As such, Pericles said, it would become “only what the heroism of these and their like have made her.”įew countries, if any, accorded such honor to the common soldier over the next couple thousand years. Athens at the time was a fledgling democracy. The fallen deserved the highest glory because they had been citizen-soldiers fighting to preserve a great nation, Pericles told his countrymen. Pericles, the great Athenian general, statesman, and advocate of democracy, delivered a funeral oration with themes that echoed hundreds of years later in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. On the fourth day, the remains were placed in cypress coffins and buried in lush gardens. Friends and relatives brought flowers and ornaments in tribute. Although the dead had been cremated at the battlefield, their bones were brought back to the city and laid out in tents. He wrote about an Athenian ceremony to honor those killed in the early battles of the Peloponnesian War, the decades-long clash between Athenians and Spartans in the fifth century BC. PERHAPS THE EARLIEST ACCOUNT of a country bringing home its fallen soldiers comes from the Greek historian Thucydides. History had given the American people definite ideas about what to do with the war dead. This was a refrain Pershing and the military establishment would hear for the rest of the war, indeed, for years afterward. No matter that the men had died an ocean away or that the war was still going on. Letters and telegrams arrived in Washington asking when the soldiers’ remains would be shipped home. Within days, however, the War Department discovered that the families and friends of the dead thought differently. And he couldn’t bear to think of mothers opening caskets to see their boys ravaged by the fearsome new weapons of the industrial era. There was no time to bring fallen soldiers back to the States, he said, nor any space on ships crossing the Atlantic. This was as it should be, General Pershing believed. All three were buried near where they had died, amid the beautiful rolling hills of northeastern France. The third was found face down, his throat cut. One was shot between the eyes another had his skull smashed. These were the first of Jack Pershing’s men to die in the Great War. on November 3, 1917, German troops overran an isolated Allied outpost near Verdun, killing three men from the 16th Infantry who had slipped into the trenches for their combat debut only hours before. In World War I, the American public fought plans to bury fallen soldiers abroad, giving rise to a tradition that is now sacred In World War I, the American public fought plans to bury fallen soldiers abroad, giving rise to a tradition that is now sacred
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