View 13 photos

WAYNE — Outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 and attacking a well-fortified British garrison in the middle of a blinding snowstorm after making an arduous trek up the Kennebec River, about 1,000 of America’s first soldiers, led by Benedict Arnold, knew they had no chance at victory, and a great chance of losing their lives.

But they attacked anyway, those colonists taking up arms against 1,800 British troops garrisoned in Quebec, in a surprise, ill-fated advance. While it was unsuccessful, the soldiers who attacked, in casting aside concerns for their own well-being for the good of their nation, set an example others have followed since, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Chris Ireland, a Wayne native, said at the small town’s Memorial Day observances Monday.

“I’m trying to imagine what was going through the minds of America’s first service members,” said Ireland, who returned home to Maine after his retirement from the Air Force. “They’d crossed 180 miles of wilderness, survived a hurricane, and watched one in four, 25%, of their comrades fall ill or die. And now they’re hungry, they’re cold, and they’re told to attack. They all knew it was a fool’s errand by that point. And they went anyway.”

Of the approximately 1,000 troops who made it to Quebec to attack, 515 died.

Ireland said honoring sacrifices like those is the point of Memorial Day.

“When someone joins the military, even then, they signed a blank check and handed it over to our nation,” Ireland said in ceremonies at Wayne’s Memorial Park, following a brief parade down Main Street. “There are no contractual carve-outs considering their safety or comfort. There are no guarantees about what will happen. They are, through their own choice, putting service before self. Overcoming that uncertainty, divorcing oneself from the most innate sense of self-preservation, is what we are gathered here today to honor. We remember the commitment of those 1,100 early Americans who stepped forward to volunteer despite the uncertainty. We honor the 515 who did not come home. This day is about honoring the American service members who went ahead, despite the uncertainty, and did not come home.”

Ireland, president of the Board of Trustees of the Arnold Expedition Historical Society in Pittston, spoke of Benedict Arnold’s time in Maine. This year is the 250th anniversary of Arnold’s daring, if ill-fated, 1775 expedition through Maine to Quebec City to attack the British.

Arnold and the 1,100 troops he led stopped at the Colburn House in Pittston to acquire 200 bateaux, flat-bottomed boats, built for them locally, on their arduous march to attack the British at the start of the Revolutionary War. Hundreds of soldiers died during the march, and hundreds more were killed, wounded, or captured in the unsuccessful Dec. 31 attack on the fortifications at Quebec City.

Wayne’s Memorial Day observances were among several in Maine on a sunny Monday. They included parades in: Lisbon, Bath, Falmouth, Old Orchard Beach, Portland, Richmond, Gardiner, Oakland and Skowhegan. Wreath laying ceremonies also took place at Togus National Cemetery in Augusta.

In Wayne, Navy veteran Bobby Charles and Marine veteran Don Welch carefully placed one wreath at a memorial stone on the edge of Pocasset Lake, and Marine veteran Craig Grossi, who was last year’s Memorial Day keynote speaker, placed another in the waters of Mill Pond, as two trumpeters played a solemn “Taps” from opposite ends of the Memorial Park.

Earlier, Marine veteran Rick Parker yelled “forward, march!” to begin the parade on Main Street. It included classic cars, each with the name of a resident veteran on a sign on their doors, a band and drum corps from Maranacook Schools, Boy Scouts carrying American flags, and a couple of fire trucks.