, no matter how small or isolated, has one--that the whole appalling scale of the war sinks in.
There's a small town named Luchon, in the Pyrennees, that has a small graveyard. One of the gravestones was put up by the Red Cross and reads, roughly (from memory), "Here lie several soldiers; French and German and other nationalities, all buried together."

Since it has never seemed relevant.

My father was a Navy Captain when he retired after 33 years in, including a stint building a (now-closed) nuclear reactor at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica and a year in Da Nang in 1971-72. He was also present as an observer at Bikini Atoll. I followed him into the Navy and served a couple of years in Japan 1972-1974.

Only if we entertain the Festival.

That shouldn't be too difficult. Won't we be the founders of it, eventually?

David Haig (A for Andromeda, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Two Weeks Notice) plays Kipling; Kim Cattrall (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Sex and the City) plays his wife Carrie; Daniel Radcliffe (the Harry Potter films) plays their son Jack; and Carey Mulligan (Dr Who "Blink") plays his sister "Bird".

ITV have made the whole thing available as a download for the next four weeks or so, if the web site can be convinced your computer is good enough for it.

You say ToMato, I say ToManagers.

Oh, good, sporks!

I took a class my freshman year of high school called Art and War. I thought it was all pretty cool - the Egyptians, the Romans, David, even Goya - until we got to World War I. I will never forget sitting on the round artclass stool, staring at slides of Otto Dix's work, and feeling something shift inside me. Without going all wishy-washy on you, I connected with Dix, and the other war artists, and with the stories my teacher told, so much that I found myself looking up Dix on the internet and showing his sketches to my parents, and I searched the library (in vain, mostly), for books on World War I. My teacher recommended All Quiet on the Western Front. I rather hope you've read it, because I do not think I can describe that book without spluttering "It's just incredible!" or other unhelpful things. In any case, I read it in about a week, and walked around in a daze afterward. I took another class my senior year called War Writings (my high school was/is really cool, by the way), in which we read stories produced around the time of war, and/or as a product of war. We read All Quiet... as a class, and I loved it again.

It feels pedantic to say that I am fascinated by World War I, and it feels weird to say I love learning about it. I am, and I do, but not in the mostly-academic way I like learning about, say, the Crusades or the writings of Thomas Aquinas. It goes a lot deeper than that.

What I most appreciate about these annual posts here on Making Light is that they tell the stories of the war, by people who were there. I do not find that very often, at least in this country. (I do find textbooky works by people who interviewed other people who got their information from other people, and oh here's a time line and some photos, but that's another story.)

I let this get quite long, and I'm not even sure I explained myself, but the bottom line is still Thank You.

The thing I found so upsetting about those comments were those from the Australians who were claiming that *no* British people died on first day of the Somme because they sent the ANZACS out to do it for them. Which is just such palpable nonsense, and hurtful with it.

The Lancashire Fusiliers are my county regiment, the same regiment that won "6 V.C.s before breakfast" at Gallipoli (those same Australians probably assert that "there were no Poms" at Gallipoli).

The doomed men pictured in the Sunken Road should have been my Great-Uncles; I am very short of cousins and second cousins despite my great-grandparents having twelve children. Those children - being the WWI generation - produced a total of three offspring between them. And yet my family got off incredibly lightly in terms of war casualties. There were hundreds who suffered more. After all, I'm here and typing this.

This year the BBC News did a short interview with each of the five surving British World War One veterans. The youngest is 106, the eldest 111 - the last British survivor of the Battle of Jutland.

Paul Duncanson@28 - I remember seeing that when it first went out on the BBC and being struck speechless by it. I thought it was one of the most poignant things I'd ever seen on television. I recently bought the DVD box-set and watched it again, and I still find it incredibly moving.

My other grandfather was in the German army in WWI, on the Russian front. He and his four older brothers all survived, although one was badly injured.

(Some people ask for iPods for Christmas. I want a WWI poetry anthology.)

Xopher @ 71: Thank you. My next step is to inspire this passion in others. (I am young! Nothing can stop me!!)

cap 76: (I am young! Nothing can stop me!!)

