FRIDAY FOTO (March 23, 2018)

Snowfall, Arlington Virginia.

(U.S. Army photo by Elizabeth Fraser)

We had snow in the Washington area this week. Pretty as it fell, there was enough to closes area schools and many Federal government facilities for the day, but not Arlington National Cemetery.

In Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital, soldiers of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment’s Caisson Platoon trooped through the snows in a funeral procession on March 21, 2018.

This scene calls to mind the last lines of Irish writer James Joyce’s novel, The Dead.

The snow “lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears   of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Known as “The Old Guard,” the 3rd Infantry is the oldest, active duty regiment in the U.S. Army. In addition to honor guard duties at Arlington, the White House and elsewhere, the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry guard the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington.