LibertasPost

November 11th is coming again and -- hopefully -- most of us might pause and remember.

Of course, so few Canadians have a personal connection to war.

Taking stock of my graduating high school class in 1978, so far as I know perhaps three others of 120 besides myself wore uniform. I served for 13 years in a time during which nobody shot at any Canadian soldiers or sailors anywhere in the world which means my ability to identify with someone who served in the World Wars is limited.

Yes, I stood watch in cold pouring rain in a muddy trench at 3:00 PM and fought to stay awake. So I know about discomfort and fatigue, but I don't know about fear --being shot at with blank cartridges is just not the same.

So who do I remember from my service?

There was Mike, whose leg broke when his jeep flipped over and he crawled back to pull his driver out from under the wreckage without a thought. Neither died but I remember what he did. Mike will be 50 now, and I bet the leg pains him in the damp, wherever he is.

There was Abe who didn't hesitate to rush into a gasoline fire in the back of a fuel truck to throw another man to safety and alone had the presence of mind to prevent a hundred jerry cans from catching fire. Abe is still alive and full of calm dignity. His heroism was never officially recognized but I remember what he risked.

Who else do I remember?

There was Tony who was in Rwanda during the massacres. It wasn't just Romeo Dallaire who was haunted for years by what he witnessed and couldn't do. Tony beat his subsequent battle with the bottle; having a family helped a lot.

Knowing Mike, Abe and Tony; and knowing what it was like to do a forced march with your tongue full of dust and your feet on fire with blisters lets me identify more with others who are properly remembered on November 11th.

There's one great uncle who signed up immediately in August 1914 and died as a member of the 13th Battalion of the CEF on the first day of Canada's first battle: April 22nd, 1915.

That's when the 1st Canadian Division stood firm during the first poison gas attack in history and held the Germans back from Ypres. He was killed that day, and nobody today quite knows how.

I went to Ypres to look for his grave and learned there wasn't one. Of the 300,000 Australians, Britons, Canadians, Indians, Irish, New Zealanders, Scots, and Welsh who fell around that city in four years of fighting, 90,000 of them are without known graves.

I barely remember my grandfather who tried four times to join the Canadian Army in WW-1 and finally learned how to lie about his age. As a child when I learned he had been in the First World War, I rushed him with all manner of questions, but no answers were forthcoming. He never told his three girls about what he did, but I learned a lot when I retrieved his personnel documents from the Archives of Canada and read the unit diary for the 4th Battalion of the CEF during the time he was with them. He was 17 and fought as an infantryman in the last month of the war... and saw more action than he ever let on.

There is the other great uncle I never knew. A popular and pleasant young man, he died when his bomber collided with another after 14 months of operational flying with the Demons of 407 Squadron. Nobody in the family knew what he did, but there was a squadron history I found. His flight crew had strafed and bombed German shipping off the Netherlands, dodged German fighters off Cherbourg, and had nearly bagged a U-Boat in the Bay of Biscay. When he died, he was days away from being posted to a training role back in Canada.

There are the uncles I knew as a child. One of my Dad's brothers was an infantryman who landed on D-Day and despite all the odds was still with his battalion 11 months later in May 1945. He beat some grim odds in coming through without being killed or wounded. I remember when he visited our family and a summer thunderstorm catapulted him out of bed in a scream from some nightmare of shellfire in Normandy or the Rhineland he thought he had buried away.

There was the other uncle who fell to cancer 30 years after his wartime flying ended. He spent six years on anti-submarine tours over the Atlantic, alternating with tours spent instructing other young men. Again, the odds were against his survival.

There is my father. He never went overseas to join the great adventure and it frustrated him until he realized that he had been saved by the atom bomb. He was training for the Canadian contingent for the invasion of Japan when the war ended.

I've always kept Remembrance Day and observe it, but it really took a trip to Ypres and the Menin Gate to understand what the ritual we practice is about.

A Cenotaph is literally an empty tomb -- that's what the name means. It is a burial place for those whose final resting place is far from home. Every night, the Last Post is sounded under the gate for the 90,000 British and Dominion dead without a known grave and the 210,000 others who died to defend the city in four years of fighting.

The Last Post is not just a tradition... it is the old bugle call of the British Army to call in the troops from a day of fighting and to mark the end of the day. The call had a purpose: Imagine some battlefield, there are wounded and lost men blundering about in the growing darkness and the smoke. Now they hear the Last Post -- "Come here, come here... the fighting is over. Come and rest. Here is where your mates are. Here is safety and respite. Come here." Is it too much to imagine that the dead who were so violently taken from life would ignore this call?

We call these dead to an empty tomb, built for them.

The minute of silence? It's not just a gesture of respect. It is a ritualized vigil, standing in for that older tradition when one watched and guarded the bodies of the dead before they were buried. This is an old custom, but in ages with less medical knowledge than ours, we watched over the dead to ensure that they really were dead. We also did it to guard their bodies from insult by scavengers and looters. The message of the vigil is that we still care for the dead, will watch over them and protect their honor.

Reveille is the first call of morning and symbolizes two things. One, it brackets the minute of silence and so brings the stylized night of a vigil to an end. It is also redolent with Christian imagery -- the belief in that final dawn when all the dead can awake with the hope of eternal life.

At its simple core, Remembrance Day is a pledge to the dead. We demonstrate that we still care for them; that the gift of their lives to shield us from desolation and despair is still important and that we believe no parting is truly final. This is not bad for a couple of minutes every year.