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The Strange Wind. Shortly after the war, according to a popular story, some Washington women asked permission to put flowers and wreaths on the graves in Arlington. They had heard that such a custom had grown up among women in the South during the war. The War Department granted permission, the story goes, and designated May 30 as the decoration day, but attached a stern order: no flowers were to be placed on the graves of Arlington's 300 Confederate troops, who were buried in a segregated area. The ladies brought their floral offerings to the cemetery and obediently left the Confederate headstones bare. Then, on the night of May 30, an unusually high wind arose and blew virtually all of the flowers from the Union graves onto the Rebel area. On May 30, 1868, Memorial Day was observed officially for the first time at Arlington, with General James A. Garfield as the principal speaker.
Today, Arlington is maintained by a crew of 90 ground keepers, who carefully tend the grounds, repair crumbling headstones and monuments, and dig graves with huge mechanical diggers that can scoop out a regulation 5-by-3-by-8-ft. hole in eight minutes. One man has the sole duty of patrolling the cemetery endlessly to remove withered wreaths and fading flowers from the markers. From neighboring Fort Myer, 60-odd husky, white-gloved soldiers act as pallbearers, buglers, riflemen (to fire a farewell volley into the air at every military burial) and 24-hour-a-day sentries at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Arlington's population is growing at the rate of 75 funerals a week, and by 1969 or 1970, the cemetery will be filled with the nation's honored dead. Before that time, presumably, an Unknown Soldier of World War II will be interred beside his older brother-in-arms. Congress has authorized such a burial, but last week, ten years after the war, no unknown warrior had been selected, and the Army Quartermaster's Office was still "coordinating" its plans.
-The simple tomb at Arlington, of white Colorado marble, encloses the body of an un identified American soldier who fell in France during World War I. The body was selected from four unknown soldiers in the city hall at Chalons-sur-Marne by Army Sergeant Edward F. Younger, a twice-wounded veteran, who marched past the four caskets, dropped a spray of roses onto the second. "I passed the first one ... the second. Then something made me stop," said Sergeant Younger (who is him self now buried at Arlington). "And a voice seemed to say, 'This is a pal of yours.' I don't know how long I stood there. But finally I put the roses on the second casket and went back into the sunlight."