A Season of American History That Stirs My Soul
Between my first two years out of college teaching at McCallie School, and returning to Vanderbilt for my master’s degree, I spent a year studying and traveling in and around France. That year, 1964-1965, was within 20 years of the end of World War II. There remained ruins from the fighting as well as vivid gratitude on the part of the French people that the United States joined with the British and French Resistance fighters to free France from the grip of Hitler and the Nazis.
Below are two of my journal entries relating to the War, the first written early in my year in France. It was written from a mountaintop on France’s southern coast, the Mediterranean Sea:
Sunday, September 20, 1964 (my age 23)
I had a wonderful bus ride from Cannes to St. Raphael and then on to Toulon by train. … This morning I rode a cable car up to a mountain which gave a wonderful view. There were battlements left from the allied invasion of August 15, 1944. In the museum my spine tingled to read an old U.S. poster with the Statue of Liberty on it which said: Au pays qui nous ὰ donne La Libertἑ … Nous rendrous la libertἑ. (To the country that gave us the [Statue of] liberty, we give it the liberty.)
Then, nine months later, toward the end of my year abroad, and now on the northwest coast of France, my brother Warren and I had the following experience:
Monday, June 21, 1965 (my age 24)
Our trip in Bretagne and Normandy is now ended …. We were in the heart of agricultural France, seeing herds of sheep and cattle, fields of brilliantly red poppies, and many farmers harvesting hay by primitive methods. … Day before yesterday we saw a very moving sight; row upon row of white marble crosses in the American Cemetery on the hill overlooking Omaha Beach. We have learned much of the D-Day invasion in Normandy.
That’s been over 55 years ago, yet the memory of these two experiences remains vivid. In the fall, and on the Mediterranean coast, I was alone so more subject to heightened emotion over this “love letter” dropped from the sky as leaflets. It was my first encounter of the lasting impact of World War II on two people groups that don’t speak the same language. And then later, on the official first day of summer, Warren and I stood above the Atlantic Ocean with its waves crashing against the rocks below, and except for that sound and that of the light breeze, we were in total silence. The unending rows of white marble crosses brought tears to both of us. The profound silence in both settings speaks as appropriately as any voice of “greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for another.” This may well have been The Greatest Generation.
