Editor’s note: This essay was published in the magazine Chronicles in February, 1988.  A few small changes have been changed to bring it up to date.

One of the most moving war memorials I ever saw was on a wall outside the old Reading Room of the British Museum in London. It was a simple plaque with the names of a hundred or so librarians killed in the Great War. Librarians. Think about it.

That plaque makes a point, doesn’t it, if not perhaps the one it was intended to make. We may or may not be better off for it, but these young librarians were sent to their death for the sake of posterity – that is, for us. To forget them would be an act of shameful ingratitude.

Some years ago, hiking in the hills above Lake Como, my wife and I came across another memorial, a little chapel dedicated to the memory of local lads who died in World War II. It was decorated with freshly cut flowers. The boys it commemorated had fought for Mussolini.

Now, to have left that beautiful place to die in the sands of North Africa or the snows of Russia — well, obviously, the right or wrong of their cause is important, but why shouldn’t their parents and girlfriends have built that chapel? Who could fail to be touched that, forty years later, they still brought flowers and burned candles?

I’m told that the Vietnam Memorial attracts more visitors than any other memorial site in Washington. I’m sure that many who go there believe that the cause for which those servicemen died was futile, even wrong, but surely no one goes to gloat or to scoff. A. E. Housman wrote, in the voice of those killed in another war,

Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure,  is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young

The librarians, the Fascist conscripts, the Vietnam draftees — no doubt all were scared young men. The memorials honor them for facing death despite that. We can sympathize with their causes or not, but we shouldn’t deny those who wish to remember their kin and countrymen.

These thoughts came to mind one spring as I was walking across the beautiful, flowering campus of the Southern university where I teach, and passed the pedestal where “Silent Sam” usually stands. Sam is a statue of a Confederate infantryman, a memorial to the university’s alumni who died fighting for the Confederacy. That month the statue had been removed for a much-needed cleaning after years of exposure to pigeons and rival football fans with paint cans.

By the empty pedestal stood a young man, obviously showing a visiting couple around. All were Yankees, by their accents. “They’ve sent it off to be cleaned,” I heard him say. “Eight thousand dollars! Can you believe it?”

Well, yes, as a matter of fact I can.

In Walker Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett, a Mississippian, tells this story:

When I was at Princeton, I blew up a Union monument. It was only a plaque hidden in the weeds behind the chemistry building, presented by the class of 1885 in memory of those who made the supreme sacrifice to suppress the infamous rebellion, or something like that. It offended me. I synthesized a liter of trinitrotoluene in chemistry lab and blew it up one Saturday afternoon. But no one ever knew what had been blown up. It seemed I was the only one who knew the monument was there. It was thought to be a Harvard prank.

Will was wrong to do what he did. But Princeton was more wrong not to know what he’d done. Maybe Percy is slandering Ivy Leaguers here, but I doubt it. Say this for the South: if somebody blows up Silent Sam, it will be noticed.

And I’m afraid, in fact, that it’s only a matter of time before somebody does come gunning for him. Many Americans, black and white, have begun to object to official state displays of the Confederate battle flag, like that on the  Mississippi state flag. (Some time ago the Ole Miss administration dropped the battle flag as an official school symbol; I gather because coaches said it repelled black recruits — first things first.) In Maryland I hear there is renewed agitation to change the pro-Confederate words of “Maryland, My Maryland” (“Huzzah! She spurns the northern scum,” for example). These are just a few examples — there are fresh conflicts all the time.

I’m tempted to say that it’s nice we’ve solved all the real problems of race relations in these parts and can now take up the symbolic ones, but that’s just because I’m a smart-aleck. I’m actually sympathetic. It’s simply undeniable that to many of our citizens the symbols of the Confederacy don’t stand for freedom and self-determination, or for sacrifice and honor and duty, or even for hell-raising, good-timing, don’t-tread-on-me rebelry, but for white supremacy, plain and simple. Given that, they’re entitled to their objections. I’ve belatedly come around to the view that we ought to get government out of the act and let those who value the Confederate heritage celebrate it privately.

But Silent Sam is a different matter. Like the Vietnam Memorial, he doesn’t honor a cause; rather, he honors some brave men who died in one. And notice I said “in one,” not “for one.” We can’t know what motives impelled these men, but we do know that they were defending their families and their homes. And I mean their homes: not the shores of Tripoli, not even the halls of Montezuma, but, say, New Bern, North Carolina.

True, Sam was put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy at a time when nearly all of the university’s alumni, students, and governors saw the Lost Cause as a glorious one. That’s no longer so, and some want us to acknowledge that somehow. Fair enough, but surely we can find better ways to recognize that change than by denying our alumni their memorial.

Maybe we can learn from still another memorial, an extraordinarily sweet and fitting one, in the chapel of New College, Oxford. It just lists the names of the scores of graduates who died for their country in the First World War — including a half-dozen whose country was Germany. That memorial honors the dead, and speaks well of the living, too.