By Ann Distefano / Herald Forum
I thought I would share a special experience my husband and I had 12 years ago. We were traveling in France with friends. We had planned for five weeks so we had the luxury of time and being able to explore lesser known areas. We were in the Champagne area in a town that had been destroyed in World War II and unfortunately rebuilt like a plastic U.S. suburb.
We were asking for places to explore and the hotel manager mentioned an American Cemetery from World War I that was about an hour away. So we traveled through the back roads to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial. We walked into a beautiful, serene place covered with headstones, 14,276 to be exact. It was a huge emotional moment. It brought tears to our eyes. We saw one other couple visiting the site. They were being escorted by a worker so we assumed they were looking for a family member.
After we had explored for a while we went up to the main building. The cemetery manager was there and obviously very happy to see a visitor. We spent the next hour learning more about World War I than we had ever known.
As it happens this is the spot that war ended at 11:11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918. The 14,276 graves represented only a third of the American lives lost there. The others had been returned to families in the U.S. for burial. The astounding thing was that all of these lives had been lost in a short seven-week span. Also surprising, this is the second largest American cemetery in the world. The largest is in the Philippines.
We learned so much that day and it was embarrassing that none of us had known anything about this place. Later in our trip we did visit Normandy but to be honest, it didn’t have nearly the impact on me as the Meuse-Argonne did. The place was beautifully maintained, but the manager apologized that it was in a bit of disarray as they were preparing for the 90th anniversary later that year. As we were about to leave my friend asked how many American presidents had ever visited there. The answer was none.
I had so hoped that in 2018 our president would visit this sobering place for its centennial, but that was not to be.
When Veterans Day comes I see those acres of rolling green grass covered in headstones. The memory still takes my breath away.
Ann Distefano lives in Marysville.
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