
First, I must recognize that today is Veteran’s Day. Armistice Day.[1] I lived in Belgium for a year. This poppy brooch is from Flanders Fields. Every city, every village, has memorials to soldiers and civilians killed in the Great War. In the nature reserve and fields near my home were old craters from explosive shells, softened by time into small ponds. The bucolic landscape, the unassuming people are impossible to reconcile with the No Man’s Land of trench warfare. I was thanked, as a American, for the role my country played in the conclusion of the war, and for providing flour—food—for a starving population that had been occupied by hostile forces for years. It is a thanks I have not earned, but I accept on behalf of others, many of whose graves are dutifully tended today and throughout the year. I do not understand the impulse to war. This aggression. The impulse to hurt and control. So much hurt and sorrow. Defense, I can understand. And like Captain Moroni, I would kill to protect my children. But I have not sent them off to die. I don’t know how to do that. As a student of ancient Greek, I read Xenophon’s Anabasis, about the march of ten thousand Greek mercenaries to the interior of Babylon. Two other famous works by Xenophon are The Art of Horsemanship[2] and The Calvary Commander.[3] In them, Xenophon talks about the selection and training of war horses.…