...as many a young man thought as he went over the top. Careful.

This afternoon on the radio, BBC's "World Service" played some excerpts from the WWI diary of British soldier Alexander Steward, as read out by his grandson-- an astonishing blend of horrific events and dry, grim humor.

I went into law to do something less confrontational.

G.K. Chesterton

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And birds and bees of England
About the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.

And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England
They have no graves as yet.

Then I'm twice as outraged -- and a good bit indignant. My family hasn't many military veterans or deaths in its history, but I damn well respect those who've given their lives or offered them -- for good reason or none.

War is not a video game.
War is not a board game.
Though there are many games about war, war is not a game. Ever.

I think this needs saying again and again. Those who glorify war and are willing to have one for no reason must think of it in their hearts as a kind of gladiatorial entertainment. In America there aren't hillsides with miles of graves, and I wonder if this mentality will stop until there are. Perhaps some Australians suffer the same lack of cognizance.

I said something like this last year, but I'll write it again now. It is inconceivable to an American (or it was to me) how deep the memory of that loss, and the dread of another such loss, exists in the British consciousness. The memorials are everywhere - every town and every village has its cross. Every business still going since then, banks and insurance companies and department stores. Every school that existed then and exists now. The plaques are lovingly preserved, transferred through rebuildings, displayed in lobbies. And though there are additions, names from the 30's and 40's, it's the long, long lists from the Great War that justify them.

Some of it, I think, is that the US celebrates Veterans Day, not Remembrance day. So it gets applied to the most recent veterans, rather than looking back to a specific conflict. The same thing with Memorial Day - who now thinks of it as specific for US Civil War Union soldiers?

It's a shame, I think, because by focusing on the soldier rather than the war, it becomes a be-nice-to-soldiers/veterans day, rather than a reflection on the horrors of war and a reminder of the horrors of war and the goal of "never again." And it creates a curiously unreal sense of what war is - focusing only on soldiers, when it hits civilians as hard or harder.

Memorials like Teresa's one here help, but the US is sadly lacking in occasions to remember war, rather than to celebrate soldiers.

So yeah, on Sunday we first listened to Radio 4 to the remembrance in London and watched BBC One for the parade, only to have the neighbourhood children coming round making merry, singing songs and demanding candy in the evening. Somewhat of a contrast there.

Yesterday's NYT had an article (login may be required) about the last surviving American WW1 veteran, Frank Buckles, age 106:

It’s hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It’s not that World War I will then become history; it’s been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can’t quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We can’t stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.

My grandfather served in the Army Air Corps in France. He destroyed the pages of his diary that described the things he saw as a member of the ground-crew at an aerodrome near the front. He talked about them rarely: crashes, dying pilots landing burning planes, and other horrors.

Ms. Macdonald does not try to tell the story; she gives a little background information on the people whose testimony she is using, and then gets out of their way.

If there is anyone looking for a manageable one-volume history of the war, both John Keegan and Hew Strachan have produced good books; Strachan's was the basis for an excellent documentary on the war which shows up on US cable television (try the Military Channel, if you get that one) at various times; this gives a good overview of the war, and has astonishing pictures, both still and moving. I think both have been mentioned in the comments threads on Teresa's Remembering the Great War posts in previous years, but it's always worth repeating the information, in case someone else is looking and didn't see the earlier mentions.

In addition, for a different sort of war memoir, Vera Brittain's Testment of Youth is worth looking at--she worked as a VAD nurse, and lost her brother, her fiancé, and most of the male family friends of her generation. It's available in a Penguin Modern Classic edition, as is Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel, which is also worth reading, although not for those inclined to nightmares. he does not attempt to analyze, explain, or rationalize his four years' service--he just tells what it was like. There's also Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That, which covers not only the war, but his efforts to cope with what we now call PTSD afterwards.

Bugger.

It captures the chaos and confusion of a war fought before widespread motorised transport or reliable long-distance communications (marching three miles one way then right back the way you've just come; mislaying the baggage train and field kitchens; narrowly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory because the message for the reserves to advance never got through) as well as the terror and quiet heroism of it all.

