On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:44:39 +0000, Arthur Figgis
wrote in misc.transport.urban-transit:

Robert Coe wrote:
On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:19:37 +0000, Chris Tolley
(ukonline really) wrote:
: Robert Coe wrote:
:
: that inscription has also been allowed to deteriorate. It's inlaid (in
: a contrasting color) in a marble floor with high pedestrian traffic
: and has become quite worn. When I was there fifty years ago, it was
: prominent; now some of it is hard to read. It was followed by a verse
: from a poem lamenting the Civil War, and that has been all but
: obliterated.
:
: Some folk might view that as a healthy way to install a memorial of that
: nature. It is after all, only truly a \memorial\ only for as long as
: there are still people around who can put faces to the names, and that
: is becoming a dwindlingly small number in the case of WW2, is more or
: less zero for WW1, and has been zero for the US Civil War for pretty
: well a century. Once everyone with the memory stirred by the memorial
: has gone, it is just a list of names.

Maybe, but virtually every American but the most recent immigrzants had at
least one ancestor killed in the Civil War.

I once knew one who said her ancestor had been killed in the War of
Northern Aggression, and spent an evening and a few bottles of beer
explaining why we shouldn't call it a civil war. :-)

Indeed, it was a war of regional secession, though those are all called
civil wars.