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Tell them of us and say,
For their tomorrow,
We gave our today."
-- The Kohima Epitaph
This appears on a monument
erected at the British military
cemetery at Kohima, Assam,
India, in memory of those who
died in World War II's largest
Asian land battle near there in 1944.
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"It
is better to have lived
one day as a lion than
one thousand days as a sheep."
Inscription on the stone of
Lieutenant Colonel Charles G. Clinger, USA,
Section 8, Arlington National Cemetery.
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"I went - it was not long ago
-
to stand again upon that crest
whose one day's crown of fire has passed into the blazoned coronet of fame.
I sat there alone on the storied crest,
till the sun went down
as it did before over the misty hills,
and the darkness crept up the slopes,
till from all earthly sight I was
buried as with those before.
But oh, what radiant companionship rose around, what steadfast ranks of
power,
what bearing of heroic souls.
Oh, the glory that beamed
through those nights and days.
Nobody will ever know it here!
I am sorry most of all for that.
The proud young valor that rose above the mortal, and then at last was
mortal after all."
-- Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
Commenting on his return to Little
Round Top, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1913.
Chamberlain won the Medal of Honor there
in July 1863 while commanding the
20th Maine Infantry.
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"In great deeds something abides.
On great fields something stays.
Forms change and pass;
bodies disappear; but spirits linger,
to consecrate ground for the
vision-place of souls.
And reverent men and women from afar,
and generations that know us not
and that we know not of,
heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered
and done for them,
shall come to this deathless field to ponder and dream;
And lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom,
and the power of the vision pass into their souls."
-- Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
Commenting on his return to Gettysburg and
the great battlefield there.
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