Thoughts on Remembrance Day 2020

 

I, like many others, watched the annual Remembrance Day ceremony on television yesterday.  It was a different kind of ceremony because of the coronavirus with only a token 100 people in attendance.  But as one woman said, it made it a quieter, more peaceful ceremony.

I was born in wartime England in a city called Swindon where my father and my mother, before I was born, were working for a company that made wings for Spitfire fighters.  After the war when no more Spitfires were being built, we moved to a town just east of London.  There you could see some of the ravages of war.  Across the street from our flat, there were the ruins of what had been a doctor’s home and office.  It had been destroyed by a V-1 flying bomb that didn’t quite make it to London.  In that village I played with two other boys my age.  They were also victims of the war.  Between the three of us, we had three good eyes, and I had two of them.  Flying glass from a bomb explosion had blinded the other three eyes.

In the late 1940s, we emigrated to Canada.  My father came over in late 1948 on the RMS Aquitania which was still fitted out as a troop carrier.  My father sailed in a room with 39 other emigrant men.  Six months later, when my mother and I came over, we travelled on a Canadian Pacific Empress liner.  We shared a cabin with one other mother and her young son who was also moving to Canada.  When we went to the lounge for tea, my mother was surprised to see cake with butter on it.  When she looked closer it was white bread, the first she had seen for over ten years. No signs of war or rationing here anymore.

I, of course, later went to the Royal Military College of Canada as a naval cadet and spent the next 28 years in that service.  During that time, I had an experience that changed the rest of my life.

Which brings me to the reason that I don’t put Remembrance Day at the top of my remembrance dates.  First on my list is 23^rd of October, the anniversary of the explosion and fire aboard HMCS Kootenay that killed nine of my shipmates, left three badly burned and over fifty others hospitalized for mostly smoke inhalation; a ship on which I was the Weapons Officer at the time.  Second is Battle of Atlantic Sunday, a true Navy ceremony.  When I was a young officer, the Canadian Navy was still steeped in the exploits of that six-year long battle.  In my first summer training, they showed us the movie “The Cruel Sea”, probably the best movie ever made of that battle.  Remembrance Day has always felt to me as a day for Army and Air Force veterans to reminisce.  Despite the Governor-General wearing a Navy uniform yesterday, the day never seemed to be a day for the Navy.

As some of you know I love music.  Music and Remembrance Day go back to a concert that my wife and I attended some years ago at the National Arts Centre.  The concert featured the very fine Scottish Canadian tenor, John McDermott.  It included many wartime and memorial songs.  We thoroughly enjoyed the show and afterwards bought a CD of the performance.  I play it in the days leading up to Remembrance Day.  There are some wonderful songs on the CD.  They include “The Green Fields of France” remembering a young English lad who was killed and buried in France in 1916, probably at the Battle of the Somme which along with Verdun were two of the bloodiest battles of the war; battles that lasted months.  Ask any Newfoundlander why they remember July 1^st, 1916.

Other songs on the CD include “The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda”, the poignant Australian song about Gallipoli, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” from the American Civil War, and “The Wall” a lament about the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., that wall of black marble with the names of over 58,000 Americans that died in that war. 

The CD also has a song, “Christmas in the Trenches” about the unofficial and unplanned cease fire along the British and German trenches on Christmas Eve 1914.  It was strongly condemned by the officers on both sides, but the men were not listening.  Peace on Earth on that night was too important to those men.  People now ask how such a thing could happen.  But you must remember that the war was young and there was still an innocence about it.  The Lusitania and the use of chlorine gas had not yet happened.  The bloody battles of 1915 and 1916 had not been envisioned yet.  It was still a time in the war when Christmas was still important.  It never happened again, and it never happened at all in the French sector.

I have one problem with the way that Remembrance Day is celebrated these days.  That is the concept of the Silver Cross Mother.  The selection of a mother was probably appropriate after the First World War when most of the men who died were young and single.  It may have been appropriate after Word War 2.  But these days, in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the men and women who fought in and died in these battles are usually a bit more mature and I would guess that most had spouses.  So why not a Silver Cross Spouse?  They are the ones that suffer the most from a lost member of the military.  As some of you may remember, I have a special place for military spouses.  You may remember my blog of a few years ago, Unsung Heroes, https://gordf.blogspot.com/. Therein, I think I captured some of the challenges of being a military spouse and perhaps an argument for a Silver Cross Spouse.

Probably well over 99% of the population of the world do not want war or violence.  A mere fraction of a percentage point want war.  Why can’t the world listen to the 99% +?