Either the bolded part is a typo or I don't understand. Wouldn't a 1:1 scale model be the same size as the actual terrain?

Melchett: Now let's talk about something more jolly, shall we? Look, this is the amount of land we've recaptured since yesterday.
[indicates a tabletop model]

George: Oh, excellent.

Melchett: What is the actual scale of this map, Darling?

Darling: Erm, one-to-one, sir.

Melchett: Come again?

Darling: The map is actually life-size, sir. But it's superbly detailed. Look, there's a little worm.

Melchett: Oh, yes. So the actual amount of land retaken is?

[Darling whips out a tape measure amd measures the table.]

Darling: Seventeen square feet, sir.

Melchett: Excellent. So you see, young Blackadder didn't die horribly in vain after all.

I think that's the point. The methods ordered by generals behind the lines led to little or no gained terrain - so their model could be 1:1, or proved to be 1:1 when the actual terrain didn't match that expected by the model.

This little babe, so few days old
Is come to rifle Satan's fold!
All Hell will at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak, unarméd wise,
The gates of Hell he will surprise!

Ack. Now that will be in my head all day! In competing and conflicting SSA and SATB arrangements.

And no local choir to sing with. (Yes, I am a choir snob... The Gregory Kunde Chorale ruined the typical community chorus for me.)

If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, then flit not from this heavenly Boy.

I've actually compiled a playlist based on the songs several of you mentioned here, as well as some I know (Richard Thompson's "Dad's gonna kill me", for example). Napster has Britten, but not the War Requiem. I'll keep an eye out for it elsewhere.

Thank you!

In America there aren't hillsides with miles of graves, and I wonder if this mentality will stop until there are. Perhaps some Australians suffer the same lack of cognizance.

I take it you've never been to Arlington National Cemetary or any of the graveyards near Gettysburg, Vicksburg or any number of Southern towns? There are hillsides with miles of graves, but they aren't for WWI...

Some historians hold that the American Civil War was the first "modern" war, the rehearsal for the "total war" of the 20th century.

For commentary, Attaturk (who was the commander of the Turks at Gallipoli) takes the cake.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land. They have become our sons as well.

That was in 1934.

The Turks have managed to live up to the sentiment. In 1985 they named the chunk of Suvla Bay where they landed, "ANZAC Cove" and declared it a national park.

For a sense of scale, if it happened today, and it were Americans, it would be more than 500,000 dead.

There are some good reasons for the bitterness the Australians have toward Britain as a result of the war. One of the things which was most notable was that the British wanted to have complete control of the Australians, and Australia wouldn't allow it. Which is why the Australians had no one shot for desertion, which cannot (to the best of my knowledge) be said about any of the other Commonwealth troops.

I think there were a number of factors which made the Civil War less of blow to the psyche than WW I. First, there was a definite set of principles to be fought for, not just "the great game". Second, the leadership was just better. The south started with the good generals, and Lincoln for the North ran through generals until he came up with those who accomplished something. (There we stupid tactics, to be sure -- see "Battle of the Crater"-- but the "if we repeat a failure enough, it will become success" mentality didn't set in.) Third-- and I thnk this is perhaps the largest factor-- the country had something else to do besides brood over the affair: continuing to populate the west. That's not to say that the South didn't brood over it; to a degree, they still are.

Similar things happened in Britain (not just England; normally I'd pass over that, but not in this case) in the Great War. Look up the Pals' Battalions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pals_battalions

"...16th (2nd Edinburgh) (Service) Bn Lothian Regiment Royal Scots... containing the entire first and reserve team players, several boardroom and staff members and a sizeable contingent of supporters of Scottish professional [football] club Heart of Midlothian FC... One of the most notable was the 11th (Service) Battalion (Accrington) East Lancashire Regiment, better known as the Accrington Pals. The Accrington Pals were ordered to attack Serre, the most northerly part of the main assault, on the opening day of the battle [of the Somme]. Of an estimated 700 Accrington Pals who took part in the attack, 235 were killed and 350 wounded within the space of twenty minutes."

