Another Tale From Luxembourg 11-11-2011

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On a gray autumn November 11, 2011 after the ceremony for the American War dead, the dignitaries drove to attend the Ruhe Tag or ‘Quiet Day’ ceremony for the fallen German soldiers at the close-by Sandweiler German War Cemetery, a separate and smaller cemetery. Shaded by the trees and dark as a forest. Most of the tombstones were unmarked, as the decomposed corpses had been recovered from mass graves well after the Battle of the Bulge.

The cobblestone path led to a large gray stone cross on a monument. Two lines of stones formed the image of rail tracks. The heavy gray tombstones were reminiscent of Wehrmacht uniforms.

Over ten thousand German soldiers were buried here. Many were SS. Their bodies had been buried on top of the other. The German ambassador explained to my friend, the UK ambassador, that they had been interred so they would be close to their comrades. I thought the two to a grave policy had been to save space.

I stood next to the American ambassador. Robert was Jewish. His unease was obvious. Neither of us were here to judge the dead. We showed our respect during the somber rites for the dead.

I had earlier cried seeing rows upon rows of white crosses at the American cemetery. Flowers had been laid at the monument for the German dead and a band played a dirge. I suspected that Germans had many of them. I shed no tears here.

I slipped outside the ceremony . An old man in a good suit smoked a cigarette by an iron fence. The Battle of the Bulge had been over sixty-six years ago. He had to be in his late eighties. In 1944 he had been very young. He still stood militarily erect. I asked him for one of his cigarettes in German. He gave me one and lit it for me.

“Du kennst hier jemanden?” Did he know anyone here. My high school German was still stuck in my head thanks to Bruder Karl.

“Viele Kamaraden, du?” He smiled and sucked on his cigarette.

“Ich war damals noch etwas jung.” I hadn’t even been born in 1944.

“Du bis rechtig.” The old man laughed with a tobacco cough. Maybe something worse. “Ich bin alt. Sehr alt.”

“Aber nicht tot.” We were both old at different ages, but neither of us were dead.

“Das stimmt. Du bist Amerikaner?”

I nodded yes.

“Guten Soldaten.” He nodded in appreciation of the Yankees’ valour and stubbed out the cigarette. “Guten tag.”

I said the same. He walked away as I finished the cigarette. I didn’t go back inside the cemetery. I knew no one inside. I was better off outside and happy to be so. Every day above the dirt is a good one for the living. The good, the bad, and the in-between.

NOVEMBER 11, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Kenya, the River Platte, Flanders
Vienna, Istanbul, Berlin
Versus
Moscow, London, and Paris
1914 to 1918
An assassination in Sarajevo to the Treaty of Versailles
World War I
Machine guns, trenches, blood
Airplanes, Zeppelins, blood
Gas, barbed wire, blood
Death in a thousand fields
Verdun
Gallipoli
Tannenburg
Emperors' armies
Nations' will
Men's blood
Victory and defeat
The kaiser in exile,
The sultan deposed,
The Tsar eliminated by the New Men
Yanks, Krauts, Limeys, Frogs, Aussies
Ivans, Turks, Pollacks
Greeks, Serbs, Slavs,
Japs, I-ties, and Scots
Dead by the millions and at the eleventh minute
Of the Eleventh hour
Of the Eleventh day
Of the Eleventh Month
In the year of 1918
A ceasefire for the War to End All Wars.
For a few years.

I'm alone in bed, reading John Toland's 1918 THE LAST YEAR. Alice rose early and went to Club 57. Her true home. I listen to classical music from a Philadelphia radio station, drink from a bottle of 1972 Bordeaux, and smoke a joint. No naked body. Alice still thinks she's too fat to have sex. I think the opposite, but the mirror tells the truth to everyone with their own reflection.

My evening plans are to go to a party and then hit CBGBs. I avoid Club 57. Susan and my old friends, the boys from East 6th Street- Frank Holiday, Andy Reese, and William Lively make me uncomfortable in that club. Someone spread a rumor that I had robbed Tim Dunleavey. I suspect Andy Reese and Frank Holiday. They are junkies, plus I prefer CBGBs. The bartenders like me. I flirt with girls. Guadalcanal and I snort coke. Not everyone is so friendly. A drunk from New Jersey wanted to fight me. Guadalcanal grabbed the thug and chucked him out with Merv, the Gentle Giant.

