The sheer scale of human tragedy

Created
Tue, 30/05/2023 - 00:30
Updated
Tue, 30/05/2023 - 00:30
And Mankind’s folly Ahead of the Memorial Day holiday, a book arrived unexpectedly from an old friend. John Nation writes about his exploration of WWI battlefields in France in “A Nomad in No Man’s Land.” It began with a simple road sign, Ligne du Front–“Front Line.” The Somme battlefield. Brian Klaas reflects today on his recent visit to Normandy cemeteries. “From the beginning, then, there was a tension” in memorials to the Confederate war dead, Klaas writes, “between paying respects to those who had died—the sons and fathers and brothers—and a debate over whether you could ever separate out the injustice of a war’s cause from those who fought in it. For some, the answer was absolutely not. After all, Confederate soldiers fought to keep others enslaved, one of the great stains on human history.” Above the WWII beaches in Normandy stand memorials to the “sheer scale of that human tragedy” that occurred there marked by row upon row of white marble headstones: 9,387 in the Allied cemetery. The Nazi cemetary, Klaas expplains, “is dark and black. The gravestones are cut from a rough, plain brown/black stone, a striking juxtaposition with the pristine white marble”: 21,222 German soldiers buried in a field off a busy two-lane highway, both “perpetrators and victims,” Klaas observes: Even if we accept that a 17 year-old conscript bears less moral responsibility than a 40 year-old Waffen-SS officer, there can be social utility in ignoring that nuance in pursuit of reinforcing the more important message: that the Nazi…