LETTERS: SPECIAL CEMETERY'S POWERFUL IMPACT

To the editor:

I was in Cape Girardeau recently, and a friend told me about a special cemetery. He though I might be interested in seeing it.

While I've never visited Flanders Fields -- the national cemetery in Belgium immortalized in the poem about the World War I dead who are buried there -- I can imagine what it must be like: Endless rows of white crosses, flowers and grass glowing in the wind; a voiceless pathos that decries the tragedy of war.

It must be like this place just off the interstate highway at the southern edge of this Missouri river town. At Flanders Fields, I suppose one might walk among the crosses speculating about those buried there, the young Americans whose lives were ended prematurely by a war of someone else's making.

This one might have been a mighty general had he lived. Another a famous doctor. Yet another a missionary ministering to the sick and dying. All had hopes, dreams and futures that were instantly lost to a bullet or an exploding bomb.

I thought of this, walking among the crosses in Cape Girardeau. They stretched out across the field, more than 10,000 of them. Each exactly like the others: four feet high, painted white, posted in a straight line. Some were decorated with wreaths. Others had vases of cut flowers at the base.

As I walked in this solemn place, I thought about the future these might have had. One might have been a doctor, another a scientist. One might have developed a cure for cancer, another might have become president of the United States or a justice of the Supreme Court. There might have been poets and teachers. Certainly there would have been husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, neighbors and friends.

At the front of the cemetery is a row of larger crosses bearing black ribbons. They tell us something of those who have died: In 1973 they numbered 615,834. A year later, 763,476 died. The next year the number was 854,853, and the year after that it was 988,267. By 1977 the death toll had climbed to 1,079,430, and it has been over 1.5 million each year since.

All of this began in 1973, of course, because that was the year the Supreme Court said, in Roe vs. Wade, that it was OK for a woman to have an abortion. The count only goes through 1995 when the grand total of those dead reached 45 million -- nearly eight times the number killed in the Nazi Holocaust.

The name of this place is on a sign at one corner: Cemetery of the Innocent. Its creator is a man named Drury of Cape Girardeau, well known for the chain of hotels bearing his name. I don't know where he got the idea, except that the numbers alone stagger the imagination. Another sign proclaims that abortion kills 4,400 unborn children each day.

The quiet despair of Flanders Fields did little to stem the slaughter of war, and it is unlikely that Mr. Drury's sober testimony will stop the flow of death in America. Few listened when Mother Teresa lamented the selfishness of a nation that would kill its own children. And even the president of the United States has approved legislation that would allow the use of fetal tissue from abortions to be used in research.

Yet, I contend that it is impossible to walk among these crosses or even to drive by and catch a glimpse of them in the rear-view mirror without hearing the voiceless cry of 45 million lost children.

WARD DEGLER

Zionsville, Ind.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This letter was first published as a column in the Zionsville, Ind., Times Sentinel.