Battle Hymn comes directly after President Bush, so we'll know soon. I could have sworn that I heard some of the processional anthem, but I was on the phone, so maybe I'm wrong.
Navy Hymn was played on C-SPAN as the casket was carried into the Church.
The "Battle Hymn" was born in 1861 in the thick of the Civil War, when Julia Ward Howe visited a Union Army camp on the Potomac River. She heard the soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" and was inspired to write new verses. After publication in the Atlantic Monthly, her words quickly became the marching anthem for the Union Army.
Since then the song has mostly rested unsung in hymnals--criticized by some as inappropriately militaristic--only to be revived again in time of national crisis. In our own day that has included World War II and the civil rights movement. It was sung at the funerals of Winston Churchill and Robert F. Kennedy.
The hymn's revival now is of a piece with the spontaneous national burst of flag-waving. Everywhere we looked this weekend, we saw the flag--hanging from homes, stuck in flower pots, flapping from car windows. In a Virginia Catholic church we visited this weekend, the recessional song was "America the Beautiful," and not a soul bolted early for the exit. Half the congregation was in tears.
This can't be dismissed as simple jingoism. That much they know at ground zero in Manhattan, where one of the first things the firefighters did was raise the colors over the rubble where the twin towers once stood. Flying the flag is as much an encouragement to duty and sacrifice as it is an expression of loyalty.Surely that must be the way it was seen by the 168 New York firefighters who yesterday stepped up to accept promotions--"battlefield commissions," Mayor Giuliani called them