Finneran: The Stone Still Weeps
Friday, May 08, 2015
That date, May 8th 1945, was the day upon which the surviving German military leaders signed the terms of their unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces. It was no doubt a very happy day for those families that had survived Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror. A colossal force of Russian, British, and American soldiers, armed to the teeth and motivated by a righteous cause had brought the appalling Thousand Year Reich to its knees, well short of its self-proclaimed span of years. It was a good war to fight and the good guys won. Even German citizens knew that the good guys won, particularly those kind and generous American boys who looked with pity and in puzzlement on those beaten, starving, bedraggled survivors.
Sensible Germans, and there were many, had survived an internal savagery rarely seen in the annals of history. Many Germans knew in their hearts that the war would end very badly once the United States entered the fight. But the rape and murder of mothers, wives and daughters and the torture of fathers and sons ensured a sullen silence and a grudging service. Such were the methods of Mr. Hitler and the barbaric SS.
Hitler, stubborn, stupid, and savage to the end, rejected all advice, subjecting the German people to the vicious realities of modern war. Thus he, and his people, reaped what he had sown. And that is why the stone still weeps, asking the timeless question—“why”?
The stone sits on the green playing fields of Milton Academy in silent and eloquent tribute to the brutal cost of a brutal war. Read the inscription and let your mind drift over the facts—David Dennis, Class of ’42, killed in combat, age 20, Italy, 1945.
David Dennis, all of twenty years old. He had graduated from Milton Academy in 1942 and he, like millions of young American boys, had gone off to fight the war. Almost all American boys had gone to fight, including President Roosevelt’s sons. It was a national cause in a global conflict and it consumed millions of young men. David Dennis was one of them. That the war would end less than a month after he was killed only adds to the heartbreak borne by a German bullet.
His yearbook tells us that he played tennis and that he sang in the school choir. The stone tells us that he was just a boy. Imagination tells us that he was killed by a German boy, probably no older than David and as likely to have been killed himself as part of Hitler’s national suicide pact. Such were the horrors of WW II, when boys were slaughtered for the lurid fantasies of lunatics.
For more than thirty years I have jogged on Milton Academy’s outdoor track, trying to stay in shape and occasionally training for marathons. I still chase my grandchildren around up there on sunny afternoons, the kind of joyous activity and exquisite afternoons that David Dennis never felt. Someday I will explain the stone and its significance to them. But for now I pass in silence, for the stone still weeps and I weep back.
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