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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 6, 2004
D-Day
You can't smoke at the Legion any more. The veterans have been told to butt out almost everywhere and municipalities won't give Legion Halls exemptions from the proliferating anti-smoking by-laws because that would invite legal challenges from private bar-owners wanting exemptions too. Think of this for a moment -- think of our half million surviving vets many of whom (as my late grandpa) were going there for decades to drink and smoke with their cronies. (Old friends are the best.) Almost all of them smoke or would smoke -- it's a social thing. Everybody smoked in the Second World War everybody smoked in France -- read any diary look at the snapshots from that age before the triumph of tight-assed political correction. And especially in bars which have been smoking zones since they were invented. This is all about freedom: why our vets went to war. In case you've never heard Adolf Hitler was a non-smoker. He was the pioneer of anti-smoking regulations (as Bismarck before him was the pioneer of the welfare state; we 're all German now). Hitler tried to ban smoking throughout the German civil service. To be fair to the man he gave up when he realized that he didn't have the power. To the non-smoker the right to smoke is a minor thing surely not worth defending. Why should anyone persist in smoking if I decide I don't like it? After all what's another person's freedom? Democracy rules and now that a majority are non-smokers they can vote to make the minority behave. (It's an excellent example of democracy and freedom in direct conflict.) My non-smoking readers -- not all of them just the "health fascists" the ones with the ants in their pants -- may well argue I am being petty by bringing this up. Smoking is "minor" death on the battlefield is "major" why should I reduce the 60th anniversary of D-Day to some irrelevant rant about smoker's rights? But for the guys who landed in Normandy smoking was not a minor thing. It was a poignant symbol of freedom. We blew the Nazis off the cliffs and then we had a smoke. We ducked into the trench under a Moaning Minnie and then we puffed. We liberated Paris and after we'd done that we lit a Gitane. The baguette and the glass of Bordeaux were optional. A dear friend in the Yukon has compiled the memoirs of a certain Sgt. Red Anderson Calgary Highlanders transcribed from oral source. It is a most wonderfully entertaining document -- hysterically funny yet clanging everywhere with the ring of truth. It cries out to be read by generations who know nothing of war -- which alas is the very reason no Canadian publisher today would have the guts to print it. For it is utterly free of neurotic moral posturing. Take for example this succinct explanation for a place marker somewhere inland from the Norman beachfront: "I remember one German soldier that was shot in the middle of the road. All the tanks trucks and Bren gun carriers (even me) would run over him. After a while (five days) he was nothing but a spread-eagled grease spot. ... It was at a road junction so everybody called it 'Flat Man's Corner'." It's the stuff they talk about in Legion Halls where the old guys go or used to go to smoke and drink. To talk about stuff that people who weren't there wouldn't understand wouldn't want to understand -- the "boomers" and their progeny the people raised in luxury and peace who haven't heard that evil exists who no longer know what it takes to contain it; the people of the mall culture. Red Anderson again after a good shelling: "When it was over I went to check on the boys. I was no braver than anyone else but being a sergeant you were supposed to act brave so the men would think you were okay. Checked each man and everybody was scared and shook up. I asked Mac how he was doing. He said: 'Red I am so yellow I could give a blood transfusion to a lemon.' That broke the tension and we all had a good laugh." Sixty years later the world is changed. Peace has brought the tyranny of the jackass aptly symbolized by his anti-smoking by-laws. We have forgotten everything. For instance that freedom is laughter. That it's a glass of whisky an off-colour joke. That freedom was freedom when freedom was a smoke. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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