War and Heroes

Memorial Day – still known as Decoration Day through my high school years – is a sobering day, though we celebrate it with barbecues and pool parties. This year, Facebook posted soldiers’ pics and their lives’ summaries (most of which were quite short summaries) throughout the weekend so that when you least expected it, up popped the photo of a young face, usually in uniform and often staring at the camera with a jungle or a burnt-out town in the background. All those young men. (mostly young, mostly men) All that war.

Several of my fictional historical heroes are military veterans. Think the American Civil War’s John Rock Davis (Lily’s Sister) and Si Carpenter (What We Carry With Us) and World War I’s Gus Davis (Smiling at Heaven). But none of my books takes you into the actual war itself more than Magnificent Farewell, written from the perspective of a woman ambulance driver on the European continent during the First World War. The war is as much a character in the novel as Meg or Lucy Rose or Captain Mac Chesney. So in memory of all American military veterans who lost their lives during our country’s many wars and whose bodies lie far from home, I offer the Kindle version of Magnificent Farewell free from May 31 through June 4. Take a look into a continent at war and pray for peace. (Visit my website’s bookstore and click on the cover of Magnificent Farewell to go directly to Amazon, where you’ll find the free kindle book.)

“War broke: and now the Winter of the world / With perishing great darkness closes in.

For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece, / and summer blazed her glory out with Rome,

An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home, / A slow grand age, and rich with wild increase.

But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need / Of sowing for new Spring, and blood for seed.”

Wilfred Owen, British soldier and poet, killed in battle Nov. 4, 1918, one week before World War I ended.