Revery at a Tomb

Last week I stood beside the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

How wise they were who chose that hill above the Potomac for his final resting-place. The open wind-swept hill is so much more fitting for a soldier’s grave than the stuffy gloom of Westminster Abbey or the thoroughfare for motor traffic on the Champs Elysee. In Arlington he lies under the wide and starry sky, surrounded only by the nation’s honored dead. His simple, handsome tomb stands before a marble amphitheater of chaste beauty, a memorial to all who have died in their country’s service. It faces the nation’s capital, which rises like a fairy city beyond the river.

As I stood beside the tomb and watched the bayonetted guard march back and forth in mock tribute to the dead, I wondered whether the Unknown Soldier had been a Jew. Why not? Had not thousands of Jews given their lives for their country in the last holocaust? I knew many of them [personally]. They trained with me in Plattsburg Barracks in the early Summer of 1918, and then embarged on the long journey from which they did not return. Some were ordinary fellows but full of the love of life, and never really believed they would be killed.

Then there were the gifted men who were touched by the war’s realism and gladly gave their lives to the sacrifice. Like David Hoch###ein. He was the outstanding American-born violinist. A marvelous career of glory, wealth and artistic satisfaction lay before him. Then came the war. For him it became a holy cause. The old evil world had to be destroyed and a shining new one erected on its ruins. He would not take advantage of his [justified] exemption from the military draft. Nor would he accept the offer to play in a regimental band, which would have kept him behind the lines and free from danger. It was a good fight and he wanted to be in it…. He was killed in action shortly before the war ended.

Perhaps the Unknown Soldier was my Plattsburg bunk-mate, [Morton Cohen]. He was a budding poet. His verses were tender, romantic and almost feminine in their sensitiveness. He was the very last person who should have gone to war. But his spirit had been stirred by the President’s [flaming] phrases. He truly believed it was a war to end war, a crusade [to?] make the world safe for democracy.

I remember the first day we marched together on to the drill field for bayonet practice. Our instructor was a British officer, just [returned?] from the front. With shrieking curses he aroused us to ### insane fury against the straw dummies he was teaching us to attack as Germans. He pointed out the vulnerable parts of the human body, where a thrust meant a sure kill.

"Don’t stick the Hun in the [eyes?]," he cautioned, "for if you do, he may get a death grip on the bayonet and you will lose it!"

I looked at Morton and he looked back at me, disturbed but resolute. That evening we went for a long walk. I asked him whether he had realized before that war was so [evil?] that in it a piece of steel becomes more precious than a human life. He admitted he had never thought of it this way but felt none the less that the good to be accomplished more than justified the evil means that had to be employed. "Bloodshed and suffering are the price we pay for humanity’s progress," he maintained. "If we can free the world from tyranny and [fear?] it will justify anything." Morton’s brave young life was ###d out by poison gas at the [Somme?]. If it is he who rests benath that tomb at Arlington, I am grateful he does not see the light this day, does not know that the ###r which destroyed him also destroyed the ideals for which he died.

Or Perhaps the Unknown Soldier is the lad whom my friend, Emil Oppenheimer, killed at Sedan. Emil is a Berlin lawyer, who fought in the German army from September 1914, until November, 1918. In the last great battle of the war, he met a young American in hand-to-hand combat. Being stronger and more experienced, he swiftly ran his bayonet through the other’s heart. As he watched the boy die, he heard him moan "Shma Yisroel."

"Why did I kill him?" Emil has since asked a thousand times. "What quarrel did I have with him? He was my brother Jew and I killed him!"

And now Hitler has decided that Emil, despite his splendid war record and his readiness to kill even Jews in the service of the Father-land, is disqualified from military service because he is a Jew. I do not know how Emil regards this decision, for he has not written recently. Perhaps he is in a concentration camp. But I have read that many of his compatriots are protesting against the decree and are insisting on their right to serve in the German army. This is an attitude I cannot comprehend. For myself, I would rather languish in jail, I would rather even die than render military service to Hitlerism.

If my voice could reach them, I would say, "Embrace your fate, my German brothers. The evils that have come upon you are the bitter fruits of war. For you to support war is to make a mockery of your suffering. Your mission and your destiny, your crown and your cross, are peace."

They are mine, too, I am convinced, as I commune with the spirit of the Unknown Soldier this Memorial Day.