Remembrance Day - One For Two
Thursday, November 06, 2014
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| Photograph - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
The more this century
stretches towards a future in which not too far off, It will not include me in
it, I find myself thinking more and more as a creature of the 20th century.
This is obvious as I still look up to the sky when I hear an airplane. Flying,
a magic act, was so in the 20th. Now it means the problem of dealing
with carry-on luggage.
Today my granddaughter
was complaining that in her school the students prepared a Remembrance Day
ceremony that was “truly awful” I am amending this from what she actually said.
The principal reason had to do with the fact that one of the students read “that
red poppy thing”.
As an Argentine-born
Canadian my knowledge of Canadian history is a tad slim but I did read Pierre
Berton’s Vimy Ridge in which he argued (favourably for me) that Canada became a
country as a result of that battle. It unified Canadians.
My granddaughter was
partially right when she told me that General Sir Arthur William Curry (born in
Strathroy, Ontario, 1875, was the commander at Vimy
Ridge. She was wrong in telling me that his predecessor was a terrible British
general who used his soldiers as cannon fodder. Curry’s predecessor was the English born, Wrotham Park, 1862, Field Marshal Julian
Hedworth George Byng, 1st Viscount Byng of Vimy GCB GCMG MVO.
This ignorant Canadian
did not know the significance of the poem that my granddaughter was so tired of
listening to. I looked it up and found that it was a poem by a live Canadian
soldier John McCrea written to honour a fallen comrade from his regiment. I
found the story here.
During the early days of the Second Battle of Ypres a young Canadian artillery officer,
Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed on 2nd May, 1915 in the gun positions near
Ypres. An exploding German artillery shell
landed near him. He was serving in the same Canadian artillery unit as a friend
of his, the Canadian military doctor and artillery commander Major John McCrae.
As the brigade doctor, John McCrae was asked to
conduct the burial service for Alexis because the chaplain had been called away
somewhere else on duty that evening. It is believed that later that evening,
after the burial, John began the draft for his now famous poem “In Flanders Fields”.
I had a short chat
with my granddaughter about the above and then gave her to peruse, my copy of
Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia with two pages marked by a blank paper. The two
pages so marked were on the page on Siegfried Sassoon and the other on Wilfred
Owen.
I can only hope that curiosity
might just work the way it should.
I then told both my
wife and granddaughter the special significance of Remembrance Day’s date. Few,
particularly those born in this century or close to it in the other know of
such a thing as an Armistice on November 11, at 11am (Paris time) 1918. In fact
my granddaughter thought it to be the armistice for WWII. Few know even
understand that WWII did not end with D-Day or with Victory in Europe (V-E Day)
on May 8, 1945, but ended with the two atom bombs in Japan which signalled V-J
Day and that was celebrated on August 15 1945.
I did not end it all
there as I told them that Remembrance Day celebrates Canadian soldiers, those
that died, and those that are live veterans including soldiers who have fought in Afghanistan.
The Americans are different in that they have a day for the fallen, Memorial
Day (celebrated on the last Monday of May) and one for the living, Veteran’s
day on November 11.
