The leaders of France, Canada, the UK and the US  have just finished back-to-back orations at the D-Day commemorative ceremonies.  We have witnessed many such anniversary observances over the years — every one moving, not simply for what has been said there, in Normandy, but far more for what so many did there, all those years ago.

Today, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was by far the most eloquent and most appropriate, at least to this American’s ear.  More purely than the others, he captured the transcendent significance of the moment — the legacy of sacrifice for an enduring cause that ennobled and continues to ennoble the world.  At stake was something larger than one country, one moment, one fight, something beyond time and place, something on which all of time would turn, and he captured that.

The others were good, though each with an ever so slightly bemusing touch of the parochial.  Was a ceremony marking heroic exertions made in alliance with Britain really the right occasion for a US president to invoke Lexington and Concord?  And didn’t the soldiers of all the countries engaged that day, not just Canadians (the only focus of the Canadian PM’s account of the post-war era), return home to build, not just a better country, but a better world?  And didn’t the men who hit the beaches in 1944 fight for something beyond national vengeance and personal survival, though from the repeated references in the French president’s remarks you might have thought otherwise?

Given the grandeur of the hour, these are quibbles.  But isn’t a pundit’s job to quibble?

Perhaps the most eloquent moment of the afternoon came not in words but in notes, the poignant sounding of taps over the headstones of the fallen, overlooking the beaches and fields where they had commenced the re-conquest of the continent, leading to, in the decades since, the greatest advance of human freedom and dignity in all history.