Remembrance in a foreign field

Here, amid elm trees, boxwoods and roses, is a set of war monuments no one will ever consider dismantling. Here are 3,732 Latin crosses and 81 Stars of David, standing in quiet but eloquent testimony to the American contribution to victory in World War II Europe.

Here are buried those lost in the skies over the British Isles, in preparation for D-Day and in the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.

Here the wind whispers from the fields, the visitors walk in solemnity.

In the week leading to Armistice Day marking the end of World War I — we now call it Veterans Day, today — these grave markers in the Cambridge American Cemetery tell much of the story of the conflict that followed a mere 21 years later.

The names inscribed on these memorial markers tell much of the story of America, which helped the Allies prevail not only because of the industrial might of the United States, but also because of the gritty military work performed by soldiers, sailors and aviators from diverse heritages.

And if you read aloud the names on a nearby wall of remembrance saluting those whose bodies were never found — read them slowly, one by one — you may conclude that they have a rhythm and a cadence that sounds like America, a liberation libretto that goes like this:

Maliszewski, Malounek, Manley, Mann, Mapes, Marcus, Marshall.

One of the names on that wall strikes a poignant chord: Kennedy, Joseph P. Jr.

He was the oldest World War II-era Kennedy brother, the one Joseph P. Kennedy, a wartime American ambassador to the Court of St. James, groomed for the presidency — a destiny which was passed on to the second son, who fought in the Pacific as the older brother flew in the European theater.

Young Joe Kennedy died in 1944 in a daring mission in an aircraft loaded with more than 21,000 pounds of high explosives that were intended to destroy massive guns the Germans had deployed near Calais on the French coast.

This is a serene corner of England, grand green lawns surrounded by farmlands, the great Ely Cathedral visible 14 miles in the distance, the only sound audible the other afternoon coming from workers trimming hedges.

Here is a corner of a foreign field that is forever America.

A statue of a Coast Guardsman, a soldier, an aviator and a sailor stand watch over the 472-foot-long granite Wall of the Missing where young Kennedy’s name, among many others, is carved.

The legend across the wall reads:

The Americans whose names here appear were part of the price that free men for a second time in the century have been forced to pay to defend human liberty and rights.

There is a great democracy in death — experience teaches us that, and so does Thomas Gray’s famous 1751 elegy, which carries the phrase “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife” — and here we see democracy in action.

In this field the enlisted men and the officers are side by side, the privates first class and the first lieutenants at rest together.

Thomas Gray, again: “For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn.”

Here, too, are remembered some of the unknown but not unmourned soldiers of World War II.

Between the graves of Clyde Simmons of Missouri and Chester Romanosky of Pennsylvania is this marker:

Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.

The meaning of these markers, and of this place:

All who shall hereafter live in freedom will be here reminded that to these men and their comrades we owe a debt to be paid with grateful remembrance of their sacrifice and with the high resolve that the cause for which they died shall live eternally.

The words are Dwight Eisenhower’s. The sentiment is all of ours, this week of remembrance, and always.