Rory Gilfillan is a history teacher and the head of social science at Lakefield College School.
I used to show pictures to my class of the Lakefield Old Boys – students at Lakefield College School (a private high school just north of Peterborough, Ont.) who had served in the wars of the 20th century. I would read aloud the letters they had sent home from the front. My intention was for my students to make a connection between themselves and these young men, to see that there was little separating them but the passage of time.
But recently, it dawned on me that in all the ways that matter, we are in fact nothing like these men. And it’s not just because our lives are easier, but because of something else altogether: very little has been asked of us.
Most of us have never been asked to leave loved ones and travel thousands of miles away with no return date. We have never been asked to lay down our lives so that people we have never met, in faraway lands, could be free. We have never been ordered to take the lives of strangers, or to carry the burden of those actions after the fact.
It has been three generations since Canadians, en masse, have been called on to don a uniform, rack the bolt of a rifle, or strap ourselves behind the controls of a Lancaster bomber; to willingly put ourselves into harm’s way. While the Canadian Armed Forces continue to serve as the country’s defence, the vast majority of us who are alive today have never had to send waves of our sons, fathers and brothers to war with the knowledge that they might never return. I imagine the men and women whom we commemorate on Remembrance Day might see our ignorance of war as a victory of sorts.
The boys who attended Lakefield College and fought in the two World Wars of the 20th century lived in a world that lacked the kind of social safety net and widespread access to health care we enjoy today. Most would have been well acquainted with death before their departure to the Western Front. Infant mortality was high and the average life expectancy was low. They would have seen the ravages of disease and infection. Travelling to Lakefield, Ont., for school would have been the furthest they had ever journeyed until they boarded ships to Europe.
On Remembrance Day, we honour those journeys. We remember that Canada fought both World Wars from start to finish. We remember that, in 1915, our soldiers stopped the enemy assault at the Second Battle of Ypres, holding urine-soaked handkerchiefs over their faces in defiance of the First World War’s earliest chlorine gas attack. We remember the boys who flew bombing missions at 20,000 feet over occupied Europe, when the odds of coming back alive made it the closest thing to a suicide mission during the Second World War, and we remember the troops sent to bolster the defence of South Korea in 1950, dying on numbered hills.
We remember the Canadian women who donned boiler suits to build munitions, aircraft and tanks, who took over family farms, raised children on their own, and turned plowshares into swords. We remember, too, the estimated 12,000 Canadians who defied their own government and fought in the Vietnam War, and the 40,000 Canadians who served in Afghanistan. We remember that in the biggest conflicts of the 20th century, Canadians have been among the first to fight and the last to lay down their arms.
Wearing a poppy and remembering our fallen has to be more than just a single history lesson or a day of sombre reflection. Remembrance Day comes with an obligation to do the hard work of democracy. Our liberty is inherited but it is not guaranteed.
While Canadians enjoy the rights enshrined in our Charter, in recent years we have seen examples both at home and abroad of the ways in which our rights can be threatened. There is no guaranteed right to anything – to practise any religion you wish, to assemble with whomever you want, to love anyone you choose, to have a free press that has both the ability and the obligation to criticize governments – without the willingness to step up and defend these rights when they are put at risk.
Canada could have sat out many wars, but we didn’t. We could have turned away, but we chose not to. We could have found excuses and reasons not to fight, but we made the hard choice instead. The men and women we memorialize on Remembrance Day understood that there are some ideals that are worth defending, whatever the cost.
Remembrance Day calls on us to live for the ideals that they died for.