Today's ceremony at the cenotaph in our town will be different. It'll be scaled back. There will be fewer people -- all wearing masks. And it will be shorter than usual. COVID has changed everything.
Nonetheless, we need to remember, in a world with far too many demagogues, that we should never repeat the folly which this day finally brought to an end.
Image: Bay Ward Bulletin
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To me, Remembrance Day has become a creepy blur of veneration/celebration of our war dead. We imbue death with an element of nobility that is rarely found on any battlefield. Yes there are those exceptions - the guy who grabs his submachine gun and charges into the enemy's machine gun nests. Most deaths, however, result from misfortune. The enemy shell just happens to detonate over your head, the airburst raining white hot shrapnel on the poor buggers below.
As for brave men and women rallying to the defence of King and country, that too is mainly bullshit. Barry Broadfoot's excellent 1974 book, "Six War Years", is based on interviews with a lot of those who signed up and went off to fight. Some were motivated by the same jingoism that produced Haig's cannon fodder in the first war. Some did it to look good. One guy Broadfoot interviewed enlisted because he'd never had a pair of real boots. Others were trying to get away from the old lady or debt collectors or the prospect of conviction and jail. The King and country business was window dressing.
But if few enlisted for King and country, far fewer still died for King and country. Soldiers don't fight for their monarch or their country. If they did it would be an awful mess. No, they fought and died for the guy to their left and the guy to their right. It wasn't dying that was on their minds, it was surviving to see another dawn. It was rotten luck, not patriotism or some other noble cause that ended their lives.
My dad had a photo of four, freshly-minted 2nd lieutenants sitting around a table outside an English tea shop. There was one guy with real movie star looks, a Van Heflin double. I asked my dad about that guy. Dad said that after he was wounded, that guy was given command of his platoon. On the first mission out, that fellow caught a German bullet right in the middle of his forehead. We construe that as noble because it suits our purposes. We do it for ourselves.
The dead are venerated as we want to see them, not as they were, and in that we desecrate their identity, their memory.
On this Remembrance Day it might be worth remembering this: How Port Coquitlam became B.C.’s ground zero in history's deadliest outbreak
"As we grapple amidst our generation's most devastating pandemic, we look back 102 years ago, when a troop train arrived in Port Coquitlam carrying the deadliest virus in human history. Here’s how it spread."
https://www.tricitynews.com/news/how-port-coquitlam-became-b-c-s-ground-zero-in-history-s-deadliest-outbreak-1.24120526
My grandfather was on that train.
My father told me that he survived the war by "pure dumb luck", Mound. He went in as a private. But he had the opportunity to become an officer. They trained him to be an aerial photographer. However, when he got back to his unit, they had moved out. They needed someone to command an anti-aircraft battery in another location. So he spent the rest of the war shooting at airplanes rather than being shot at. Most of the people he trained with never came home.
My grandmother was a widow with six children, and there was no money for higher education. When Dad came home, the government paid for his education. He became a mechanical engineer. He spent the rest of his life fixing things. His prime directive -- which he passed on to me -- was "Don't give me lip-service. Fix it." He picked up that mindset in the army.
He saw things he never wanted to talk about. But he was grateful for the doors that opened after he survived.
We need to remember those who came before us, Toby -- those who did not live long enough to know the opportunities and challenges we've known.
Further to Toby's comment, it's worth noting that some 61,000 Canadians died in the First World War. Cenotaphs and war memorials dot the country in their memory.
As the war's survivors came home, they brought the Spanish Flu with them. The disease hit the young and the strong hardest, turning their vigorous immune response against them. Those combined calamities decimated the nation's strongest and brightest, leaving a lost generation. Some 50,000 Canadians died of flu, without a single public memorial in their memory.
More than a century later, we continue to honour the war dead, and our leaders lay wreaths for them every year without fail. Those that died of the flu live on only in the fading memories of their elderly relatives. Meanwhile, the nation is in the midst of another pandemic. To date, some 11,000 Canadians have died of that. I wonder if they too will be forgotten, or will society raise memorials to them as a reminder to future generations to take pandemic control seriously.
Cap
If we have any integrity, Cap, we will build memorials to those who died of COVID. Many were considered "essential workers" -- something neither their salaries nor their stations in life took note of.
Owen, imperial pride and colonial nostalgia have been prevalent with the British elite for a long long time. The Brits also have their own gullibillies, as Mound calls the Trumpers. It's OK to have some national pride, but not to the complete destruction of your fellow human beings. Imperial pride and colonial nostalgia were the driving forces behind Tony Blair's support for George Bush's phony weapons of mass destruction. He knew better, but maybe he thought it would reestablish Britain's road to world domination. RG
It strikes me as ironic that we mourn our dead from WWI but never denounce the war itself, a spat among Victoria's grandsons George, Nicholas and Wilhelm. Those deaths were demeaned by our postwar jingoism and resultant failure to grasp that millions died in a war of inadvertence that none of the belligerents really wanted. We think we have 'free trade' today but so too did Europe pre-1914. Economies were integrated. Germany and Russia were each other's primary trading partner. This was not a war of conflicting ideologies, a war of conquest and expansion. A war sparked by the assassination of an unpopular, likely deranged, Archduke of a collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire.
We went to war over that?
The survivors returned and we busied ourselves constructing cenotaphs and parades instead of saying "no more." We chose a different motto, "lest we forget," and promptly forgot what really mattered, collectively ensuring that the armistice would not hold for more than a couple of decades, Round Two.
Barbara Tuchman documented how easily the nations of the world slid into the war, Mound. Like today, the times were supposed to offer an idyllic path to globalization. How quickly it all fell apart.
The last century should have taught us, RG, that there is nothing glorious about war. But those of us who have not known war -- or, in the case of Mr. Trump, skipped one -- keep insisting that there is glory in mass destruction.
When I started Grade 1, the fathers of nearly all the kids in my class (including my own) were off in WWII, except the men who got a medical exemption and worked at the local sawmill. the only men were the old gray-haired grandpas that some kids had (mine was recently retired from the NWMP and joined the army but spent his time escorting German prisoners of war to their place of incarceration in eastern Canada).
I was the eldest of 4 girls (we were 3, 2, 1, and brand new) when my father got drafted and in Grade 2. My siblings and I were out in the yard playing when we spotted this strange man walking down our driveway towards us. I can remember we all hid behind a blue cedar tree, scared out of our wits, but still peaking out to watch him. As he got closer to us, he called out "Luly, its Daddy!" We did not know our father and I can tell you it was a huge adjustment to all of us to have a man in our house (especially my Mum who was only 25 herself) making demands of us. Of course, it wasn't until an adult myself that I understood what an adjustment HE had to make himself after being overseas for those years.
War is a horror show for everyone and yet mankind has still not learned to live with their own kind. A few years ago I found a book at my local library titled "TARNISHED BRASS" written by a Canadian author about Canada's military and its leaders (the guys with all the stripes and the privileges that go with them). It is worth a read and a timely reminder that those without the stripes are are hailed as heroes every November 11th, but the reality is that many of them come home from all these "scrimmages" with severe disabilities both mental physical and constitute many of our homeless today.
The most troubled soldiers tend to be those who survive, Lulymay. My father was lucky. He was not permanently scarred by what he saw. He'd talk about humorous events that happened when he was overseas.
But, when he got back, he only went to the legion once. He decided that he was not going to spend any time drinking beer and telling war stories. There were better things to do.
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