Those of you whose hands are not up—you’re showing your age.

Memorial Day poster, showing graves at Arlington National Cemetery

In the small town in Ohio where I grew up, the cemetery was up on the hill behind the Church of Christ. It was called Schoolhouse Hill, because the school stood beside the cemetery.  And every Memorial Day in my childhood, the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) put down their beer bottles, donned as much of their old uniforms as they could still get in to, and held a ceremony up on the hill, distributing flags to all the graves of old soldiers.

Red poppy "In Flanders' Fields, the poppies blew..."

Every house flew a flag, and most people pinned on red artificial poppies that they bought from the VFW–the funds going to veterans in need.

Fallen warriors were not the only ones honored, though. It became a day to honor one’s ancestors as well.  That was the day that people cleaned up the area around family plots, put flowers in pots, or planted them in the ground and stood and thought a minute or two about each ancestor.  People still do that in small town America. So in the spirit of a Memorial Day that used to mean something more than “Sale”, here are some past posts about America and patriotism in travel and books to add to your travel library. So plan a trip, read a book, remember.

WW II Re-enactment

A ceremony in Fredericksburg Texas and a magnificent World War II museum. The book: Fortress Rabaul:  The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942-April 1943.

Memorial at Normandy World War II American Cemetery

Visiting a cemetery in Normandy, France, and the battlefields of D-Day. The book: The Steel Wave by Jeff Schaara.

Independence Hall, Philadelphia

A visit to the cradle of America, Philadelphia. The book: Miracle at Philadelphia

Ohio Grave of Civil War Veteran, Henry Allen Butts

A salute to veterans in my own family, and books about war. The books: Several by Michael Schaara and Jeff Schaara

George Washington

Revolutionary War and early American sites to visit. The book: 1776 by David McCullough.

Here’s a touching post from Vacation Gals about a visit to the Pearl Harbor WWII site in Hawaii.

Remember, you now are able to rate posts (even old ones). Let me know which ones you like and you’ll get more of the same.

For your convenience, I put several links to Amazon in this article. If you buy anything at all at Amazon, please click through one of my links or the Amazon search box. You’ll be showing your support of A Traveler’s Library, and helping me pay the rent on my Internet address. Thanks so much!

Thanks, as usual to those photographers at Flickr who took some of these photos. I took the Normandy, the Civil war grave and George Washington photos. If you are interested in using a photo, be sure to ask the photographer for permission.

Happy Memorial Day weekend. What are your plans?

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Ohio Grave of Civil War Veteran, Henry Allen Butts

I have been thinking for quite a while about what I wanted to write about to commemorate Veteran’s Day. My brother, a veteran of Vietnam,  thinks I should write about the Civil War. He, my sister-in-law and two nephews (one of whom served in the Marines in Iraq)  participate in Civil War Renenactments in California.  So obviously, HE is the one who should be writing about books about the Civil War.

I will digress from my usual pattern here and tell a little story of my own, and then list a few books that seem to be worth looking at if  you need travel literature to help plan re-enactments of your own.

My Story

My grandfather, William Henry Butts, an Ohio farmer, served on the Union side of the Civil War. We still have some of the letters he wrote home to his wife, unhampered by standardized spelling and punctuation. (In the excerpt below I have seen fit to add periods, just to make it easier on the reader.)

He was discharged for disability after 8 months. Being let go in Nashville, Tennesee, he presumably had to make his way home to Ohio on his own. By October 1864 he had re-enlisted, and he served until July the following year. “Dear Wif” he writes on December 18, 1864 from “Near Savanah, GA”

It is a pleasure to me that i am permited to seat myself to anser your ever welcom letter which came to hand yesterday. i was glad that you and dear little Allen was well. your letters found me well and enjoying myself as well as I can enjoy my self. better since i herd from you for it has bin a long time to me. i must tell you the reason i did not hear from you sooner we started on this march the 15 of november and landed hear on the 10 of this month we had no communication all that time but its all right now. we have had a hard march over three hundred miles. some nights we did not get time to lay down and hardly time to eat but we are through and i em glad this is Sunday. my dear last Sunday i did not think that i wold write to you this day for we laid under the rebels fire boath Saturday and Sunday and the shells and balls flew thick and fast. thear was one shell bursted about ten feet from me and broke three of our guns so i begin to think that was coming rather close.

Henry Butts as an old man

One of the rare lucky ones, he was able to return to his wife and lived a long life, and was buried in the church cemetery outside his small town. We went in search of great-grandfather’s grave, and noticed that in the older section of the church cemetery, Civil War Veteran’s graves spout brass star that indicates service in The War. One star stood beside a grave of a boy who lived to the age of fourteen.

While you think about that, you might also think about taking a road trip to one or more of the many, many battlefields of the Civil War scattered from Pennsylvania down to Georgia. You can drive. You do not have to march.

Books

• Gods and Generals by Michael Shaara. Best book on the Civil War, hands down. When Michael Shaara died before the book found fame and became a movie, his son Jeff took over and completed a trilogy with Killer Angels and The Last Full Measure. Jeff Shaara went on to specialize in novels of war.
• Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause relate the American Revolution.
• The Last Full Measure , covers the gruesome and grueling World War I
• No Less Than Victory,  a novel of World War II

I will no doubt be talking in the future about WWI and WWII sites to visit, but here are previous posts about a movie in France, a memoir in Naples,and the underground in Crete all set in WWII. Travel to American revolutionary places were covered in Philadelphia, and Reading for July 4; a guest poster talked about Vietnam during the war.

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Charlotte Gray

Destination: France

Movie: Charlotte Gray

I rather wish that I had read the novel,Charlotte Gray (1999) by Sebastian Faulks, because the story seems too complex for the simplified love story that dominates the film, Charlotte Gray (2002). However, I would not want to miss the atmospheric French village that plays an important role in the movie.

Briefly, for anyone, who, like me, missed the movie the first time around, the story revolves around Charlotte (Cate Blanchett) a Scottish woman living in London during World War II. When a pilot she has met and fallen in love with disappears in France, she volunteers to parachute into Nazi-occupied, Vichy France as part of the British effort to help the French resistance. Because of a childhood spent partly in France, she speaks French effortlessly, which helps her disguise.

I won’t go any further into the movie, because, as usual here, I am principally interested in whether the location causes me to want to pack my bag and travel. The answer is yes. The medieval village, with it narrow streets and three-story stone buildings, does exist. It was not shot on a sound stage. San Antonin Noble Val in the SW region of France known as Tarn et Garronne, would definitely be worth a visit. I have to admit that it does not take a lot of persuasion to get me to seek out a medieval village, or to go to France. And after I took a look at the village’s web site, I found even more reasons to go there. Check it out, either before or after viewing the movie.

P.S. I found the additional material on the DVD interesting, and wished there had been more about the fact that tanks rolling through the village brought back unpleasant memories to some of the most elderly of the villagers. I would have liked to hear their stories about the roles played during the war by parents and grandparents of today’s residents.

Have you ever discovered a place you would like to visit after seeing it on a movie screen? Tell us about it.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.