Re: Hurtgen forest

    I wonder, Paul, how many besides myself will have
    looked at your Hurtgen Forest site with such interest.
    World War II has never sold better - though enlightened
    people nowadays are shamefaced when found scurrying
    out of the shop with their war memoirs or Private Ryan
    videos wrapped in plain brown paper. You expect
    to find such material confined to the brutal mental defective
    next door who shaves his head & hangs Nazi memorabilia
    above his one solitary bookshelf.

    Yet from Homer to Tolstoy it's been arma virumque
    all the way. These blokes actually gloried in war, even
    (? especially ?) those who had, like Oliver Wendell Holmes
    actually: 'shared the incommunicable experience of war
    ... have felt - still feel - the passion of life to its top.'
 
    When I raised this topic before, everyone hustled away
    like shocked Puritans, thanking God they had never been
    so tested & piously denying any regret, such as I felt,
    at having missed what still seems to me one of the great
    defining experiences of being a man.

    Still. I make no apologies for having had such heroes
    when I was a boy - or for still feeling the goose pimples
    spread across my back when I recognise on page three of
    the Hurtgen site, what I once saw on the streets of Belfast,
    the Divisional badge of the Big Red One.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Sat Aug 10 13:06:48 2002