"That was nothing," says Guadalcanal.

Yeah, that's all everything is."

"I meant that guy."

Alice and her crowd show up. I wave to Lisa Crystal, Holly's daughter, let in my girlfriend and signal for the others to pay. They've come to see Pere Ubu, an art band from Cleveland. Sort of a punk Meat Loaf. Alice comes to the bar.

"Can't you get Susan in for free?"

"It's not my bar."

"I'll pay for her."

"Why can't she pay for herself?"

Alice makes a face. I figure the two are a couple. We haven't made love this week. Maybe not last week either.

The Club 57 enters without saying 'hello'. I am the club’s persona non persona.

I leave with Guadalcanal.

"Before I came here, I thought Boston was small, but every place is small, if you only go to the same places every night."

"You could always broaden your horizons by joining the real world. Get a 9 to 5. Wear a tie."

"Yeah, I could always do that." I have a fear of ending up like Peter Willen, my Aunt Mary's beau. A socialist with smoke-stained teeth. My mother is scared of that fate for me too. Time will tell.

The GOP scored massive gains in the 1978 mid-term elections. White men hate President Jimmy Carter, They want a strong America to face the USSR.

Prior to the vote the GOP controlled twelve states; now they have eighteen thanks to the media's portrayal of America losing its way; i.e. the grip of white people over the rest of Americans; Black, Spanish, Asian, and under-paid working classes.

Massachusetts was served by Republican Senator Edward Brooke and Governor Frank Sargent. My father hated Sargent for not financing I-95 across the North Shore wetlands. I like the estuary in its natural state.

No one says a word about World War I. It ended sixty years ago.

Journal Entry - Poetry - November 11, 1978 - East Village

The battlefields crossed the world

Suez, Flanders, the Dardanelles, Tannenberg, Africa, Asia

1914-1918

Sarajevo to Versailles

Tear gas, machine guns, ditches, airplanes, poison gas, tanks

Death in a thousand fields Gallipoli, Verdun, the Somme

The slaughter.

Nation's will, Emperor's greed, Man's strength versus an industry geared to blood

Now the empires gone

Although at the cost of millions of young men and women.

The War to End all Wars.

If only for one day

11-11-11

On the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, a permanent ceasefire was declared along the Eastern and Western fronts. Canadian George Lawrence Price was struck by a sniper's bullet at 10:58. The British soldier has long been thought to be the last casualty on the Western Front, although troops continued to shoot at each other for several hours after the armistice ended the four-year global conflict.

11-11-11 occurs once a year.

Someone in the armistice committee must have been heavily influenced by numerology to have chosen this powerful repetition of the first prime number to magically stop soldiers from killing each other.

Of course it could have just been a coincidences like 9/11/2001.

Today , the major combatant nations of World War I commemorated their fallen dead.

Over 65 million soldiers participated in the struggle.

According to Wikipedia, the last living veteran of World War I (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918) was Florence Green, a British citizen who served in the Allied armed forces, and who died on 4 February 2012, aged 110. The last living combat veteran was Claude Choules, who served in the British Royal Navy (and later the Royal Australian Navy). He died on 5 May 2011, at the age of 110.

The last veteran to serve in the trenches was Harry Patch (British Army), who died on 25 July 2009, aged 111. The last Central Powers veteran, Franz Künstler of Austria-Hungary, died on 27 May 2008 at the age of 107.

My grandfather and grandmother both served in France for the Canadian Medical Expedition. As my grandmother was disembarking at Le Havre, she stumbled down the steep gangplank. My grandfather stopped her fall and helped her onto the dock. They served as doctor and nurse, along with my Aunt Marion at Epinay, tending to thousands of wounded and dying. After the outbreak of Spanish Flu in 1917, the three of them returned home on an ocean liner. Captain Smith and Nurse Hamblin married soon after their arrival in Maine. The two veterans lived together for thirty-two years. My grandfather died the year I was born and my grandmother twenty years later.

