Every small town and First Nation community across our nation hosts a local cenotaph, sometimes even more than one. And an examination of the names on those cenotaphs reveal the history of that community, written in blood spilt on foreign soils and engraved on marble and stone. Few are the families who cannot trace some branch of their lineage to those names.
This is, of course, no different here on Manitoulin, where we also have the incredible Veterans’ Memorial Gardens at the Manitoulin District Cenotaph, where monuments stand not only in memory of the men and women who gave of their life’s blood in service to our nation, whether in the armed branches of the army, navy, air force or merchant marine, but also to the youth whose lives were irrevocably impacted by the violence of the conflict between nations when fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters failed to return or returned scared deeply by their wartime experiences.
War is not glorious. It is brutal. It is pitiless. It is an insane aspect of humanity that continues, to this very day, as an existential threat to our species despite our many social and technological achievements. To think otherwise is a dangerous hubris.
For many of those young men and women who set out for the recruiting office by horse-drawn wagon, car, train, bus and on foot, it might have seemed like a grand adventure, a chance to “get off the rock.” Those ideals were soon dashed upon the rocks of reality. They died on Queenston Heights. They fell in the slaughterhouse of the Second Battle of Ypres, at the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Vimy Ridge, the struggles for Hill 70 and Passchendaele. They died on the beaches of Dieppe and Normandy, in the hedgerows of The Netherlands, the Battle of Ortona, the Battle of Hong Kong (and its subsequent death march), in the air and upon the sea, and countless other actions. They died in Korea, on Hill 355, in the Battle of Kapyong and Hill 187. In countless peacekeeping missions around the globe, in Afghanistan and most recently losses in our NATO commitments in Europe.
So many dead. So many tragedies, both in war and in its horrific aftermath—in the hundreds of thousands of mothers and children who were bereft of fathers.
Today, we tend to look upon war as something of a spectator sport. Playing out on our television and computer screens. Something far removed from our daily lives, insulated from us by a pane of glass, unless, of course, it was your child, your parent, your cousin, uncle or aunt who number among the recent fallen.
There is no glory in war. Even victory must prove hollow to those whose families were ripped asunder by the bullet’s path. Canadian Forces have never lost a war. But so many lives have been lost, more than 118,000 since Confederation.
As we approach November 11, Remembrance Day, and don our poppies and stand in solemn silence as the bugle sounds, let us all remember that war is not a game. It is a brutal curse upon all of humanity and something that does not fail to touch each of us in ways we may not even understand or realize. It is something to be abhorred and eschewed at every opportunity and only faced when all other avenues have failed.
That is why we must honour those who have stood, and continue to stand, on the bulwarks in our nation’s defence.
We shall remember them.
Lest we forget.
