Remember More than the "Fallen"

Remembrance Day is upon us, and across Canada, John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” will be recited as we honour the “Fallen.”?While it is indeed noble and just that we remember the Fallen, like John McCrae’s words themselves, and indeed our memory of McCrae himself, our remembrance has become ritualized liturgy; words repeated but the actual meaning of life and death is left unexamined.??

Few remember, or want to remember for example, that McCrae was an artillery officer in the Boer War before he became a surgeon and poet in the First World War.?McCrae was a taker of lives before he became a saver of lives and a symbol of the fallen, but this inconvenient and complicated truth has been glossed over in classrooms and ceremonies across the nation.

Noted historian Jonathan Vance (not the former CDS) observes in Death so Noble that as we get farther and farther from the days when our entire nation was embroiled in conflict, memory of war and those who fought becomes idealized as we try to distance ourselves from the carnage that the Fallen fell prey to.?It is safe to remember the Fallen as they are gone.?We need not trouble ourselves with why they died, was a war just or not, or even if justice matters in the harsh light of realpolitik, where cultures clash in struggles for resources rather than, as we would prefer, ideals.?

We can pity the dead without considering why they died. But, as Margaret MacMillan observes in War: How Conflict Shaped Us, war cannot be ignored as it is always with us.?Indeed, MacMillan quotes Leon Trotsky’s admonition that “you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you” to highlight the fact that those who fail to remember war as it is, are more likely doomed to repeat it.??Thus, while we remember the Fallen, we must also remember why they fell.?We must remember the circumstances that led to nations fighting one another so as to try to avoid doing so again but also to remember that sometimes there are values worth fighting for such as to defeat Nazi tyranny or stop terrorists’ bombs.?

We must therefore also reflect on the motivations of the men and women, past and present, who step forward to enter the fight, or even to stand ready during the long cold war, and ask ourselves why were they prepared to die for Canada??And if the same call came today, would men and women still respond??The Canadian Forces Recruiting problem would indicate that defending a free world is not a sufficient motivator, but perhaps if Canada was invaded as Ukraine has been invaded, citizen-soldiers of all types would step up.??

Failing invasion however, perhaps we should reflect more on what made men and women step up for Canada in the past.?What about Canada and her ideals motivated them??Jonathan Fennell in The People’s War paraphrases Oliver Cromwell, writing that “the people must know what they are fighting for and love what they know.”?What do we know about what some have called a “post-national” Canada that we love so much that we would lay down our lives for it today??What are the shared values and principles that we will defend to the death???

Fennell argues convincingly that those who fought in the Second World War, the “People’s War,” did so because of a belief that not only did evil need to be vanquished but that their own nations would need to become more equitable and just because of a shared concept of mid-century liberalism.?These people had already fought the First World War and survived the Great Depression and thus the creation of a new social order was incredibly important to battle motivation. Thus, while they held on to ideals of self-reliance and responsibility, they also believed in collective responsibility and the common good:?in short, if they were to fight yet another war, it needed to achieve a better life for those who fought it and returned.??

In remembering the dead, we need to honour their memory by truly engaging in the values that they died for.?Our current polarization and obsession with individualism to the expense of common cause is an affront to their sacrifice.

More directly, our idolization of the Fallen allows us to distance ourselves from those who survived the carnage and returned, perhaps missing limbs, or with damaged lungs or minds, to whatever convoluted programs we put in place to assist them become re-established in civil society.?By focusing on the dead, who are almost always depicted as young and angelic, we can ignore the very real citizens who were prepared to kill but who walk amongst us still.??

Unlike the idolized Fallen, those who return bear not only the scars of their experiences but sometimes the stigma of being prepared to kill in a society that would prefer to see itself as the Peaceable Kingdom in a peaceable world that does not exist.?As a result, Veterans, when we do think of them today, must be somehow broken, all the easier to pity them and ignore that we should not only respect their service and return them to civil life but also expect every citizen to be ready to protect the values we hold dear if needed.??

Veterans should not be stigmatized for their service.?Veterans are simply citizens, that killed or were prepared to kill for Canada, and returned.?They are, as J.L. Granatstein put it “Jam makers, Dairy Owners, and Stockbrokers” as much as they are soldiers.?However, in our peaceable kingdom, we do not want to remember that all veterans are not broken and that some have become national leaders.

We do not remember that before he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Lester B. Pearson was a stretcher-bearer and pilot in the First World War.?We do not remember that John Diefenbaker was on his way to the Western Front before being hospitalized in England.?We do not remember that Bert Hoffmeister was also hospitalized in England, but went on to become, as Doug Delaney argues, Canada’s best battlefield general, before becoming Chair of McMillan Bloedel.

We do not remember that Chief Justice Brian Dickson, the great interpreter of our beloved Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was missing a leg suffered in the Normandy battles of 1944.??Or that Milton Gregg, a tea totalling Baptist killed 11 Germans himself on a single morning before becoming a University President and Liberal Cabinet Minister.?Or that Barney Danson lost his eye in combat before also becoming a Cabinet Minister.??

Above all, we do not want to remember that perfectly decent people sometimes need to be prepared to kill to defend our values and, as a result, we do not reflect enough on whether we have shared values worth killing or dying for.?We idolize the Fallen, forget the returned, and turn our gaze away from why they sacrificed in the first place. We do not, as Tim Cook asks of us, Fight for our History.

John McCrae admonishes us to receive the torch and “…not break faith with us who die.”?Today, do not recite McCrae like liturgy without thinking.?Think hard about the Fallen but also about those who survive.?How do we treat them???

Also think hard about what it really means to be a Canadian, and what shared values are worth killing and dying for.?What type of country have previous veterans left us and have we tended it well??Think about the duty we all share to defend Canada if necessary, and that if we are lucky enough to return from that duty, remember that we need to be re-established in civil life.?

We are trustees of a noble legacy in a world where we might not be interested in war but war is interested in us.?In that world, to survive, we must know what we are fighting for.?People died so that we could live, we owe it to them and our children that we live well, learn hard lessons, and never forget.