Lost in the Footage of Old War Films

On Memorial Day weekend, television likes to bring back past wars. It’s surprising how much of the old motion picture film still exists. I’m especially interested in the World War I footage because my father was in that war. He died before I was old enough to ask questions, but I knew he had been lightly gassed and had a shrapnel wound in his foot from the Battle of the Argonne. His comrades, those who are left, are in their 90s now. Dying old men are our image of that war. But I remember my father in his vigorous 50s, brown-haired and full of life.

I have a game I play when I see those old films. When I see the marching columns of men, the guns, the wounded, the trucks and horses, fading now as the film decays, I imagine that one of those soldiers is my father. There! Just past that truck, hard to see. . . . There he is! Standing in a crowd of uniformed young men, all probably dead now. Then the scene changes. There! Among those running soldiers, his back to the camera, just to the right of the one who is shot and falls! Just a boy, really, young enough to be my own son, barely off the farm, the runt of the litter, sent to Europe to fight because America would save the world from war and because they told him to go.

The old battlefields are silent now. I hear that the birds still do not sing in the Argonne Forest, what’s left of it, and the shallow trenches still show on the land. All our wars fade from memory. The entire Earth is the tomb of great men, said Pericles, and the arrowheads and cartridge cases of our flawed race lie under our feet wherever we walk. I only know that when I see a line of men in gas masks and funny old helmets, silently waiting in the muddy trenches, I sometimes see my father among them and I almost cry out.