Memorial Day, 1996 - 31 May 1996

I look out my window and observe an officer of the United States Army passing down the street. He is without a sword, he wears a soldier's blouse, he employs shoulder straps to indicate to the army who he is. So far he's dressed exactly as General Grant was dressed when he accepted the surrender of General Lee.

But here there's something more. On the left breast of this officer, apparently a major, there are two long strips displaying every hue in the rainbow and the kaleidoscope, imperial purples, reds, wild Irish greens, romantic blues, loud yellows and oranges, rich maroons, sentimental pinks, a gallant soldier indeed. How he would shame a circus wagon if he wore all the medals and badges, the stars and crosses and pendants, that go with those ribbons. As it is on the left breast of this officer, there blazes so brilliant a mass of colour that as the sun strikes it and the flash bangs my eyes, I wink, I catch, my breath, I sneeze.

I didn't write that, I wish I had, it was my old mentor, the sage of Baltimore, Mr H L Mencken, looking out of his study window on a day in 1920, less than two years after the First World War was over. He was reporting then, and deploring a custom, an indulgence, the United States Army had started to practice, namely to load serving members of the armed services with campaign ribbons, not only for battles fought by Americans, or at which they were present, but also for engagements of any in foreign sorties.

Well if Mr Mencken, seeing that fabulously beribboned soldier, sneezed in 1920, today he'd have an epileptic fit if he'd been present at any of the military services held last Monday on what used to be called Decoration Day and is now called Memorial Day, which used to be a solemn occasion, expressly set aside for the people of any city, town, village that had lost men in any American war. Today, it's by most people indistinguishable from Veterans' Day, which used to be Armistice Day, and is celebrated with picnics, popcorn, barbecues and general merry making.

But not in the place where the custom started, in upstate New York in a small town called Waterloo, New York, there it is the custom to decorate soldiers graves with flowers on the 30th of May. The custom came in 1868 only a year or two after the end of the Civil War, it was a simple respectful custom and it spread rapidly throughout the north, several states made it a legal holiday.

A squabble about the originator of Decoration Day was renewed every May until 1966 when President Lyndon Johnson, after much beseeching by several claimants, publicly declared Waterloo, New York, to be the positive, official birthplace of the holiday. So you'd expect Waterloo following the lamentable modern trend of turning a sombre Memorial Day into a lark and a shopping spree, you might expect Waterloo to be more hectic, more bustling, more commercially rabid than ever on the great day. Hardly. It's one place in the United States where it has not happened and is not allowed to happen. Furthermore, the town insists on keeping May the 30th as the day of commemoration not the last Monday in May – this has been done on a Monday with Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays. It's convenient, it gives people a long weekend, it doesn't entail closing things down during a working week.

The people of Waterloo object. There's nothing they can do about a recognised national holiday, so last Monday they shuttered all the stores, had no marches, no parades, nothing. The town was very quiet. But on Thursday, which is the 30th of May, they began early in the morning with a military service at the cemetery. Planes from the National Guard flew over. A parade began from the town centre to the graveyard and to the silent salute of veterans, flowers were laid on the graves of every man who had died in every war since 1776 - the outbreak of the War of Independence. The village clerk said it briefly and simply: "We don't celebrate Memorial Day, we commemorate it".

The mention of 1776 brings us back with a bump and a ribald cheer to that major pacing the streets of Baltimore in all his campaign finery. The armed forces have never gone back to the simplicities of their customs during and just after the Civil War. At some later time, probably I should think, with the Spanish American War, and the lusty empire building whoops and hollers of Teddy Roosevelt, jingoism set in, and ever since it has fuelled a very lush and profitable industry: the manufacture of medals and ribbons by the truck load for anyone in the American services who had ever been exposed to shot and shell.

And more profitably still, the ordering from English and German companies of jewel encrusted swords for South American generals who had probably seen a canon, but never heard one. To define, quite harshly, what has happened, consider this comparison. The most precious military decoration in this country is the Purple Heart, a heart shaped medal with a gold border and a centre of purple enamel. It was created by General George Washington himself, and was to be awarded for "meritorious action and extraordinary fidelity." It was such a sacrosanct distinction that once the War of Independence was over, the award itself was allowed to lapse. It was not revived until 1932 and declared to be confined to soldiers wounded in action. Not for long. During and after the Second War it was distributed for "services" unspecified, in time of war. To put the progress of medal distribution briefly let's just say that throughout the Revolutionary War, General Washington's Purple Heart was awarded just three times. Since then, its recipients number in the hundreds of thousands.

Do you remember the famous American invasion of Grenada, 1983 wasn't it, suddenly ordered by President Reagan, to the great but I believe passing wrath of Mrs Thatcher – Grenada was after all a British possession – it involved the conquest of a few hundred Cubans and mercenaries who'd overthrown the prime minister by an American force of 3,000 strengthened by a couple of hundred hired hands from neighbouring islands. The number of medals handed out to the invading Americans is now said to be 8,500, many if not most of which must be for simply having been there. I myself was not eligible. I was in Grenada but at the wrong time.

You may wonder how the two presidential candidates commemorated Memorial, formally Decoration Day. The president went across the river to Arlington Virginia, to the national military cemetery created on the former estate of the south's revered General Robert E Lee and there, in a grave voice, he simply put a wreath on the tomb of the unknown warriors and asked Americans to honour all the men and women who had given their lives for their country in war and peace. I imagine he was in no mood to expand his remarks about the splendour of sacrifice of military service - he'd just come through a blunder, a clanger of the first order.

I hate to intrude on such a moment, such a gross item of news, but it did come out just before Memorial Day and whatever mood President Clinton may be in, whatever grand occasion he maybe attending, the same item is going to go on raising its ugly head. It is the complaint of that young woman in Arkansas, who claims that she was crudely sexually harassed by Mr Clinton back when he was governor of the state. She has brought legal action and she wants the president to bring his legal answer now. There's a lot of intramural logic chopping between lawyers about whether the president can be required to answer a subpoena or become a principle in a legal case so long as he's president.

Most lawyers, in both parties seem to think that claims of the national interest override a legal suit, which should be held until he's out of office. However, his lawyer enlarged fatally on this excuse the other day, by saying that the president was protected from legal action by a law that equally protects service members on active duty from litigation. After all, the lawyer unfortunately threw in, the president is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. What a coup for the crowing republicans who never let people forget that Mr Clinton, while at Oxford, managed to evade the draft. The Republicans hastened to make a ridiculing television infomercial as they're called: "Now Clinton's on active military service."

As for Mr Dole on Memorial Day there was nothing solemn about his commemoration, or the crowd that heard him make a fighting speech, more pungent, more eloquent than any speeches he gave before he hired a novelist to write them for him. I have to say that until about two months ago, one of the attractive things about Mr Dole and his campaigning was that he made nothing in his speeches of his atrocious war wounds, which kept him in hospitals for three years. Now he talks about little else. He stresses all the time his ordeal on the Italian front. Last Monday, said Mr Dole: "I can't change his record and he can't change my record. These are facts I am proud to have served my country." As veterans stood listening to him, he stood upright, his right arm as always limp, he saluted them smartly with his straight left arm. I suppose that every glance of the polls, at Mr Clinton's 20 point lead, has made Mr Dole desperate. He's had to forego his former dignity, and like the army with its wholesale distribution of medals, forego also the old simplicity.

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