Opinion: Memorial Day in my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans of conflicts ranging from the second World War to the Gulf War march round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the Fifth Graders. The band plays Anchors Aweigh, My Country 'Tis of Thee, God Bless America, and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens's Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way) - Billboard Number One, May 1970.
One of the town's Selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organisations, and then the Fifth Graders recite the Gettsyburg Address and the Great War's great poetry. There's a brief prayer and a three-gun salute, exciting the dogs and babies. Wreaths are laid. And then the crowd wends slowly up the hill to the Legion hut for ice cream, and a few veterans wonder, as they always do, if anybody understands what they did, and why they did it.
Before the first World War, it was called Decoration Day, a day for going to the cemetery and "strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defence of their country during the late rebellion". Some decorated the resting places of fallen family members, others adopted for a day the graves of those who died too young to leave any descendants.
I wish we still did that. Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory" are difficult to hear in the din of the modern world, and one of the best ways to do it is to stand before an old headstone, read the name, and wonder at the young life compressed into those brute dates. 1840-1862. 1843-1864.
In my local cemetery, there's a monument over three graves, forebears of my hard-working assistant Tiffany, though I didn't know that at the time I first came across them. Turner Grant, his cousin John Gilbert and his sister's fiancé Charles Lovejoy had been friends since boyhood and all three enlisted on the same day. Charles died on March 5th 1863, Turner on March 6th, and John on March 11th. Nothing splendid or heroic. They were tentmates in Virginia, and there was an outbreak of measles in the camp.
For some reason, there was a bureaucratic mix-up and the army neglected to inform the families. Then, on their final journey home, the bodies were taken off the train at the wrong town. It was a Saturday afternoon and the stationmaster didn't want the caskets sitting there all weekend. So a man who knew where the Grants lived offered to take them up to the next town and drop them off on Sunday morning.
When he arrived, the family were at church, so he unloaded the coffins from his buggy and left without a word or a note to anyone. Imagine coming home from Sunday worship and finding three caskets waiting on the porch. Imagine being young Caroline Grant, and those caskets contain the bodies of your brother, your cousin and the man to whom you're betrothed.
That's a hell of a story behind the bald dates on three tombstones. If it happened today, maybe Caroline would be on with Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and the other network sob-sisters demanding proper compensation, and the truth about what happened, and why the politicians were covering it up. Maybe she'd form a group of victims' families. Maybe she'd call for a special commission to establish whether the government did everything it could to prevent disease outbreaks at army camps.
Maybe, when they got around to forming the commission, she'd be booing and chanting during the officials' testimony, as several of the 9/11 families did during Mayor Giuliani's testimony.
All wars are messy, and many of them seem small and unworthy even at the moment of triumph. The unkempt lice-infested Saddam yanked from his spider-hole last December is not so very different from the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, captured in May 1865 while skulking away in women's clothing, and thereafter depicted by gleeful northern cartoonists in hoop skirts, petticoats and crinolines.
Conquered and captured, an enemy shrivels, and you question what he ever had that necessitated such a sacrifice. The piercing clarity of war shades into the murky greys of post-war reconstruction. You think Iraq's a quagmire? Lincoln's "new birth of freedom" bogged down into a century-long quagmire of segregation, denial of civil rights, lynchings.
Does that mean the Civil War wasn't worth fighting? That, as Al Gore and other excitable types would say, Abe W. Lincoln lied to us?
Like the French Resistance, tiny in its day but of apparently unlimited manpower since the war ended, for some people it's not obvious which side to be on until the dust's settled. New York, for example, resisted the Civil War that my small town's menfolk were so eager to enlist in. The big city was racked by bloody riots against the draft. And you can sort of see the rioters' point. Over 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War - or about 1.8 per cent of the population. Today, if 1.8 per cent of the population were killed in war, there would be 5.4 million graves to decorate on Decoration Day.
But that's the difference between then and now: the loss of proportion. They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren't a victim culture. They had a lot of crummy decisions and bureaucratic screw-ups worth re-examining, but they weren't a nation that prioritised retroactive pseudo-legalistic self-flagellating vaudeville over all else. They had hellish setbacks but they didn't lose sight of the forest in order to obsess week after week on one tiny twig of one weedy little tree.
There is something not just ridiculous but unbecoming about a hyperpower 300 million strong whose elites - from the deranged former vice-president down - want the outcome of a war, and the fate of a nation, to hinge on one freaky jailhouse; elites who are willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it's pain-free, squeaky clean and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonours the memory of all those Americans supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day. Playing by Gore-Kennedy rules, the Union would have lost the Civil War, the rebels the Revolutionary War, and the colonists the French and Indian Wars. There would, in other words, be no America. Even in its grief, my part of New Hampshire understood that 141 years ago. Today's media and academy, the Democratic defeatists and Republican isolationists should understand it, too.