SOUTH AND WEST OF THE NEW World War Two Memorial on the national mall in Washington, beyond the brooding Lincoln, and across the Potomac, lie the low green hills of Virginia and Arlington National Cemetery.

Honored there are tens of thousands of sons and daughters, Presidents and Privates, soldiers and civilians, who have dedicated their lives and, all too often, sacrificed them, in service to the United States.

The most touching and honored of all the memorials at Arlington; however, is dedicated to the nameless: to unknown soldiers from the First and Second World Wars, Korea and Viet Nam.

They are never alone. World leaders travel from afar to lay wreaths to honor them. Tens of thousands of their fellow citizens visit their graves each year. The Old Guard stands watch over them, around the clock, and to walk post there, at midnight in the worst of weathers is considered not only a duty, but an honor.

Another such monument to unknown soldiers, less known, indeed, almost forgotten, stands an hour's drive away, in Sharon Cemetery, in Middleburg.

There, a simple obelisk honors unknown dead, north and south, from the American Civil War.

The Middleburg monument is guarded only by the dead -- by a circle of modest tombstones marking the graves of long-forgotten boys who fought and died while serving in the Confederate Army. Nick Roach is there. He'd ridden the trains and marched north all the way from Louisiana. His stone stands post alongside those of Elija Linville and his fellow tarheel, Guilford Taylor of the 5th North Carolina Cavalry. John Tiffany, Lieutenant, 27th Virginia, is with them, his grave marked "Stonewall Brigade," lest someone forget. Chris McDonough of Mosby's Command is there too, along with one of the Whitfield boys, killed while serving with the 9th Virginia. Their stones, and seventy-five others encircle the obelisk, inscribed simply: "To the Unknown Dead."

At the other, northern, end of Jay Street, where it dead-ends, stands an equally silent memorial, Asbury Church, now with its windows boarded and warnings posted lest the unwary should enter.

Built in 1829, it is Middleburg's oldest church. Like most churches in the war-torn areas of Virginia, it served many purposes during its lifetime, not the least of which was as a hospital for many, if not all those buried just to the south.

In 1864 it was given to a black congregation of the AME church, as penance, or reparation, or both, its congregants only recently declared free. They too remain for the most part nameless, and their brothers and sisters, if remembered at all, known only by names that were not really their own.

In a novel published well before September 11, in which an airplane is flown full of fuel into the dome of the Capitol Building, Tom Clancy defined honor. He described it as a debt; as behavior one owes to those who expect it and to those whose esteem one holds dear.

In this time of uncertainty, strife and terror, when people with special insights into the mind of God contend with deadly effect, with equally determined and morally certain opponents, on a global scale, it is well to visit these memorials to the unknown dead, both honored and long forgotten, and there to contemplate both debts owed and debts paid.