They drew replacements from the same recruiting ground, too, so the casualties would have been made up with more Accrington men.

No, I don't think the Civil War has the same resonance for the British - it's just too long ago. Also, it didn't have such obvious effects; the monarchy was restored, after all.

Terry @ 111: I have only just begun to learn about Attaturk (yay, college), but he strikes me as an incredibly perceptive man.

The one truly, truly, truly astonishing piece of First World War writing I've discovered in the last year or so is A.P. Herbert's The Secret Battle (sadly not yet online) - Herbert was best known as a humourist, but this is his first novel and arguably his best, written in the immediate aftermath and published in 1919. Exceptionally well-written, and compellingly bleak; the protagonist is a good man who is relentlessly put upon by circumstances, until one day, he breaks a little more than usual and turns back in the face of shellfire. And the System then breaks him, grinds him into the ground, completely and without feeling; we get perhaps the first appearance of the "shot at dawn" scene in fiction. I can't read it and not want to scream a bit, and it ought to be much better known. (WRT the comments above about the British at Gallipoli, it also has a rather interesting couple of chapters on Gallipoli, where APH served)

The other interesting discovery was C.S. Forester's The General, where the protagonist was one of the "donkeys" who kept throwing men into the meatgrinder in the belief that he was doing it right. It's not an apology, but it's an interesting attempt to explain the mindset that got us there.

James@93: The War the Infantry Knew is mainly by one man, Dunn, with filler from some others in the same unit after he left - one of those being, interestingly, Siegfried Sassoon. (One of the aspects of that book is that it doubles as a regimental diary; each day you get the "minor skirmish, two wounded" sort of thing. It's interesting to note the way it's always phrased as "Lieutenant Johnson and five other ranks killed"...)

And still, America has its hills with miles of graves.

(If you want a sight that will give you chills, some Civil War battlefields (now parks) are decorated with candles during the holiday season. Each candle marks the spot where a soldier died.)

It wasn't until WWII that the US had the kind of losses that Great Britain experienced in WWI. The example I'm thinking of is the young men of Bedford, Virginia -- most of that town's soldiers died on the beaches of Normandy -- in a single day...

It's a great sentiment, but things aren't quite that simple. In "exchange", locations in Australia and NZ were renamed. Ataturk point (with a memorial) is south of Wellington Airport, overlooking Cook Strait.
The area is also important for the Turk's, due to Ataturk's involvement - it was busy the day I was there, as it was Ataturk's birthday.

That's Fort Snelling. It's an active cemetary, in that it is still accepting burials. There are something like 175,000 people buried there now.

It's very busy. If someone entitled to be buried there dies, you call, and they tell you when the burial will be. It's usually about a week, and you get a time, say, 7:15am. You are there at 7:15am. If you are late, you sit there and wait until someone else is late, even if that means waiting hours.

Burials are scheduled every 15 minutes from several stations. Burials of veterans (as opposed to spouses of veterans) are accompanied by a salute - guns fired in the air. This doesn't go over well with TSA, but the cemetary is winning this argument (so far).

By far most of the burials are WWII veterans and spouses, but there are always a scattering of younger ones.

It's a lovely site, right on the bluffs above the river. At water level right along there is a federal wildlife sanctuary, and there is an amazing array of birdlife living there. Back when it was possible to leave the airport without having to go through security hell to get back, I used to meet relatives and friends with layovers of more than an hour and take them out for a picnic. (At the Fort, not the cemetary. I have some sense of decorum.) Alas, those days are gone forever.

There were likely World War I veterans in my family, but they would have died before I was ever thought of. If I were taking bets, I'd guess the Austrian side of the family. My father is not a veteran. They wouldn't take him for Vietnam. Several uncles are Vietnam vets, a cousin is a veteran of the Persian Gulf War, and my brother is an Iraq vet.

I don't ever want another family member to go off to war.

We get not only those who live close, but those who prefer to be buried at Arlington.