ICYMI, Monday's links are here, and include Vonnegut's letter home after imprisonment in an underground slaughterhouse (Slaughterhouse Five, specifically) during the Dresden bombing, what happens when you swallow gum, laser helicopters, and Beatrix Potter's pet pothead bunny (on which she based Peter Rabbit).
ICYMI, Friday's links are here, and include the tactical order of dressing (so you'll always be battle-ready), a history of tug-of-war fatalities, an Australian town on sale for $750,000, and the giant radioactive frog steaks 1913 newspapers predicted we'd be eating.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.**
- Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen
Until 1967 known as "Decoration Day" and formerly celebrated on 30 May before "long-weekend" national holidays were introduced the next year, various Memorial Days were first observed after the Civil War in both the North and South, when the graves of the fallen were decorated with flowers and bunting. The first widespread use of the 30 May date took place in 1868 as an observance organized by the Union Army veterans' organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, and this custom gradually spread to the rest of the country and was later expanded to honor the dead of all the nation's wars.
"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived." )
* N.B. Longfellow's "Decoration Day" is from his collection, In the Harbor (1882).
** The fourth verse of (Robert) Laurence Binyon's "For the Fallen" (1914) - generally followed by the phrase, "Lest we forget" - is now part of virtually every war memorial service in Britain and her former colonies.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, mors et fugacem persequitur virum. nec parcit imbellis iuventae poplitibus timidove tergo.
~ Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace), Carmina, III, ii, 13
(To die for the fatherland is a sweet and admirable thing.* Death is at the heels even of the runaway, nor spares the haunches and back of the coward and malingerer.)