By JOSEPH B. NADEAU

CUMBERLAND — Wilfrid E. Hebert drew on his own experiences as a combat veteran of World War II to create a special place of remembrance for those lost in war.

Today Hebert’s small tribute to the nation’s war dead near the town’s other memorials at Cumberland’s Monastery property  offers a quiet place to reflect on the cost of war that draws people touched by faraway conflicts.
Hebert, 87, a resident of 1 Flat St., can often be found at the monument himself, tending to the spot and thinking of that October day in 1944 when he and the rest of his bomber crew were forced to bailout near Innsbruck, Austria.
Hebert and his crew were all captured once on the ground but survived the war after a stay in German prisoner of war camps.
It was years later when he had more time as a senior veteran that Hebert came up with the idea of dedicating a local monument to all the U.S. veterans of combat, from the Revolutionary War to present, and set out to get it erected at the Monastery in 2000.
Former Mayor Francis A. Gaschen gave Hebert a location for his memorial and allowed his fellow veterans and volunteers use of town landscaping equipment on weekends to prepare site. Richard Sousa, a town employee, did a lot of work on his own to make the grounds fitting Hebert’s intent and the area still gets his attention today.
After a successful fundraising effort collected nearly $10,000 for the project, Hebert purchased the granite marker and had it inscribed with a poem he wrote to honor the lost soldiers of war.
Hebert continued to think about the spot he helped create as he attended many memorial services there in the ensuing years or stopped to see others visiting it for their own personal memories.
He added a stone bench for sitting after learning an area woman went there frequently to think of the son she lost during the Vietnam War.
It was only recently, however, that Hebert learned how fitting a memorial his tribute actually is to those who never returned from war.
Talking with a fellow resident of his senior complex, Eileen Iannetta, 84, Hebert learned his monument could be viewed as having another meaning beyond that which he first envisioned.
Iannetta, it turned out, had been to the combat veteran’s memorial several times herself when visiting the town’s library at the Monastery. A native of England, Iannetta had been a teenager when World War II broke out and still holds both sad and happy memories of that challenging time of her youth.
Iannetta even brought up the monument during a conversation with her sister back in England recently and pair recalled how many monuments to servicemen lost in World War II had been erected in their own country. When telling of Hebert’s poem on his, Iannetta said her sister deemed the stone tribute a “cenotaph,” a description she herself had forgotten.
A “cenotaph,” according to Webster’s, is “an empty tomb, a monument, erected in honor of a person who is buried elsewhere.”
Her own town of Widnes had a large cenotaph dedicated to the many men of the community who had never returned from World War I, Iannetta said. Iannetta’s father, a veteran of the Great War, was called on many times to lay wreaths at the cenotaph in memory of those lost.
 While she only met Hebert after moving to Flat Street, Iannetta said she did know what soldiers like him had been through given her life in wartime England. Her brother, Roland, had been capture by the Germans and held from 1939 to 1945 and she met her husband of 61-years, the late Nicholas Iannetta, while he was stationed in England awaiting the D-Day Invasion. The couple married when he returned from service in Europe with an Army medical unit at the war’s end.
  Iannetta still can recall the sound of German planes flying over on their way to bomb nearby Liverpool and how her father had instructed her in the method of putting out an incendiary bomb the enemy would drop to set fires helping their planes find a way to the target.
One night she and teenage girlfriend were challenged to put those skills to a test when one of the fire devices fell on her town. After extinguishing the fire with sand from a ready pail, the girls were cheered by seniors living in a nearby home, she remembers.
 “They thought we were so brave, but we were just doing what we had been told. It was a horrible time but we lived through it,” she said.
 The community was very good at “black out” the covering of all lights and night, but Iannetta said she and her friends still went to see movies during that time and met the Americans family’s like her own would invite home to visit.
 After the war, family members of American soldiers killed in Europe would often travel to England to see the places where their lost soldiers had stayed before going into battle. Some would erect a small monument to their loved one with a poem or words of love like Hebert’s monument, she said.
 After living so many years in the United States, Iannetta said she finds it amazing that England had never been overrun by the Nazis as had so many other countries.
 It is because of people honored by Hebert’s tribute that didn’t happen and Iannetta said she still likes to visit the granite slab at the Monastery when she stops there.
 “The wording of his poem is so beautiful,” she said.
Hebert said he likes the new description of his monument offered by Iannetta and believes it makes it an even better tribute than he had intended.
 No matter where a soldier may have died for their country, Hebert believes they can find a home at the quiet place Cumberland has commissioned in their memory.
 They will have fought, suffered and died for their country and that will have made the monument theirs, he said.
 “It recognizes all the soldiers who have died for their country, no matter where they are,” he said. “I believe that something as unique as this memorial is a blessing for the Town of Cumberland and I’m glad that it is here,” he said.