SOLDIER

More than a hundred years ago on Tuesday, there was a parade on Main Street in my hometown, to celebrate the armistice. Father Thomas Comerford was at the head of the parade. It was said of him, in jest, that he was “the last absolute monarch in the western world.” There really was not any distinction then between the town and the parish. Father Comerford once, for example, stationed a policeman — Irish, obviously — outside of the church during Mass, to collar anybody who left early. He also spent a lot of his family money to build a handsome three-story parish hall, with a library and reading room, a billiards room, meeting rooms, and a combination of basketball court and auditorium with a large stage for putting on plays. There he was, though, on that cold day in November, and behind him marched the American Legion, and the Knights of Father Mathew (an Irish temperance league), and I think the Girl Scouts — the photograph I’ve seen doesn’t tell me, but I can say that the parade stretched for at least a mile. It was what we called it still when I was a boy: Armistice Day. The “war to end all wars” was over, and of course it did not end all wars. My father’s father, an Italian immigrant, fought on the American side. I have seen a handsome studio photograph of him in uniform, framed behind an oval glass, such as people, even the poor, used to have made.

Our Word of the Week, in honor of that day, which is now called Veterans’ Day, is soldier. My father and all of my uncles were soldiers, because in those days most men did their stint in the Army or, more rarely, one of the other services. When he was a sergeant, the Army sent my father to Germany, where a lot of American soldiers were stationed, because the year was 1956, not all that long after the second World War came to its end, and West Germany had to rebuild and to protect herself against the aggressions of the Soviet bloc in the east. During that time, he went to visit his uncles, aunts, and cousins in the Italian village of Caserta Vecchia. And when I finally went there myself in 1983, my great-uncle Luigi had a couple of dog-eared black-and-white photographs of my father standing on the rise of land overlooking the miles-long embankment down to the plains below. Everybody in those days loved a soldier, and the Italians were probably the friendliest of all the Europeans to the Americans. But in general, the attitude was one of admiration. My mother used to say that women liked the Army, because the Army took boys and made them into men. And women do want men, not boys, though you can never quite take all of the boy out of a man, not if he’s any fun, nor would you want to.

Well, that was the attitude then. What it is now, I don’t know. Much depends on where you are. When I was at Princeton, it was all the rage to try to prevent the R.O.T.C. from recruiting on campus. That was a part of the snobbishness popular at the time, not from Italian-Americans like me, or from people who came from middle America, but from the elites, or a certain noisy division of them. The Army, in the 1980’s, started to promote itself by commercials focusing on individualism: “Be all that you can be” was the slogan. But in this respect I think of what John Ruskin said about professions to which we pay special honor, or ought to. Obviously, one of them is that of the soldier, who as soon as he dons his uniform says, implicitly, that he will put his life on the line for his country. More than 100,000 American soldiers in World War I did more than that. They died in that war. We honor the soldier, says Ruskin, because we know that if we “put him in a fortress breach, with all the pleasures of the world behind him, and only death and his duty in front of him, he will keep his face to the front; and he knows that his choice may be put to him at any moment — and has beforehand taken his part — virtually takes such part continually — does, in reality, die daily.”

Other professions, says Ruskin, are deserving of honor inasmuch as they involve the complete submission of one’s personal desires, welfare, reputation, or position to some ultimate value. The doctor does not leave his post in time of plague. The judge does not decide on any grounds other than law. The clergyman would prefer to be rejected by all men than to teach error. Even the merchant, if he is to be honored and not just looked upon as selfish, would prefer to lose money than to put out a bad product or to fail to complete the terms of a contract. I wish I could believe that college professors were more like soldiers and less like ambitious politicians or self-promoters or cynics who can hardly sacrifice themselves for truth, since they don’t believe in truth in the first place. Better that you should be run out of your college than that you should bow and scrape to falsehood.

Our word soldier is an interesting one, I think, though it seems at first glance to cut against what I’ve said above. It comes from Old French soudier, for an infantryman — remember that for a long time after William the Conqueror, the English armies were going to be led by men whose main language was Norman French. That French word comes from late Latin soldarius, so named because the man in the ranks would be paid in solidi, Roman coins. They were initially minted in gold, but by the time the soldarii were earning them, they were much debased. In the Middle Ages, the Latin word solidus denoted an English shilling, one twentieth of a pound sterling. In modern Italian, the plural soldi is used as a general colloquial term for money, but also for pocket change, which sure isn’t going to be gold or, nowadays, even silver. Very few men ever got rich from being soldiers. If you’ve ever read C. M. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series (and I recommend them highly), you’ll recall that one of the constants in that brave captain’s life is that he hardly ever has any money.

So, a tip of the hat to all soldiers: not terrorists or bravos or thugs, but soldiers. God bless you and yours.

“Armistice,” Jules Adler. Public Domain.

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