The Weight of 9,000 Marble Crosses

In America, we don't really know war. It's a thing that we've heard of and visited on occasion, but no one living has ever experienced it in their homes. We go to war; it doesn't come to us. We have felt the cost in absence, in the brothers, fathers, husbands, and friends that never came home or never came home the same, but never in war's presence. War is a burden we have picked up willingly, not the crushing force that marks the buildings in Paris with bullet holes and scars the beaches of Normandy with craters.
Our cemetery is a shrine to those who willingly fought for freedom, a commemoration of willing, selfless sacrifice--and it is beautiful. White crosses for every soldier dot line the field. Names, ranks, and states. "Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms, known but to God." Even the unknown soldiers are thought to be known to Someone, they are honored, and best of all, they rest. They rest in the peace of a perfect field by a bright blue ocean, and the reverent victory of effective, selfless sacrifice.
The German cemetery is not a shrine, but a warning. Dark crosses dot the field in groups of four in rows of flat headstones, two bodies to a stone. Name, as in our cemetery, as well as rank. But

then--age. The loss of years that should have been lived grows larger with every step down the row of young men that died at twenty for a cause that failed, a cause they may or may not have believed in. The mood is somber. These are not the villains, but the victims of this terrible machine called war, stripped of any individuality and placed as cogs and pistons in a well-oiled weapon, both the tools and the supplies for the end product: death.
Both cemeteries represent the cost of the same deadly game of chess--whether the pieces be white or black marble. I cannot regret the price we payed to send our troops to Normandy. The inscriptions in our cemetery are correct, and we saved more lives than we lost. But the weight of these pieces is terrible, and we cannot take the game lightly. My worry after seeing these things is for our generation in the USA. We do not know war. If then, it stood on our doorsteps, would we know to recognize it? Would we let it in? Perhaps, if we take a moment to take in the weight of these 9,000 marble crosses, we will know, and if we once more choose to bear the weight, it will be with a full understanding of what it means to go to war.