Lest We Forget

Remembrance Day is tomorrow and it seems fitting that something should be written about war and its modifiers. Tomorrow I have class, as many of us do I’m sure, and I wonder if we will take a minute of silence at the appropriate time (11am) to remember our lost ones? I doubt it greatly and this saddens me because:

"Remembrance Day confers upon us a moral obligation to pay to tribute those 1.5 million fellow citizens who went overseas last century to fight for freedom. They represented one-sixteenth of this country’s population, three-quarters of whom were teenagers, boys trying to be men. They scarcely knew what they were living for, much less had enough time to learn what they were dying for. Their lives were extinguished like a flame in the wind."1

I realize that I am being pretty presumptuous in stating that my prof will not be upholding the minute of silence! But somehow I feel that he will find his lecture material more pressing to cover and despite being a historian who has studied the tragedy of numerous wars through time, will neglect to pause in remembrance for those that died for us. As a side bar: I will feel like a total schlep if we did take time for a minute of silence!

These young men and teenagers had families, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, and children that they were leaving behind in order to go overseas to battle in a war. Granted the mentality or reason for the war was important…FREEDOM…but at what cost is war justifiable? “The unvarnished truth is that war always begets more war and more killing fields. It generates the very evil it seeks to destroy and its psychological, social, spiritual and human costs are immeasurable.”2 That idea that war generates more killing is eerily accurate since it truly does. All we have to do is look into our history and realize that there are minuet periods of…what I will not refer to as PEACE because no such thing exists anymore if it ever did…re-organization, repopulation and re-arming.

As a rough estimation there is about twenty years between most of the modern wars, such as WWI and II, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf. Is that merely a coincidence that it takes about twenty years for the population to grow up and reach an ideal age for a soldier? Twenty years provides enough time for societies to organize their military operations? In twenty years, manufacturers are able to produce more sophisticated weapons? Or have I watched one too many X-File episodes so that now my head is filled with conspiracy theories?

At any rate…the repercussions of World War I reverberated in society for years and in my personal and non-expert position, consumed society until the start of World War II:

"A war changes people in a number of ways. It either shortcuts you to your very self; or it triggers such variations…provid[ed] you don’t take flight from a burst shell, you emerged from your khaki cocoon so changed from what you were that you fear you’ve gone mad, because people at home treat you as though you were someone else. Someone who, through a bizarre coincidence, had the same name, address and blood ties as you, but must have died in the war. And you have no choice but to live as an imposter because you can’t remember who you were before the war."3

We all think of how horrible it must have been for these soldiers to have died gruesomely in battle…and indeed it must have been horrible and none of us could ever experience that! But after reading the above excerpt would it not be more terrible to come home? Imagine trying to live your old life but not being able to because all you can hear is the ringing in your ears from the bombs and bullets? Or see the faces of your dead friends? Look at your hands and seem them covered in blood and human waste? I would think that coming home would be far worse. It would be like living in your own private hell from which no matter how hard you try, you cannot escape.

I will return now to being killed it battle and who that affects because it seems that I have glossed over that point…something that I did not intend to do. In pre-modern history, to die in battle was honourable and desirable for warriors and soldiers. There was no greater honour than to die for one’s country on the battle field after having wielded ones sword or bow to physically stun and beat the opposition! However, with the invention of live ammunition battles were no longer won based upon skill with a sword but with who possessed more powerful guns. The use of guns and bombs in war only escalated the number of deaths amassed in war…there is a poem called Grass and the accompanying comments on Joanna Roberts' blog which helps illuminate this phenomenon of death quiet well.

There is no way that I can encapsulate the emotions and sensations felt by a soldier dying so I really will not even try. What I can try to describe is the feelings of those left at home: “Mrs. Luvovitz never recovers [from the loss of her two eldest sons in World War I]. She functions, has to because she has her youngest son, she has [her husband]…She took the news about
the boys very hard.”4 That example is what most mothers must have experienced after receiving the news that their children had died in a foreign country under painful circumstances. How would one continue to go about their daily business knowing that your children will never come home? I suppose that it can be paralleled to dealing with death in general…no it really can not! There is no grave to visit, no funeral mass and no opportunity to say a final goodbye. There is no consolation in being the mother of a soldier who has gone off to war. Plus it is a commonly held sentiment that parents should die before their children. No one should have to bury their child, but what happens when you cannot even do that?

I have never understood the concept of war…call me stupid if you would like…but I don’t understand how two opposing sides can face each other on a flat field and then either run, march, ride or walk towards the other one. Once close enough one side would fire and then the other side. Continuing this civility until either someone turned around and ran or all the people were killed. How bloody stupid! How could you stand there with your weapon ready and know that the next shot that will be fired could kill you?

We lost some of our best and brightest men and eventually women to war. An example of this is the poet Sidney Keyes. While leafing through the Norton a while back I came across his poems (there are only three!), the one that caught my eye was Elegy (In memoriam S.K.K.). It was well written so I wanted to know if I could find more of his poems and out of morbid curiosity I guess, I checked when he had died. To my shock he only lived for 21 years! I was stunned and then flipped to the back of the Norton where small biographies are provided and as I suspected because of the year of his death: “he was commissioned into his father’s regiment…[and] after only two weeks of active service he was captured…and died.”5 His life is not the only life lost, but it simply shows that war robs us all; of immediate family; security; stability; and on a more simplistic level of beautiful things like poetry.

War Poet
By: Sidney Keyes

I am the man who looked for peace and found
My own eyes barbed.
I am the man who groped for words and found
An arrow in my hand.
I am the builder whose firm walls surround
A slipping land.
When I grow sick or mad
Mock me not nor chain me:
When I reach for the wind
Cast me not down:
Though my face is a burnt book
And a wasted town.6

sv

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1 Mikelic, Peter. “Remembrance Day a Time to Recall the Lessons of War”. The Toronto Star 8 November 2004, Life Section.
2 Ibid.
3 MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Fall on Your Knees. Vintage Canada, Toronto: 1996. pg. 115.
4 Ibid. pg. 104.
5 Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fourth edition. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, New York: 1996. pg. 1910.
6 Ibid, pg. 1540