They are here in ghostly assemblage

Memorial Day, 2021

Maj. Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr. in eastern France 1944, for LIFE magazine.

I grew up in the army, and there were always parades.  They would turn out the troops to welcome a new commanding general, to bid farewell to the one who was leaving, to celebrate the award of a unit citation, to honor a visiting dignitary, to pay tribute to the passing of an old, distinguished soldier.  When I got to West Point, we had parades at least three days a week, rain or shine, even what they called “bandbox parades” in Central Area in the dead of winter in the snow.

As cadets, we hated parades.  All soldiers hate parades.  You’ve got to shine up your shoes or boots and brass, you’ve got to make sure your uniform is pressed and perfect, you’ve got to clean and inspect your rifle to insure it is free of dirt and dust and in perfect order.  You line up in ranks for inspection and then you march off to assemble on a parade field, and when the band starts to play, you march in perfect ranks to “pass in review,” saluting the commanding general or whoever is being honored that day.

The only parade I can recall not hating was the one on Memorial Day.  It was a solemn affair.  We were honoring the dead of America’s wars.  At West Point, we would march across The Plain, the huge, pool-table-flat parade ground near Trophy Point, where stands Battle Monument, designed by Stanford White, a tall Tuscan column dedicated to the Civil War veterans of the Union.  We had a hymn called “The Corps” that had a verse capturing perfectly what Memorial Day meant:

“That we of the Corps are treading, where they of the Corps have trod.
They are here in ghostly assemblage. The men of the Corps long dead.
And our hearts are standing attention, while we wait for their passing tread.”

That’s what it felt like marching in the Memorial Day parade out there on the Plain, and that’s what it feels like to me every time I visit one of our military cemeteries.  I can still hear the tread of the dead.  My maternal grandfather, Bartley M. Harloe, West Point class of 1918, is buried in the West Point cemetery.  My paternal grandfather, Lucian K. Truscott Jr., is buried at Arlington Cemetery.  Neither man died in a war, but they are buried alongside hundreds, thousands, who did. 

I’ve always thought the most remarkable military cemeteries are those in Europe with the graves of the American dead lost in World Wars I and II.  That we, as a nation, would leave behind the bodies of our dead soldiers on foreign soil where they died has always seemed to me the most remarkable tribute we could pay them.  They lie beneath crosses and Stars of David where they fought and died not only for this country, but for the countries where they lay.  To me, it is a measure of not only how much their sacrifice counted, but how deeply we care about what they did and why they died. 

There is the famous cemetery at Normandy, of course, visited by presidents and other dignitaries when the landings of the D-Day invasion are commemorated, where more than 9,000 American soldiers are buried.  There is another, even larger, cemetery where 14,246 Americans are buried near where the Meuse-Argonne offensive was fought in World War I.  There is the cemetery at Epinal, France, containing the graves of 5,252 Americans who died in the little-known campaign of the 7th Army in eastern France in 1944-45.  And there is the cemetery near Anzio in Italy, with the graves of 7,845 American soldiers who died in Sicily in 1943 and during the fighting for Salerno and Anzio in 1944. 

My grandfather, General Truscott, was in command of some of the units which fought in Sicily and Italy and Eastern France:  the 3rd Infantry Division, the 6th Corps, the 7th Army, and at the end of the war, the 5th Army.  I have visited the cemetery at Anzio, where grandpa famously turned his back on the dignitaries who were present when he spoke at its dedication after the war, and according to the famous “Willie and Joe” cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who was present that day, apologized to the dead for causing their deaths as their commander.

Mauldin summed up grandpa’s remarks in his memoir, “The Brass Ring,” this way:

“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. . . He would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn't see much glory in getting killed if you were 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 that was the least he could do.”

I think about grandpa’s remarks at Anzio on Memorial Day every year. They have become justly famous as they have been spread on social media. 

But the story that I remember best about him was told to me by the man who wrote the LIFE magazine profile of him which was published in October of 1944 during the campaign in Eastern France.  The author’s name was Will Lang, and I met him while I was a cadet at West Point skiing at a Catskills ski resort one weekend.  We had both had quite a bit to drink by the time we introduced ourselves, and when Will realized who I was, he launched into a story he said was about “the day I learned what a war is.”

One morning somewhere in Alsace, Will attended a meeting of my grandfather with his division and regimental commanders at his headquarters.  It was held in a trailer grandpa used as a mobile office.  One wall of the trailer was covered with a large map of the battlefield where the 7th Army was fighting the Germans.  Grandpa issued his orders for the day, and when the commanders had left, he and Will sat down at a little camp table outside the trailer and had breakfast.  Will was asking grandpa about his meeting with his commanders, what did it mean when he gave this order, or that order.  He said he was peppering grandpa with questions when suddenly he stood up and barked at Will:  “Come with me, young man.”

Will followed him up the steps back into his command trailer.  Grandpa walked over and pointed to a push-pin on the map.  “Were you watching when I moved this pin a few minutes ago?”  Will said he had been.  “Do you know what it meant, moving a pin on this map?”  Will admitted that he didn’t.  “It meant that by the end of this day 250 of my men will be dead,” he said.

Will Lang, who was in his 20’s, was stunned.  Grandpa, who was about to turn 50, had been moving push-pins on maps since the landing of his first regimental combat team on the beachhead in Tunisia in 1942.  He and his armies had killed, by his own count in his memoir “Command Missions,” written years later, more than a hundred thousand German soldiers.  But he had also given the orders that ended up in the deaths of thousands of his own men.  Among them would be the 5,000 lying in graves at the Epinal cemetery and the more than 7,000 lying in graves he would make his address to in 1946 at the dedication of the cemetery at Anzio.

“That’s when I learned what war is,” Will Lang told me that night in a little hotel bar in the Catskills.  “You spend the bodies of American boys for the bodies of enemy boys, and whoever spends the fewest bodies wins.”

Every one of those bodies, ours and theirs, end up in the ground.  Perhaps we should pay tribute to all of them on Memorial Day.  They died because their countries sent them to war and because generals like my grandfather moved a push-pin on a map.

They are here in ghostly assemblage indeed.  They haunt all of us.