The Death of Living Memory
This Friday November 11th at 11:00 AM, we will remember the guns that fell silent on the Western Front 98 years ago, as we have ever since the conclusion of the Great War. In Canada, the United States, and much of the world we will proudly declare ‘we remember’, but what is it exactly that we remember?
In August 2014, I embarked alone on a 500 km bike tour of much of the Western Front from Paris to Ypres. Along the way I visited many battlefields famous and hallowed to our forebears: the Somme, Amiens, Vimy, Arras, Lens, and of course, Ypres. In the town of Ypres there stands the Menin Gate, a forbidding masonry arch directly facing what was once the center of the defensive salient around the town. The inscription upon the gate reads: “To the Armies of the British Empire which stood here from 1914–1918 and to those of their dead who have no known grave.”
There are nearly 55 000 names inscribed upon the Menin Gate, and the list is incomplete. There are 35 000 additional names on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing in Passchendaele, and the New Zealanders and Newfoundlanders were also omitted. Nevertheless, 6983 Canadians Missing in Action are commemorated on the Menin Gate, and 3 of the 8 Victoria Cross recipients inscribed on the walls are Canadians. Every evening since the gate was unveiled in 1927 (except for an involuntary hiatus during the Second World War), a quartet of buglers from the town fire hall has performed ‘The Last Post’ at 8:00 PM. I arrived in Ypres to hear ‘The Last Post’ beneath the gate on August the 5th 2014, exactly a century after the German invasion of Belgium and the commencement of hostilities on the Western Front. There were two thousand people present from nations around the world, former allies and enemies alike, and I was greatly moved by the mutual desire to commemorate and remember.
As I paced the neat and endless rows of Canadian graves in Commonwealth War Cemeteries, or indeed the graves of all combatants, I observed that then 21-years-old, I was already older in living years than many of those who lie prematurely in the soils of northern France and Belgium. Some of the dead are even younger than my then 18-year-old brother. It was at this time that I fully understood the meaning of John McCrae’s haunting words “to you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high.” If not for a gap of 100 years in time, but not in place, likely I too would have gone off to war ‘for King and Country’, and perhaps would now also lie beneath the crosses, row on row. I remember the feeling of immense gratitude to live in Canada today, in the most multicultural city on Earth.
My grandfather is an amazing man. In addition to being an 83-year-old practicing civil engineer who has by now contributed countless structures to the city and people of Toronto, he is also a Holocaust survivor from what was then Poland. My equally stupendous grandmother on that side of the family is also a survivor of Stalin’s murderous brutality. My grandparent’s generation, the ‘greatest generation’ of ordinary people who accomplished extraordinary deeds, is all but gone. There are now very few people in the West who remember the wanton destruction, barbarous violence and dislocating chaos of the Second World War. As recollection of WWII fades from living memory, the great democracies are once more susceptible to the same false promises and errors of judgement which allowed the last storm to gather and break. ‘Never Again’, is sounding like an increasingly feebly promise and I fear that the Era of Appeasement has returned with a vengeance.
After Tuesday’s election result, there can now be no doubt that world order is disintegrating. The mantle of world leadership may now pass to the Chinese, as perhaps as it should have been all along, but what the Middle Kingdom will now do with their newfound and likely unopposed influence is anyone’s guess. As I gather with fellow Canadians to remember the fallen this Friday, I now question my assumption that I am safe in Canada. There may come a time soon when the country calls upon us to do our duty. Certainly, things do not look too threatening today, but I am sure that January 31st 1933, the day after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, passed like any other.
In my last article I quoted the famed words of George Santayana: “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”
To this I add another pithy remark by Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel: “we learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
