17 March, 2016
Houston
Pvt. Léon Yuratich, my great uncle, just as he left for Europe and the Great War.
Which war, you might ask? Well, sadly, it was a war so great and obscene that they called it "The War to End All Wars."
But it didn't. "It's all happened again, and again, and again, and again."
There's a song in my head called "No Man's Land." It is about someone who sits by the graveside of a 19-year-old boy who died in the war. Part of it goes:
"But here in this graveyard, it's still "No Man's Land":
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand,
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man...
And a whole generation that were butchered and damned!"
But to the dapper young man you see in the fading photograph, it was not the story you might think. This lad, the son of a Dalmatian oysterman and a French Créole farmwoman, indeed went to France, but since his native language was FRENCH, he had a valuable asset the military could put to good use.
So Léon became an interpreter, and spent the entire war in Paris, driving the American generals all around, and interpreting for them. This talent, his by accident of birth, spared him the horrors of No Man's Land. He does not lie in Flanders Field, beneath an endless row of white crosses. He did not return maimed, or blind, or crippled, or insane. Not Pvt. Yuratich.
Instead, he returned to the warm, tear-filled embraces of his mother and sisters. He lived to raise a family and live a good, long life.
To you he's a "stranger without even a name
Forever enshrined behind some old glass pane
In an old photograph, torn and tattered, and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame."
But to me, he will always be that jovial old man with his funny stories of a now-forgotten time in a faraway land.
