We are now a month past the D-day commemorations, and yesterday I got news that the last of my Dad’s five old close buddy/comrades (Colonel “Red,” who had parachuted into Normandy a sergeant and been promoted Captain by the war’s end) had died. From the 1980s on I always wrote to the six of them (Dad too!) at D-day and Vets Day. A kind surviving nephew wrote me the news “Red died happy and surrounded by love last March”). I was shocked at how hard this news struck me. These men were a type of moral sea-anchor for me, embodiments of what I look at as the brave lost world of my childhood.
So I stopped my day and listened (it is an old friend) to Britten’s War Requiem. Here is a central passage, the terrifyingly gentle poetry of Wilfred Owens “Let Us Sleep Now” sung together with the In Paradisum of the latin Requiem Mass:
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