Dear Editor:
Vimy Ridge was in the news continuously for many days, remembering the 3,600 Canadian soldiers who were killed in three days in a battle on that ridge in France during the First World War, 100 years ago. We have built a beautiful monument in remembrance of the soldiers who lost their lives in that unfortunate conflict.
However, I can’t help but wonder whether, by putting so much emphasis on this event, by mentioning, repeating and being proud of our military successes, or by seeing war as a means of finding the identity of our country, we are actually glorifying war itself. When speakers at the remembrance ceremony propound that “our men” laid down their lives that we can live in freedom or a member of the royalty of a “colonial” power suggests that those who died were “fighting against oppression,” one wonders whom they are actually talking about. Who was threatening our freedom and who was oppressing whom during the time of the First World War?
Would we honour those who died in that battle more if we quietly remember them, the great loss their death caused to their families, without making so many exclamations about it?
Wars are terrible. The American general Sherman is quoted to have said, “I am sick and tired of killing; war is hell.” My father was in the medical corps in the First World War. He hardly ever spoke about the horrors of that war, but it affected him for some time in his life and led to PTSD, which later may have been a cause for his suicide. I was not alive during the First World War, but I am a veteran of the Second World War and was conscripted to fight on the Russian Front. I, and I think many other veterans, would not like to be remembered in such a pronounced way.
All soldiers, no matter from which country, were trained and ordered to kill, and they did so. However, it is not easy, even for a soldier, to kill another human being whom you do not know. Are we really heroes by killing each other?
Historica Canada had a unique way of honouring the ones who died in recent wars. They made an appeal to the still surviving veterans of the Second World War and other wars, asking if they would be willing to share their war experiences with a younger generation of high school students. I responded and was invited by several schools. Students wanted to know what war was really like, after studying it in their classroom. I tried to take them with me through a day on the front lines. They were very attentive and involved, which I observed from the sometimes very thoughtful questions they asked.
A teacher who had invited me to her school wrote to the Historica Canada Memory Project organizer: “The first-hand accounts of his experience as a soldier on the front allowed us an incomparable and invaluable view into the effects of war on real individuals and their families. …his visit far exceeds that of any textbook or film I could have offered my students leading up to Remembrance Day this year.”
I hope that this experience will encourage these young people to promote and work for peace.
Helmut Lemke, Burnaby
