Greek Tragedy, Old and New

I thought of my good friend Ajax and the love of my heart, Akhaides, yesterday, watching a solemn Memorial Day ceremony at an American cemetery in Europe. Both of them would have despised it, for very different reasons, but I thought it was lovely. There were invocations, a flyover, a rifle volley, speeches by appropriate notables, wreathes laid. The cemetery is from WWI, and is beautifully tended. Schoolchildren sang the host country's and the US national anthems. US flags fly innocently in the town, just as if America hadn't shamed itself a hundred times over in the past few years. Truly, we are blessed with better friends than we deserve.

War, and death in war, is a strange, strange thing. Dr. and Lt. Col. John McCrae wrote "In Flanders Fields" on May 15, 1915, to honor a fallen comrade. It is said that he repudiated the poem and literally ripped it up and threw it away. Another officer rescued it. I would give much to know what was in McCrae's mind at that time. He died himself in 1918.

And then there is Rupert Brooke, a young man in love with death. "Peace" is a gorgeous outpouring - but is there another poem so chilling at the same time?

We would like to believe that these days we are finer, more sensitive, more circumspect and introspective, that we FEEL more than our brute ancestors. Then we read The Iliad, and know that we are wrong.