As the students have tomorrow off for Veteran's Day, we spent part of the class period reading a Pyle essay on the carnage on Normandy. The students were most pleased that they can all now pronounce 'beach' in the proper English way.
After class, I went for a stress-reducing walk (supposedly our only day of sunshine in the next stretch) along my beach. With the words from the essay rumbling around in my brain, the juxtaposition between them and the scene in front of me was astounding.
"The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours."
"But there was another and more human litter. It extended in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach. This was the strewn personal gear, gear that would never be needed again by those who fought and died to give us entrance into Europe."
(Both excerpts from Ernie Pyle's On the Road to Berlin.)
Happy Veteran's Day to any and all who served.
Oh - the horror. Neal P. used to tell us about his grandfather who was at Normandy... and couldn't swim. Jumped out of a boat, loaded down with all of that gear, and sank.
ReplyDeleteHe very nearly wasn't born, was our Neal.