She was the last WWI vet I knew.

I love her always.

Journal Entry – November 11, 1995 – New Delhi

The Aeroflot flight from Moscow must have arrived for crowds of badly-dressed Russians thronging through the market buying cheap clothing to sell for a tidy profit back in the ex-Soviet Union. Finding large clothing isn't easy, but the Indian merchants of the cheap tourist hotel district know their market. It is now apparent from the swift collapse of the USSR that the CIA lied about the Communists' hold on their regime, although the Russians freed Europe from the Nazis.

Throughout my stay in New Delhi, Indians have asked why the USA sold F-16s to their subcontinental adversary Pakistan, and I said, "The Pentagon does not win wars which are used to grind profit from civilians and soldiers to earn profit for the military-industrial complex.

No one mentioned Armistice Day.

The War to End All Wars.

I walked to the train station and bought a one-way ticket to Goa.

Peace reigned there.

Hippies love peace.

Dreams of Sex - November 9, 2011

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FALLEN BUT NOT FORGOTTEN by Peter Nolan Smith

On November 11, 2011, I accompanied the British and the American ambassadors to the US military cemetery outside Luxembourg City. Luxembourg was a small duchy. The British Ambassador had appointed me unofficial writer-in-residence. The CIA thought I was a spook. I dressed the part and never told them otherwise. Neither had Alice. I looked out the window of the British Embassy Jaguar as we exited from the city. The morning sun struggled to break through the low fog. It would have little success on that day as it had at the end of 1944.

In December of 1944, our troops had stopped the Nazis by Christmas, but the savage fight had been a close thing. Over four thousand American had fallen in the Battle of the Bulge. O

Our destination. The American Military Cemetery. Armistice Day was an important holiday in Luxembourg for all the combatant nations. The German ambassador and French Ambassadors waited at the gate of the cemetery. They had come to lay a wreath in honor of the dead. Beyond the entrance, thousands of white crosses marked the graves of my fallen countrymen. These were my people. These Americans had died to free Europe from the Third Reich. I got out of the Jaguar and walked away from the assembled dignitaries like the old man at the beginning of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.

"Are you okay?" The American ambassador caught up with me at a wall rusted by autumn leaves.

"Yes." There were tears in my eyes. These men were from the last generation. My father had served in the US Army Air Forces, testing radar-directed 20mm cannons on B-25s. In Kentucky. Far from Europe. The casualty rate had been 20%. WWII had been a world war. "I'm surprised by it all."

"I felt the same way the first time I saw all these graves." The ambassador was a few years older than me. "Let's walk to the back of the cemetery."

The dewy grass wet our shoes. We checked the gravestones for names, ages, and states.

Each one had died in the bitter cold of December 1944. They hailed from every nationality. Most had been in their twenties. More than a few hailed from my home states of Massachusetts and Maine.

We arrived at the last row and returned slowly through the gravestones to General Patton’s grave, who lay forever at the head of his army. Some more dust got in my eyes, as a lone bugler played Taps. The American ambassador patted my shoulder. We didn't say another word, just nodded to honor the dead

The next day I traveled to Charleroi and mentioned this visit to an American friend. Everyone said he was with the CIA. Vonelli poured me a glass of Orval Beer and we sat by the living room fire.

"My father had been with the artillery in the Battle of the Bulge and my old man never got over the horror of that winter."

Vonelli was a veteran of a colder war from the 70s and 80s.

"Every morning the platoon commander held a lottery, which picked the forward artillery observers. After the results, the chosen men shook hands with their friends, knowing their chances of coming back in the evening were close to nil."

"And they went?"

"It's what they did," Vonelli said with reverence.

I thought about the graves that the ambassador and I had passed yesterday and seeing those marked unknown.

"They were the best of the best." We could only honor their sacrifice.

"That they were."

Maybe the dust in my eye had had something to do with the lump in my throat, because those men had been us once and I am eternally grateful in the Here-Now as well as dedicated to keeping the peace in the Here-Beyond.

It's the least I can do for those men.