Remembrance

ON [VETERAN’S] DAY we remember; and, remembering, judge ourselves. A nation, like an individual, is the sum of all the preceding character that has contributed to it. There is the best and the worst, both made profitable by a just conscience, which recognizes and decides between them. The light of high endeavor never goes out; the torch passes from generation to generation, borne safely amid tumult and peace, amid onslaught and reverence.

   Today the nation stands on the golden hillcrest of which only the boldest had dared to dream, and looks back along the road. A long, magnificent road gloriously alive with the figures of brave men and brave women, of loyal hearts of undiscouraged purpose, of God-fearing manhood.

   It finds, as it looks and reflects, that the many little roads which begin on the margin of national history have come together and now for these many years have flowed in one broad and ever broader highway. It perceives a strange intimacy of blue and gray, and dimmer figures in tatters or in soiled red coats; it sees plain people, ennobled by service, who gave to civil life a little something more of integrity and fineness; it sees all sorts and conditions of men and of women; and it notices that there is this common thing among them—they all face forward to the future which now is ours. Finally, it recognizes, with gratitude and promise, that somewhere in this vast and diversely born people there is the binding loyalty of a common service.

   There is a flag, seen tiny against a field of green and white, which flutters above the bivouac of Arlington. There is a wreath invisibly adorning the home of every family whose fathers and mothers lived worthily that the race might be nobly preserved. There is a faith which, enriched by all these lives, is the deathless guerdon of a people who dares not, nor wishes, to forget.

Memento
Sunshine Magazine
May 1967