Postscript : War and Remembrance : Commemoration of Battle of the Bulge brings thanks to Americans. Some wonder if such emotional memorials do more harm than good.

U.S. and Belgian flags fluttered from every building along the main street of this small market town in the heart of Belgium’s picturesque Ardennes hills.

From temporary loudspeakers, Glen Miller’s “In the Mood” wafted along the thoroughfare, riding on an icy late autumn wind. Metal crowd barriers lined the sidewalks, and television crews prepared for the parade.

In an hour, a few hundred U.S. veterans and a handful of Belgian comrades would march through a freezing rain to the cheers of local residents.

Another World War II 50th anniversary was unfolding.

This time, on Friday, the commemoration marked the beginning of the monthlong Battle of the Bulge, a bitter engagement that military historians describe as both the U.S. Army’s single biggest battle of the war and “the last act of the great liberation.”

While the Bastogne ceremonies paled in comparison to the global media spectacle that accompanied the D-day celebrations in Normandy last June, it was an important event for Belgians and those Americans who fought here.

In its way, it was also far more typical of the string of World War II commemorations that have unfolded across Europe since 1989: It was a chance for local people to remember the heroes, the victims and the suffering connected to battles that determined the fate of their region.

As the Continent braces for the culmination of these events next year with the 50th anniversaries of both Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender in early May and the end of the war against Japan in August, the emotional swath left by commemorations over the last five years has raised questions about whether such intensely emotional reminders do more harm than good.

Many, for example, argued that June’s Normandy celebrations, which excluded Germany, achieved little more than to remind Germans that 45 years of successful democracy isn’t enough for redemption, that they still remain apart, uninvited outsiders in Western Europe.

“You have to bring the Germans in,” warned Michael Stuermer, director of a government-backed think tank near Munich called the Ebenhausen Institute. “There can be no more D-days.”

French President Francois Mitterrand’s attempt to compensate for the D-day anniversary snub by allowing German armored vehicles to roll down the Champs-Elysees as part of the French National Day military parade merely triggered an embarrassing debate in France about where Germans should or should not go half a century after the Nazi collapse.

Americans got a similar taste of such sensitivity earlier this month when a U.S. Postal Service decision to issue a commemorative stamp depicting the atomic mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki created outrage in Japan. Following a formal diplomatic protest, the Postal Service shelved the idea.

Others, however, claim that remembering is too important to be derailed by the pain of reviving old memories.

“It’s important to celebrate the past, because it’s the only way we can learn from it,” said Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris.

In Bastogne, there was evidence for both arguments.

Here, as at the D-day beaches, half a century was too soon to include German officials in a way that might have made the commemoration also an act of reconciliation.

“Two generations have passed, but if you say you are German, people still step back,” said Catherine Orban, a local schoolteacher. “Fifty years is too soon (to include the Germans).”

Guy Arend, the founder and director of the town’s two museums that deal with the Battle of the Bulge, added: “I’m still afraid of the Germans.”

But Robert Marbehant, a retired teacher and civil servant who lives in the Ardennes, said that commemorative ceremonies become more important with the passage of time.

“They are an occasion for documents and memories to be written down and published,” he said. “The people who lived through the events are getting so old now that we need to do this before it gets too late.”

He also sees such commemorations as lessons in civil responsibility by underscoring the fact that people risked their lives for others. For a new generation of West Europeans born into an era of enormous affluence that encourages self-indulgence, it is an important message.

“If anniversaries are a time for remembering, they are also a time for reflection,” Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told a group of dignitaries gathered for the occasion.

Albright represented the United States at the official ceremonies.

But another lesson for a new generation of Europeans is the role the United States played in helping the Continent win back its freedom.

“What the Americans did here goes far beyond commercial interest,” Marbehant said. “Those who have an exact memory of events, the memory of being freed, they will always see the Americans with different eyes.”

Here, in the rolling hills of the Ardennes, that message is being carefully passed on.

At St. Joseph’s boys school, for example, veterans correspond with students, who then read their letters aloud in class. And although the GIs who fought in and around Bastogne as young men now walk slowly and some require canes, they are still seen here with a mixture of respect and awe.

“The children here see the Americans as godlike,” Orban said. “They came and saved everyone.”

While that is exactly what they did, the price was horrific.

More than 19,000 GIs died in the battle, which contained and then repulsed the Germans’ final offensive of the war during the freezing weeks of late December, 1944, and January, 1945. More than 57,000 other Americans were listed as missing or wounded.

Before the Nazi offensive was finally crushed in late January, an estimated 120,000 Germans had also died--twice the number who fell in northern France trying to repel the initial Allied invasion.

During the height of the battle, German forces encircled Bastogne for several days, hoping to take the important road and rail junction by strangling the U.S. 101st Airborne Division defending the town.

In one of the shortest, most famous statements of the war, Gen. Anthony McAuliffe rejected a German offer to surrender with a single word: “Nuts.”

A few days later, Gen. George Patton led a U.S. assault from the south that broke through the German ring and ended the siege of Bastogne. But it was a month more before the last German resistance in the Ardennes was broken.

Bastogne Mayor Guy Lutgen told a group of U.S. veterans who had traveled to Belgium for the commemoration: “We will never forget what you did for us.”

Researcher Isabelle Maelcamp at The Times’ Brussels Bureau contributed to this article.