The Barrel Keepers

It is anniversary week, and the veterans have rebuilt the camp in miniature: a few tents, the flags, and the oil barrels with fire in them, lit again the way they burned through that winter eight years ago. Passers-by stop, warm their hands, stand a while, move on. The barrels do the remembering.

I was invited to warm my hands and did, and stayed longer than politeness required. The men tending the fire talked among themselves in the shorthand of people who shared something unshareable. I understood one word in five and the whole of it anyway.

Fire in a barrel is the most honest monument I know. It needs feeding, it needs keeping, and it goes out if the living stop attending to it. Most monuments should be so demanding.