The Written Word
for November 10, 1999

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day and as each year passes the remaining veterans get older and older. Not a very profound statement I agree but we seem to forget what happened in the last war as the oral evidence of it is silenced.

I am old enough to remember the war, though as a child. I well remember that first Sunday in September when the news boys – that’ll tell you how long ago it was – came down McCleery Street hollering Extra! Extra! War Declared! Read All About It! And I remember how the men in the neighbourhood gathered and how the early rumour was that we had sunk a big German vessel. It was untrue, alas, and the first ship sunk was the Athenia, a passenger ship with many lives lost.

I was keen on current events when I was a kid so I have a good memory of the war. I remember the long drawn faces as the Dunkirk evacuation took place and how they turned to relief when it was successful. I well remember Pearl Harbour Day, another Sunday. I well recall the Kittyhawk trainer which suddenly stopped in the sky and I watched as it screamed its way to the earth near Marpole … the bits of the plane were valuable souvenirs for us kids.

But what I remember most is the early postwar when churches throughout Canada had memorial services. Mine was St Mary’s Kerrisdale and my Uncle Howard was one of the men to be remembered. I can remember three of the hymns so well -–Oh God Our Help In Ages Past … Abide With Me … and For Those In Peril On The Sea. But mostly I remember how we all said we would remember. We would never ever forget the sacrifices these men and women made … nor the sacrifices made by their families.

There was scarcely a family that wasn’t touched in some way by the war … not only Uncle Howard but the man across the street was killed. So was my boyhood hero "Uncle" Bud O’Hara. And we were going to remember. For sure.

But do we remember? We read rubbish like an article in today’s Toronto Globe and Mail by Anthony Westell, a former Dean of the school of Journalism at Carelton entitled "Why I Won’t Wear a Poppy Tomorrow". He’s a veteran who, because he had a soft and adventurous war denigrates by extension all those whose memories are sad and bitter.

No … I don’t think we remember at all. We look at the few remaining veterans of the Second World War, the youngest in their late seventies, and the few from the First World War now in their very late nineties or older and think of them as people to be pitied … to be patronized a little. We don’t think of them as the kids they were at the time … kids with all their hopes and loves yet to come … and who lost so many of their mates … and who lost, very often, their limbs and their health both physical and mental.

I’m appalled when I read historians like John Charmley saying, as does that neo Nazi David Irving, that Churchill should have accepted Hitler’s offer of peace in June 1940. This would have, so the theory goes, have loosed Hitler on Russia where he would either have been consumed as was Napoleon or would have won and destroyed communism for ever … thus no Cold War … blah, blah, blah. Happily the new breed of historians, not feeling the need to be revisionists, are looking at World War II again and concluding what their fathers and mothers already knew – Churchill saved western civilization. They see clearly, as should we all, that if Churchill had parlied with Hitler, Hitler would have beaten Russia all right but only to turn back to Britain with ten times the fury.

There were legions of mistakes made leading up to World War which was a preventable war. The reality was it wasn’t prevented and someone had to do something about the power mad, insane genius running Nazi Germany. Something was done – by the old folks we will see at the cenotaphs and legions of the nations and by those who didn’t make it. That something was also done by Canada as a nation who, person for person, made a magnificent war effort.

When we remember those elderly soldiers, sailors and seamen tomorrow, and remember their fallen comrades, we also remember ourselves, our nation, and our country.

And it is for all those things that I wear a poppy and for whatever Remembrance Days are left to me arrive, I will always wear a poppy.