Nathan Goldberg, Secretary of a local Rotary Club wrote in the weekly bulletin on Armistice Day the following:
“In Flanders field where poppies grow”
“Between the crosses row on row”
“And how this thought comes back to us now! While the fires of memory burn fiercely on a winter night --- while we at home sit in the privacy of a well-protected house --- while the rivers run red from war over there -- while the bursting shells still echo and over the battlefields the mist of murder still hangs low --- while the glory of victory sends back, through the air, its marching song of success --- there is over there a son sleeping.”
“And here is my thought:
If I could write for the world the last remnant of remembrance that the boy had before going to sleep, I should be able to teach the world the way to die, while reaching the world with rules on how to live.”
“If it were possible for my pen to frame a thought to help soften the blow, this thought would find voice much like this: God only broke apart the wires of the cage and set your soldier boy free.”
“On this Armistice Day let us go together out into the world, out to open gates of Memory --- and there hear a chorus of comrades singing in the West --- Voices of Our [sleeping] Boys all singing the great anthem ‘America’.”
One cannot possibly comprehend the anguish felt by Rotarian Nathan Goldberg, and others in the club at that time, whose parents and grandparents had suffered so horribly in the “Great War”, or were about to, because of “an accident of birth”, as Churchill put it.
Nathan probably was not aware of the atrocities the Nazis were already perpetrating on the Jews at that time in Germany, Austria, France, and Poland, and certainly not the toll they would eventually take on the Jewish nation, but, while his thoughts of the past stirred the hearts and souls of his fellow Rotarians and others in the early days of World War II, they eerily predicted the Holocaust that was to be even worse.
As we take up the responsibilities of leadership in the 21st century, may we remember and be inspired by the actions and writings of the past, and truly build on and defend, if necessary, a “Century of Changing Lives in Marshall --- And Beyond”.