WAR & PEACE: What Did It Get You?

A rumpled, bulky, droop-mustached man stood beside the white dazzle of the Unknown Soldier’s marble tomb in Arlington Cemetery. He too had been a soldier—Sergeant Alvin C. York, the Tennessee mountaineer who, 23 years ago, singlehanded, disabled a German machine-gun battery and with seven privates killed or captured 152 of its defenders. He spoke: “Liberty is not merely something the veterans inherited. Liberty is something they fought to keep. . . .

“There are those in our country today who ask me and the other veterans who fought in World War No. i: ‘What did it get you?’ Let me answer them now. It got me twenty-three years of living in America where a humble citizen from the mountains of Tennessee can stand on the same platform with the President of the United States. It got me twenty-three years of living in a country where the Goddess of Liberty is printed on men’s hearts, and not only on the coins in their pockets.

“People who ask us that question, ‘What did it get you?’ forget one thing. True, we fought the last war to make the world safe for democracy, and we did for a while.

“The thing they forget is that liberty and freedom and democracy are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once—and then stop. Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them.”