1914
THE WORLD REMEMBERS — LE MONDE SE SOUVIENT
1918
Remembrance
‘What passing bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.’
Anthem for Doomed Youth, by Wilfred Owen, killed in action one week before Armistice.
The First World War was a grey and musty corner in my childhood world. It seemed to me to be old men who sat on park
benches and paraded once a year or wheezing ancients in nursing homes that smelt of body fluid and floor wax. Except
for Mr Scott, the principal of my grade school, who was said to have been a mule driver in WWI, and who administered
the strap in the office. But he was only real because of the fear. The others were like the over-painted artillery piece that
presented itself on the school’s front lawn. The First World War was a mouldy event from some distant past.
So when did the reality of the veterans’ lives truly hit me? When would I realise
that to project their names in light across Canada and across the Atlantic would
be the least I could do? My grandfather Cuthbert had been wounded in 1916 and
walked both with pain and with a walking stick. Yet he was remote and died when
I was young. My great uncle Art, on the other hand, had also fought in the Great
War but the reality of his experiences was lost in the exotic nature of his solitary
life since then. At Christmas parties, if we were lucky, we could feel for the bullet
resting in his back, a bullet loosed by a sniper in 1915. Art was the magic great
uncle, yet he was rarely seen, since he was either prospecting or running his trap
lines in Ontario’s north and came south only for Christmas. He spoke an African
language that he had learned fighting in Portuguese East Africa. He taught small
great nephews in Christmas hats how to gamble and throw snake eyes. He lived in
my mind as he lived in a photo I’d seen of him – a soldier mounted on a camel in
front of the pyramids of Egypt.
When I was 16 and heading off alone on my first trip to Europe with the Commonwealth Youth Movement, Art took me
aside as I headed to the train. Was it because he knew that I might see battlefields on which he had fought or was it because
he saw another young man embarking on his first life’s journey? Art had been 19 when he shipped out to France. He touched
my elbow and murmured through pipe tobacco breath, ‘Let them buy you a drink Bob, but don’t let them take you upstairs’.
Photo from Imperial War Museum.
1914
THE WORLD REMEMBERS — LE MONDE SE SOUVIENT
1918
The older men of my childhood were all ex-warriors it seemed. My father had served in Corvettes on the north Atlantic
convoy runs in the Second World War. Yet, despite the stories he told of storms and U-Boats, to my young mind my
father’s navy was just adventure and parental heroism. I would not sense in those stories the darker side of the experience
of a man just returned from war, even though my older brother knew that side. I wore to wreckage my father’s naval
uniform; it was no more to me than my flying kit as I piloted my orange-crate Spitfire into the skies to meet the enemy.
To me, world wars were no more than slightly threatening adventures and I wondered how old I would be when the third
world war would come and I would be sent.
I did tour the battlefields of Flanders when I was 16. It meant little. Major Ney, our octogenarian tour organiser, told
his stories of the half-hidden corpses that belched when you stepped on them. Sleepily, I had taken part in an all-night
vigil the Major insisted on. We each knelt with a sword in the attic chapel of Toc H (short for Talbot House), a house
still standing in Poperinghe, Belgium, that had been a refuge for WWI soldiers. While I knelt in that quiet place in the
middle of the night, I didn’t know that two of my great uncles – Art’s older brothers – were buried close by. I had never
thought to ask
To comprehend the experience of others is not a sense given early in life. Wrapped in the machinery of our own concerns
it sometimes takes shock to wake us from ourselves. I knew the men who had been my family’s warriors, I knew the old
men in wheelchairs who smelled, but I didn’t know their lives
My father encouraged me to read the 700 letters that Art and his four older brothers had sent back from the fields of
Flanders and the England of military hospitals. Two of these five, as I said, had joined the earth in Belgium and France.
Two others had succumbed to the effects of poison gas in sanatoriums in Gravenhurst, Ontario. And the fifth brother had
a bullet in his back and taught gambling to kids at Christmas.
My cousin died of AIDS in 1994. In the late 1980s and 90s, the disease was culling the theatre world of young men.
Peter finally died at home, too young for death and robbed of the fullness of his life. In his dying, in the funereal pall of
his body in his final weeks, I finally saw my great uncles. I saw the theft of life by death. Thousands of young men like
Peter were dying of AIDS-related diseases. On backstage walls people were painting the names of friends who had died.
How could the world be taking so many of the young? In my shock at Peter’s dying I angrily asked, ‘Why him?’, but
now I also asked, ‘Why them?’.
At Peter’s funeral I saw the look in his mother’s eyes. I saw the grief bear down on my
aunt even as she sat, determined to soldier on. I thought back 77 years and saw the eyes
of my great grandmother, Mary Elizabeth, the mother of my five great uncles. Mary
Elizabeth was at her daughter’s home in Toronto, 110 Dunvegan Road, when the first
cablegram arrived late November 1917. Five months later she received notice of the
next son’s death. A third son, back from the army, was already in the sanatorium. Mary
Elizabeth was reading letters from her fourth son who strangely described the fighting in
the summer of 1918 as a euphoric experience. I sat beside her in my imagination as she
read those letters. The reasons for my great grandmother’s rapidly whitening hair that I
had seen in photos were real to me now. The survivor, the fifth son, Art, now had his bullet
souvenir but was off fighting in Africa.
Photo from Imperial War Museum.
1914
THE WORLD REMEMBERS — LE MONDE SE SOUVIENT
1918
Memory inheres in the specific. Touching the detail sets off the emotion. A smell triggers a wave of memory and feeling.
A specific sound can bring back a world. More than once my own son’s turn of head or the rhythm of his walk has been
my father’s walk, my father’s turn of head, and the memories and emotions have flooded back. In the set of my aunt’s
eyes at my cousin Peter’s funeral, I thought I had glimpsed my great grandmother’s eyes and sensed for the first time
what the weight of her grief might have been.
I returned to the letters of her sons. But now I also read their regimental war diaries. I read accounts of the weather. I saw
the military maps that delineated the regions of mud. Art wrote of being hit by a sniper while sitting in the ambulance
late on the night of March 8, 1915. Now I knew where the ambulance was and what the evening had been like. Was
there snow on the ground south of Ypres, or had the night’s rain merely made more mud? The detail became the door to
understanding. My imagination touched the bullet more closely than my finger ever could.
Over the past four years I have spoken with many men and women whose fathers
survived that war but returned home living with the remains of it. These men and women
spoke of the reluctance of their fathers to speak about it. They described their fathers’
fears, perhaps it was a room they felt they couldn’t escape from or perhaps it was their
dreams: “My dad fought the first world war every night for the rest of his life. A couple
of times a week my brother and I had to go into his room and jump on his chest to wake
him up.” The children I talked to, mostly in their nineties, often spoke with emotion. But
their fathers were long dead, so why did the tears come after all these years? Because
someone asked? Because their grief had not ended? Because they knew that the living
memory was slipping away forever and they wanted the names of these First World War
men remembered?
If the history of Canada and WWI is to be understood, not just as dates and events, but also as the record of the men and
women whose lives were often wrapped with pain and grief, then it must be made specific. We have seen an honourable
remembrance every November 11th since 1918. Now let us name these men and women one by one in schools across
our land. Together we can hold each of their names silently on the lips of our memory.
‘Move him into the sun Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.’
Futility by Wilfred Owen
R H Thomson
Photo from Imperial War Museum.