LTTE: Peter Silverman’s Michael (17 December 1997)

Text of a letter that the boss sent to Michael Enright's CBC Radio show, This Morning on 17 December 1997. It was a response to a segment by the famed CITY-TV journalist, Peter Silverman. and was read on the air. The quotation about Truscott’s speech at the dedication of the Nettuno cemetary in 1945 is from Bill Mauldin’s The Brass Ring (NY: Norton, 1972) p. 272. Mauldin is quoted elsewhere describing the Nettuno ceremony this way: “He turned his back on the assembled windbags and sparklers and talked to the crosses in the cemetery, quietly, apologizing, and then walked away without looking around.” -- exactly what to do in the presence of self-aggrandizing windbags.

Dear This Morning:

I happened to start listening to Peter Silverman's piece this morning part way through it. It appears that he was describing a trip to a military cemetery. He spoke about the epitaphs that he read on the individual grave markers and how moving they were. He went on to single out one particular inscription that he said he would remember for the rest of his life: “If we had only loved you in life as we loved you in death.”  He painted a moving picture of how he imagined the life of this particular 19-year-old named Michael, who had died during the Normandy invasion in June 1944. According to Mr. Silverman this slender volunteer from the British horse guards was probably from a standard British upper-class family with parents who remained remote from their children. Raised in boarding schools and destined for university at Oxford or Cambridge, Michael would marry a girl from his class and spend a career in the diplomatic corps. By the time he finished, I doubt that there was a single dry eye in the entire Canadian Brideshead Revisited set.

There is some trouble in this. If we remember wars for the tragic violence that they do to the predictable lives of privileged, we may come to feel that wars are not really that bad. Unfortunately, the wars of this century have always inflicted disproportionate pain on young people born in humble circumstances. For every bored, slack-jawed, upper class Michael who enlisted during the last war because it was expected of them, there were scores of volunteers from non-privileged backgrounds like my father and his friends. They joined a conflict that was not their own purely out of youthful idealism. We should be thankful that they did. If we had left the last war to Michael and his kind, Hitler's heirs would probably still be ruling Europe today.

The life that Mr. Silverman sketches for Michael offered no surprises. What I find most poignant about the many thousands of bright young men of my father's generation who did not come back from World War II is that we can have no real idea about what their lives would have been like. They are lost to us. The older I get, the more I appreciate the sacrifices made by my father's generation. Permit me to share with you some words from one of my father's commanding officers at Anzio. I find them moving and will do my best not to forget their meaning. They are the report of an address made by General Lucian Truscott at the dedication of an allied military cemetery in Nettuno, Italy on Memorial Day 1945:

“When Truscott spoke, he turned away from the visitors and addressed himself to the corpses he had commanded.... It was the most moving gesture I ever saw. It came from a hard-boiled old man who was incapable of planned dramatics. The general's remarks were brief and extemporaneous. He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart this is not altogether true. He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances.... Truscott said he would not speak of the glorious dead because he didn't see much glory in getting killed in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought it was the least he could do.”