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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 11, 2001
The remembrance
My grandfather fought in the First World War my father in the Second. For some reason I was overlooked. I think of my son just coming of age and wonder if he may sign up on some sunny or on some rainy day in the years just ahead. Sign on for what may come to be known as World War III. In the moment of the crash in that morning in New York it ceased to be inconceivable. Some thousands of souls: our first casualties. I belong to the generation the "baby boom" that neatly avoided the great and terrible events of the 20th century; who walked like aging virgins into this 21st. Why was I missed? On this Armistice Day in 2001 two months after Sept. 11 my generation begins to ask this question. We are now at the age that provides the world with its leaders rather than its soldiers; the generation which must make the decisions to fight or to surrender. We who have lived only in peace we who have never seen the ugly face of battle stand today in silent remembrance of the generations that have. And for the first time we have a memory of the future. All our lives we assumed even we who had read some history assumed because we wanted to believe that war was in the past. We felt that it could touch us only through the past. We were thankful but too placidly thankful for what our parents and their parents lived through. We did not know what they knew; we are only now learning. We did not know what they did not want us to know when they raised us in the leafy suburbs. The generation of my own parents piously prayed that we would never have to look on the face of evil. That we would never be devoured as they saw devoured their brothers husbands fathers friends the hundreds and thousands of defenceless civilians. "They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old." Suddenly we all know better. War is not something from history but something in life in the human fate. It is not a final condition but a passing condition. There is no war to end all wars. And the casualties of war are not somehow avoidable. By the luck of the draw a man is killed the man beside him is not even injured. We saw this in the World Trade Centre the sheer luck by which some escaped. But something must also die in each survivor. President Bush said of the terrorists that they had taken away "a part of our soul". It was to my mind his most eloquent observation. For it is hard for a member of my generation -- the generation of George W. Bush -- to understand to formulate this idea. We are only beginning to appreciate the losses. Our youth our innocence is torn away like limbs torn away even when our bodies emerge unharmed. How arbitrary are these losses. But Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. There was the old lady who lived next door alone in the parlour with her piano; this very old lady it seemed to me. On the top of the piano was a young man faded black-and-white in a frame still polished. He was wearing a uniform he went off to war in the year of grace 1914 leaving her at home with their little daughter. This daughter was now grown was much older than her father; had long since gone off. I was a little boy. Sometimes I would call on the old lady and sit in her parlour. This old lady this member of an ancient generation this old maid: who could imagine that she'd ever had a man? But she had and there he was on the top of that piano. She an old woman in her mid-seventies looking back forever on this young man alert and smart in the uniform of an officer. His cap his braid his buttons. And perhaps the little speck of lint that she spotted and pulled off in the moment when they parted. What do we know about these old ladies? Only the pictures. It was she who could remember that young man's touch. And the smell of that man and of his buddies as they went off to war. And the love letters she must have received from Europe opened and re-closed by the army censors the loneliness and the longing. And the man who came up the sidewalk with the telegram. It is all so far away -- fifty years then much more than eighty now. We all die eventually but for the time being pro tem "At the going down of the sun and in the morning -- we shall remember them." In the meantime we look behind and before us. A world at war once again at war. The enemy is much different but it begins the same way people hopefully wondering if it might be all over by Christmas. People just beginning to come to terms with the enormity of what has happened with the inevitability of what is to come. There are times when we can afford to look away when the enemies we have cannot possibly reach us when little things happen but life goes on in peace. And there are other times when big things have happened. Each year on this day we remember what was big. We hold out our hands in solidarity one generation reaching to another. We glimpse for a moment the larger democracy for which our citizens have fought and have died and made the world safe for citizens not yet born. And each of us remembers what each of us remembers bound together by little scraps and pictures by the words of old poems and songs. It is the day on which by tradition we quote Laurence Binyon's magnificent "Valediction" and schoolchildren recite "In Flanders Fields". We speak them again today. But for the first time in so many years we must remember also the last stanza the one we had unconsciously suppressed. For once again it is relevant to our condition: Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep. ... David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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