Not long ago, my family and I took a lantern tour of the cemetary at the Stones River National Battlefield. This cemetary, as do most, exudes an eerie silence, particularly at night, as one is led through row upon row of granite obelisks.
Periodically however, this silence was broken as we were met by men and women who would emerge from the darkness to share letters sent to, or from, the men whose names were etched in the stone beside them. For each those two or three minutes, we were taken back to another time. There were no sounds other than the century old words of a mother or wife; of a father or a son. It was then I knew that the words never die, they are rewritten not by the ink of a pen, but in tears of a mother and the blood of a son, from Stones River to Belleau Wood, Normandy to Mosul.
It isn’t the rows of stone that make this place special, it is the words that are written on them.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. – Abraham Lincoln.
