On May 27, 2004 two days before it was dedicated, Victoria and I visited the World War II Memorial. We entered it through the Atlantic arch. On the Normandy inscription someone had left an album of Normandy photographs. Attached to the album was a zip-locked bag that contained three stones from the Normandy beach. On the inscription marking the Battle of the Bulge there was a red rose. And there Victoria and I remembered her father.

Robert Bracken White was born and raised in Detroit and had spent two years in Michigan majoring in aeronautical engineering, but in the fall of 1942 he transferred to Wheaton College in Illinois to study music. There he formed the beginning of a close and life-long friendship with Evan Welsh, later a beloved chaplain of Wheaton College. But the Wheaton idyll was short-lived. When he returned to campus after Christmas vacation, his induction papers were in his CPO box.

He entered the war as a member of the Headquarters Battery 285^th Field Observation Battalion deployed in Holland. His job was to spot the flash of enemy guns and, using instruments, to pinpoint their location. The coordinates would be radioed back to the artillery so that they could target the location and take it out.

On December 14, 1944 the Battle of the Bulge began. When it ended six weeks later, only 14 of the 144 men in his battalion were still alive.

What happened to his unit is a story told in the movie “Saints and Soldiers” (see the previous post). It’s also told in “The Making of a Missionary Doctor” a book about his early years written a few years after his death in 1982. Written by his sister, Frances White, a Professor of English at Wheaton during the war, she writes, “The responsibility of his battalion was to reconnoiter ahead of the infantry. Unfortunately, they sometimes had the experience of getting behind enemy lines before they were aware of their position. This was precisely what happened to your father’s battalion during the Battle of the Bulge, when they ran straight into a line of German tanks.”

Around 1200 (noon) on December 17, 1944, the 285^th FOB having road-marched to the area of Malmédy, Belgium, armed with rifles and machine guns, was surrounded by German tanks and infantry. The clash was brief but violent. The battalion commander surrendered. The American POWs were herded into a field near the Baugnez crossroads, and the tank crew mowed them down. The men of the 285th who survived that day did so despite their wounds or by feigning dead in the snow. History calls it the Malmédy Massacre.

What had spared my father-in-law? On December 12 a courier came up to him and asked if he was Robert Bracken White and handed him orders that he was to return with the courier to England. Officers with his skill were needed to train others for field observation duty in the Pacific Theater.

On January 8, 1945 his family received a letter from him dated December 25, 1944. He wrote:

Dear Mom & Papa & the kids,
Know you are anxiously awaiting word from me—so rest assured I am quite well, but you probably have no idea where I am. I cannot now tell you the reasons why I am where I am or what’s cooking but will shortly be able to make things clear. Am now back from the front in Germany and am in England at the replacement depot. It is truly miraculous that I am here in the light of what’s happened on the front. I just cannot understand God’s love for undeserving me. I really hated to leave my boys in spite of the danger. I had grown so attached to them. I feel quite sure that a great many of my boys were either killed, captured or wounded from bits of news I have been able to gather. How I pray so earnestly for them.

So it happened that later that spring, as Frances White writes, “A handsome young soldier strode into a Wheaton classroom and kissed and embraced his sister, much to the amusement of her class. Unannounced, Rob had come to pay me a visit.” She continues, “The following months were full indeed, for in addition to his ordinary duties, he assumed the responsibilities of visiting the families and sweethearts of his comrades who had laid down their lives on the battlefields of Europe. Although this self-appointed task was a difficult one, Rob wanted to do what he could for the loved ones his men had left behind. And, besides offering the customary words of comfort, he found opportunity to speak of the one who was so moved by the death of his friend that he wept openly at the grave of Lazarus.”

Looking around me in that plaza dedicated to remembering our World War II dead, I could see the living and I wondered at their stories. Veterans were bending down to touch the inscription of the battle they had been in, their children and grandchildren taking photographs. I tried to speak to Victoria but all I could do was begin sentences I couldn’t finish. I had to hold my face in my hands.

I was wearing my clericals. We were about to leave when I heard a voice say, “Father!” I turned. There was an old veteran offering his hand to me which I took. “Father,” he said cheerfully, “I want to thank you. I have the greatest respect for people like you, for what you do,” he said. “To have someone like you with me meant everything once. It still does.”

He thanked God for me but it wasn’t me personally he was grateful for but for a priest — a particular one but all of them whose job in the world is to be a sign of the One who said he’d be with us always — that by my collar I signified. I reached to find words hard to come by and chose two my mother taught me. “Thank you,” I said. I introduced Victoria. I gave him my name. He gave us his. His name is Larry Bush. I’ll never forget him.

The notion of Christ as a young warrior entering the battle on our behalf is one that occurs frequently in Old and Middle English literature. One well-known example of it is in the fourteenth century poem called The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Ploughman by William Langland. Here is how the poet visualizes Jesus coming to Jerusalem and the Cross:

A man came riding along barefoot on an ass, unarmed and without spurs. He looked like the Good Samaritan — or was it Piers the Ploughman? He was young and lusty, like a squire coming to be dubbed knight and receive his golden spurs and cut-away shoes. Then Faith, who was standing at a window, cried out, “See! The Son of David!” — like a herald proclaiming a knight who comes to the tournament… .

So I asked Faith the meaning of all this stir. “Who was going to joust in Jerusalem?”

“Jesus,” he said, “to win back Piers’ fruit, which the Devil has claimed.”

“Is Piers in this city?” I asked.

He looked at me keenly and answered, “Jesus, out of chivalry, will joust in Piers’ coat-of-arms, and wear His Helmet and mail, Human Nature; He will ride in Piers’ doublet, that no one here may know Him as Almighty God. For whatever blows He receives, they cannot wound Him in his Divine Nature.”

This is a picture of Christ’s work on the Cross. It has warrant in the promise in Eden of the One who would bruise the head of the serpent and himself be wounded. What is going on in the Cross is close quarters combat. Piers the Ploughman writes about it in his commonplace book. And Piers the Ploughman is reading it.