The muse is a bit late today. I spent part of the morning learning about a battle that took place in the Netherlands during World War II. I'm smiling as I write this because that statement would have been ridiculous to me if I had read it yesterday. I probably couldn't have imagined why I would even be searching out such a thing, let alone find myself completely engrossed in it. But that is how the internet works.
Things you find looking up other things....led me to do some searching for a family name at a war memorial site and lo and behold there it was.I happened upon three men whose photographs were on a wall at a museum...and one of them is probably my great grandfather's nephew. I entered a world completely foreign to me, starting with that photograph.
Let me back up to a conversation I had with a friend last Monday where I couldn't quite understand his absolute fascination with going to Civil War sites and learning about all the events that happened there. Walking the ground where hard battles were faught, reading endless accounts from dozens of books that he owns, and never losing his excitement over a topic that I just sort of grazed over in High School and hadn't revisited it since. Unless you count the movie Gettysburg. But that was a long time ago, too.
And so I wrote to one of the contributors of the museum and literally overnight I have all this information about this long lost cousin, who helped liberate a town in the Netherlands, and who was buried with honor at a beautiful cemetary, and whose fellow soldiers to this day are remembered through a beautiful museum and war memorials.
Then...through the magic of Google...this led to reading up on the fateful day in a particular battle, which led to finding out whole books are written about the journey he and his fellow infantrymen made, and there are pictures of their equipment and tanks, and even accounts up to-- which would be my cousin's very last day of life......when he and the others tried to make a bridge across a river.... at a very crucial point, and he drowned. But other soldiers DID make it and did manage to save that town and to this day people are grateful for all these men had done for them and post their names and photographs in honor.
And I think to myself....it would be nice to go to Holland. Maybe see the museum, the grave...and a trip perhaps to the river.
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