Fifty years ago, I experienced many memorable events while in combat during World War II. The bitter freezing weather that engulfed Belgium was as horrible as weather can get, and one incident has haunted me all these years.

We were in a farm area where there had been a recent battle. In every direction foxholes were empty just the way they were left. K-ration boxes and cigarette butts littered the former battleground. We saw a farmhouse and decided to check it out. Arriving at the building, I was startled to see several dead soldiers lying where they had fallen. Just a few feet from where the Germans had been entrenched, I saw a dead young American. It looked like it was a surprise encounter, resulting in a firefight.

As I looked at the dead soldiers, my eyes were drawn specifically to that one young man, his face buried in the mud and melting snow. I noticed a billfold halfway out of his back pocket. I gently pulled it out and found his name and address. He was from somewhere in Oklahoma. Then, gently, I replaced it. Regretfully, I failed to make a written record of his name. If I had, I could have contacted his family once the war was over to offer some consolation.

He is now buried, I am sure, in a military cemetery somewhere in Belgium, and a white cross with his name and state mark his grave. Today, as I remember this incident, the words written after the war by the American poet Archibald MacLeish come to me.

The young dead soldiers do not speak.
Nevertheless they are heard in the
still houses.
(Who has not heard them?)

They have a silence that speaks for
them at night
And when the clock counts.

They say,
We were young. We have died.
Remember us.

They say,
We have done what we could
But until it is finished it is not done.

They say,
We have given our lives
But until it is finished no one can
know what our lives gave.

They say,
Our deaths are not ours,
They are yours,
They will mean what you make them.

They say,
Whether our lives and our deaths
were for peace and a new hope
Or for nothing
We cannot say.
It is you who must say this.

They say,
We leave you our deaths,
Give them their meaning,
Give them an end to the war and a
true peace,
Give them a victory that ends the
war and a peace afterwards,
Give them their meaning.

We were young, they say.
We have died.
Remember us.

Leo J. Ghirardi was raised in Doric Lodge No. 205, Morgan City, Louisiana, and became a 32° member of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Scottish Rite Bodies in 1960. He has conducted some 76 Masonic memorial services for his Lodge. A veteran of World War II, he first saw front-line duty at the Battle of the Bulge. He is retired from the paint business and has applied for patents on several inventions.