Uncle Sam of Freedom Ridge

In a lantern-lit hamlet stitched to the Allegheny spine, grizzled Uncle Sam—yes, the very emblem in flesh, top-hat tipped like a cathedral spire—buries a telegraph that bleeds black ink: his only boy, Matthew, vaporized in a Verdun dawn. Grief carves cathedrals in his ribcage; yet he clings to one shimmering shard—that Matthew perished so the world might never again sup on cannon-smoke. Months slither by, Washington’s marble corridors echo with jingo cymbals, and the League of Nations—Wilson’s fragile dream—is garroted by isolationist purse-strings. Sam, beard now snowing onto a moth-chewed waistcoat, drags his sorrow to Capitol Hill, clutching a petition inked by widows, immigrants, doughboys whose lungs still rattle with gas. Doors slam like guillotines. Newspapers caricature him as ‘that antique relic baying for foreign entanglements.’ His lantern dims; the stars, once epaulettes of promise, harden into brass buttons of indictment. On Armistice night, while plutocrats guzzle champagne, Sam climbs the marble steps of Freedom Ridge, wraps himself in the flag now brittle as burnt parchment, and thrusts a kerosene-soaked torch heavenward. The conflagration paints the Potomac vermilion; his final cry—a cracked bell of a voice—rings: ‘Remember my son, remember the world!’ The flames devour him, yet the smoke coils into the shape of a dove that even the most cynical hacks swear they saw beating wings toward Geneva.