How We Do Honour Them

It’s 2019.

The Great War, the War to End all Wars, that cataclysm of a generation, ended 101 years ago. The Peace Treaty of Versailles, set down to formally end the war and begin the rebuilding, this year celebrates its own Centennial.

Versailles. The Treaty to end the War to End all Wars. World War 1. And yet you don’t call something Part 1 without anticipating a Part 2, and the failures of Versailles is one of the first causes of the Second Great War any student of history will learn.

I am a man who can recall as a boy meeting veterans of the Great War. My Grandfather’s generation fought in the Second, in Korea. My best man at my 2006 wedding was an 84 year old friend named Bob, who had once lied about his age to leave the farm and enter the war, a man who had fought house to house in Ortona, who had in Holland watched a member of the Hitler Youth intent on destroying the track of a Canadian tank instead fumble a grenade and blow himself to bloody pieces. I saw war fought in Afghanistan twice before I was thirty. I have seen Rwanda, Kosovo, Syria, Myanmar.

I was twenty-three when the two Towers of the World Trade Centre toppled downward, in an attack born from hatred that can be traced back to the Great War, indeed beyond to the Crusades. Perhaps those towers should’ve fallen sideways, just two more dominoes in a line that stretches back for thousands of years, and in our divided and bitter and wilfully ignorant times appears to stretch out past the horizon still.

We’re out of veterans of the Great War. Soon the last of the vets of the Second and of Korea will have gone to their reward as well. Time marches on. How will we honour now? How will we remember, lest we forget? 

What do we do when memory becomes history?

We will always have symbols like the poppy above our hearts, we will always have reminders like this ceremony, and we will always have veterans. What the past 101 years have taught the human race is that we may always have war because we always have had war. That is, until we have the right kind of war and there is no human race. And that is not farce.

War is humanity’s basic response to having no response. It’s the international equivalent of an ape clubbing another ape over food. In 1914, Germany and Britain were the biggest guys eyeing each other across a party, looking for an excuse to fight and bring their friends. It was inevitable. An archduke and a powder keg were incidental.

Fitzgerald’s “great Teutonic migration” had begun. Britain was at war. Was Canada ready? “Aye, ready,” came the answer. Britain brought its colonies and colonies like Canada brought their many peoples. But they didn’t know what for.

Saskatchewan farm-boys died in the trenches. Indigenous sharpshooters returned home to a country that still offered them no equality or dignity. Ukrainian Canadians were imprisoned for the crime of simply having the wrong last name.

We honour those men and women of yesterday, those boys and girls because they knew not what. The Second Great War was a defense against brutality, racism, and fascism, and yet the honour given was to kill or be killed again, for young men to die at Dieppe to test old men’s theories, for Indigenous vets who had fought beside their peers to return to Canada and have their children imprisoned in residential schools, for Japanese Canadians to lose everything they had for having the wrong last name. War has no honour.

Being little more than a child and facing death for you-know-not-what has no honour. Dying for your country has no honour. They must be honoured.

Honour shouldn’t be a noun. It is not something you can gain, something that can be quantified. Honour is a verb. It’s what you do for those who died and those who survived and lived on, for those who fought so that we can live freely to ponder what war is. What is war.

How do we honour after these 101 bloody, racist, divided years? By turning to the person beside us and declaring: no more. Disagreement is a privilege, but violence is folly.

They fought with the hope that they could save our world from itself. So that we wouldn’t have to fight.

We honour them for laying it all out on the wires in the mud, amid the hoots of the shells and the screams of the dying, because they had to believe in something, and so they believed in us. They believed in us, and we must honour them—lest we forget.

Why I Wear the Poppy

for Robbie

I wear a poppy over my heart because I have always worn a poppy over my heart. And as with anything good, it starts off as unquestioned habit, is reconsidered for its merits, and is reapplied with greater conviction.

                This year more than ever I remember it also as a symbol of many things that matter to me, one a late friendship with a veteran; it’s a symbol of what brought us to be friends, a symbol of a connection we shared.

                “Sacrifice” and “valour” and “heroes.” “For our country” and “liberty.” Words and phrases people use to justify the wearing of the poppy.

                It doesn’t need justification.

                I am a pacifist. War is atrocious. Like greed and hate, it is one of man’s simplest and greatest evils. Impossible to justify.

                There are men and there are souls that once were boys, and did what they felt was right or what they were told to do. They justified it how they could and how they had to.

                They faced the awful in the world and in themselves. They lay their lives and their innocence on a cold iron slab knowing that they were guaranteed the loss of one or the other. No retaining both.

                For those that survived that insanity, they returned to the world and they lived lives. They went on. They justified and they compensated because they had to find a way to be human again. They never forgot and they never let it go because they couldn’t. Who could? To let that go would be to forfeit their humanity.

                Where I live, there’s a man who was amongst the first to hit Juno beach on D-Day. He had signed up, trained, shipped out, and finally attacked with a group of friends from home. He was the only one of that group who returned after the war. For the next sixty years, he established himself as essential to his community. He was involved in everything. He coached, he volunteered, he was a cheerleader and an organizer. Tireless. Just to make his town better. Because he felt an obligation. Because he felt like he was living more lives than his own.

                That is why I wear the poppy.

                It is the symbol of my friend, a man who grew to be the best man in my life, an essential bond, even though it was in his own twilight years. We first bonded when he told me tales of the bloodbath of Ortona. Of depravity and horror and what he had to do to come through it, both alive and as a man. He changed my life, and every Remembrance Day for ten years I called him to tell him I loved him and to hear about the life he had made after he had put his innocence on that slab. Heard of the normal he had made after that brief, altering horror.

                That is why I wear the poppy.

                This year I can’t call him. This year is the first that Remembrance has a double meaning.

                It’s not about death, it’s not about victory, it’s not about intangibles like liberty and way of life. These are the things that those that came after must tell ourselves. In our selfishness to justify why we do it we make it grander, we talk about our way of life saved.

                To me, it’s not about our way of life. It’s about lives: those that were ended, and those that continued, changed.

                That is why I wear the poppy.