This matter of vandals attacking Civil War headstones (see yesterday's news section) is not one I can shake off. It reminded me of these words of a French war widow written in 1919 about the unburied fallen, her husband among them:

He will lie for days and days, forgotten, on the bare earth, with a smashed skull or chest, and German crows will steal away his dearest memories. Nothing! He will have nothing! Not even a pauper's grave, not even a stone, not even a cross. ... Christ could be resurrected from the tomb, for he had a tomb. As for him, he will have the earth, like the animals.

Vandalization reduces the war dead to nothing, to having earth "like the animals." And the cemetery vandals in yesterday's story were repeaters.

There is some little comfort in this report about the painstaking work of a man who repairs headstones, Civil War headstones, and old funerary monuments generally.

Thank you, sir. Unfortunately for the Civil War dead and for ourselves, this is the society we live in.