I have always loved Concord, a small town that was a sparsely settled farm town in 1775 and is a comfortable, rural-feeling suburb today. The name suggests harmony and peace. The area around the Old North Bridge is mostly wetland, and the bridge was (and is) one of the few places near the center of town where you can cross the river.
On a spring day in 1775, it was not peaceful there. British soldiers in woolen uniforms and full battle packs had trudged west from their encampment in Boston to look for munitions and some colonial leaders. Militia men of Massachusetts converged on the soldiers. In confusion, shots were fired.
Three British soldiers died at the bridge, and more died on the chaotic retreat to a city that had been hostile since they arrived after traveling 3000 miles by ship, a city where British colonists called themselves Americans, a place in which a bloody and brutal birthing of a nation was about to begin.
I am descended from the man who was the captain of the Watertown militia. When I was small, I envisioned him bravely defending the bridge from “Redcoats.” In a child’s simplicity, Americans were good. Their British cousins, bad.
Years later, I remember my father, who fought in Europe at 18, who went eastward across the Atlantic to defend the principle that might does not make right. He went because he should, he killed men there, and he came home a gentle, quiet man who would brook no pride in anything involving death.
My great aunt (his aunt) first told me about that day in 1775 as she had heard it as a child. The man got word before dawn that the British were marching, he and his men walked to the main road from Boston westward to Lexington and Concord, and they waited, watching the British march quietly west.
The retreat back to Boston was bloodiest for both sides late in the afternoon in that town, Menotomy (its native name, now Arlington), so close to the safety, or escape, that Cambridge and Charlestown offered.
Someone came to the farm the next morning and told his wife and six children that he was dead. The oldest son hitched an ox-cart and brought his father’s body home. The father’s name was Joseph Coolidge, he was in his early 40s, and I named my son for him. He wasn’t a hero, but he went when called, he did his duty, and he died. Neither my Joseph nor I am more or less for being descended from him, but I wanted my son to become a man he would be proud of. I live wanting to be a woman he and my father would be proud of.
We celebrate Veteran’s Day on November 11th. We have this holiday, we have democracy, because generations of people were willing to kill, to be maimed, or to die that we might live. The holiday was originally called Armistice Day because the hostilities of World War I closed at 11 a.m. November 11, 1918, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The treaty ending the “war to end all wars” was signed in 1919. An even bloodier, uglier war erupted 20 years later.
One year my husband and I visited the bridge on a late autumn day. No one else was there, the obelisk erected to commemorate “The shot heard round the world” stood silent, and I looked to my left at the stone that marked the British dead. I realized two things. First, it did not just honor them, two men were buried there. (The third soldier was buried in the town center, possibly because he was injured at the bridge and died later.) Second, small red paper poppies were bright against the muted colors of soil and stone and tree.
Armistice Day is known as Remembrance Day in Britain. The poppies, as brightly red as the blood of the men who died by the thousands in Flanders’ fields, mark the fact the dead are remembered, they are honored. They did not die in vain though many were buried without a name.
I don’t know who brought the poppies to Concord that year, but I hope in some way the men buried there know they were not forgotten. The three men, all privates in an infantry regiment, have names, James Hall, Thomas Smith and Patrick Gray. I don’t know who is buried at the bridge and who in town, but it doesn’t matter. It matters that we remember.
My father once said a war truly ends only when those who lived it are gone, and others can reflect on it, analyze the politics, the warfare, the result. The Revolutionary War is long over, and that makes it easier for me to respect everyone who died. Some were brave, some were constrained by duty, all were probably frightened. A few could not face the challenge and ran. That was undoubtedly true in my father’s war as well, and in every other conflict.
We cannot look at war with reflection because so many wars are going on. Some we know because we have troops there and action is covered by our media. Others are fought in more remote areas that aren’t in the media’s focus. The racial, religious, and political reasons that drive men, women, and children to kill men, women, and children have no language, yet are the same in every language.
There is an “Us,” and we are right, and there is a “Them.” They are not only in the wrong but usually vilified in language that makes them less than human. It is easier to kill someone less human than you, at least until night comes and you hear their cries, see their blood, and know that ultimately you do not fight for a cause, although you pray yours is right, you fight for one another.
In respect for my father, for everyone who did, does, or will fight for other people to be free and to live in safety, I bow my head. Today it is in sorrow. Perhaps, one day, it will be because we see that war will truly end, not in the silence of mass death, but in a living peace.
Until then, every day is remembrance day.
Elizabeth Coolidge-Stolz, MD/ (c) HealingWoman