My wife, my son and I recently returned from a European vacation. We had a fine time. We ate well, we drank well and we visited some old friends as we drove through Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands.

My wife's fluency in French returned, sort of; I began to recognize German road signs as they flashed by at 150 kph; menus in Dutch were again easy to decipher; and beer at noon began to seem normal. Our version of the Grand Tour was one delight after another.

And then we got to Margraten, a Dutch village in the extreme south of the country that is the site of an American military cemetery — the only one in the Netherlands — where 8,301 U.S. servicemen who were killed in World War II are buried. My wife and I had visited this cemetery several times before, 30 years ago when we had lived not far away. Now I wanted to show our son the solemn grandeur of this place of gallantry and death.

War is a constant theme in all of Europe. It has wracked the continent since time immemorial, and bitterness still lingers over the horrors of two world wars. My son, who is 20, had visited several European countries when he was in high school but he had not, I felt, gotten a proper sense of the struggles against evil that had ravaged so many nations in the early and mid-20th century, or been able to grasp the immense human sacrifice that winning those wars had required.

The entire 65.5-acre Margraten cemetery, maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, is dedicated to heroism. Six Medal of Honor recipients are buried there. But the large number of the dead is indicative of a quieter but no less profound heroism, that of the American citizen soldiers who left their homes and families and risked their lives in a cause to which many of them lacked a clear connection. Their sacrifice was legendary and deserves everlasting commemoration.

Leading to the burial ground is a walkway called the Court of Honor with a reflecting pool and a memorial tower. At the base of the tower is a haunting statue that represents a mother grieving for her lost son to remind us, I think, that the dead are not the only victims of war.

On the walls on each side of the court are the names of 1,722 missing soldiers whose bodies were never found, most likely blown to bits; they deserve a special prayer.

The dead are from every state in the union and also from England, Canada and Mexico. Forty pairs of brothers are buried side by side, along with 106 Unknowns.

My wife, my son and I walked through the immaculately maintained grounds, reading the names, hometowns and dates of death inscribed on the 8,301 white crosses arranged in long arcs. That staggering number, when applied to battle deaths, was beyond my comprehension. So many men were killed so far away from home in a valiant but tragic cause that some of them may not have even understood.

They were participants in a global struggle against tyranny that will echo through the ages. But the view from a foxhole is seldom more than a few yards. Historical significance is for the survivors.

I couldn't help wondering how each man had died, where he had come from, whom he had left behind, what he had been like. I, too, have faced the enemy in war and the unanswerable question of why one person survives and another perishes is never far from the mind of anyone who has been in that situation. I grieved for these lost brothers in arms.

We wandered through the cemetery, wrapped in our own thoughts, and met at the end of the mall, near a tall flagpole on a small hill. As I gazed over the burial ground, trying to imagine those thousands of gallant, frightened and determined men at arms, I noticed two blonde teenage girls, chatting as they threaded their way through the rows of the dead.

They stopped at the head of a grave and gently laid upon it a bouquet of white flowers. They stood for a moment in silence and then walked back the way they had come, illuminated by sunshine that had broken through the clouds.

I couldn't imagine who these two young girls were, or whom they were blessing on a rainy spring day in 2013, so long after the American soldier's death and not so long after they had been born. I watched from afar, fearing that if I spoke to them they would disappear like a fleeting memory because of my earthly intrusion into their divine homage.

The innocence they represented, the holiness of their beauty and the purity of their reverence caused me to weep. In them I felt the presence of God there in the valley of the shadow of death. Hallowed be the names of the fallen, now and forever.

Bill Federman is a Times Union editor. His email address is