Lest We Forget. How do we teach children who have never known insecurity, never known fear, how do we teach them appreciation for soldiers? It's like asking them to be thankful for the sunshine, when all they have ever known is the warmth and beauty of the sun. How do we expect them to be thankful when they have no idea what they are to be thankful for? This is something that I struggle with as a parent. We have been so blessed these last 69 years. Canada has been involved in wars since 1945, but usually as peace keepers and never on the scale that it played in WWI or WWII.
For me as a parent, I feel that to teach my children what freedom means, what sacrifice means we must teach them their history. Teach history, not by boringly written facts written in dusty books, but by stories. Make it real, so that they realize that this is not fiction. These are not just fairy tale stories, where everyone lived happily ever after. Men and women died, not just on the battle field, but they gave a part of themselves, their very souls to those wars. Their sacrifice was not just bodily.
We must remember these men and women, give them a face, give them a name. These people were someone's much loved child. They were someone's father, brother, sister. They were deeply loved by someone and greatly mourned. They were not just inscriptions on stone, they were at one time flesh and blood. They gave themselves over to war so that we can live in freedom.
We have become so accustomed to what freedom is that we sometimes forget that it was bought for us in blood. World War I was the bloodiest conflict in Canadian history. It took the lives of 61, 000 Canadians. The Canadian population at the time was roughly 8 million. Young men as young as 17 (that is only 4 years older than my oldest daughter), needing jobs and full of patriotic pride joined the army. Even seasoned professional soldiers were shocked by the brutality of this war.
Many commonly used phrases came to the English language because of The Great War. "Trench Warfare", is one. Deep holes were dug into the ground, barely a man wide. These "trenches" were like a maze, designed to offer safety. In the winter they froze, in the summer they roasted. They slept in these dirt holes, that were often filled with mud, no matter the weather. They took turns sleeping on a tiny bench if they were lucky, many slept in the mud. All of this while there was an uncertainty as to when and where blasts would go off.
We also gained the term "Shell Shocked". Shell Shocked would come to mean anyone who is surprised and unable to deal with the stress of the surprise. The truth of the term was anything but. It was a term used to describe early post traumatic stress. The doctor who came up with the term, coined it because they did not know why these men were getting the shakes, had gone blind, or deaf with no apparent physical reason. At first he thought it had to do with the reverberation of the riffles. Eventually they realized the true cause. Treatment for shell shock was sometimes more brutal than the tremors themselves. Men were shot for "cowardice" who had shell shock on the battlefield. Those that had been lucky enough to have survived war, received electric shock therapy to help cure them.
These soldiers were living in a nightmare. Their landscapes were barren, bombed buildings reduced to only shells, more like something out of Dante's Inferno than on earth. They had to run though mud that was mixed with the blood of their fallen brothers. They listened to the moans and screams of the injured and the dying. These were the days when you often saw the person that you killed. They had bayonets, riffles with swords attached to the end to finish the job. Bloodied corpses littered the battlefields. These were young men who had been just regular teens before they had enlisted. These were young men who may have been farmers or high school students, they were the boy next door. The boy next door who had to kill or be killed.
World War II came just at the end of poverty of the dirty thirties. Unemployment was rampant. Young men joined the army just to find work. More than one million men and women served in the armed services. More than 42,000 were killed. The Canadian's were given the task of the liberation of the Netherlands. More than 7, 600 Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen died to free the Netherlands.
Every year since WWII, to show their gratitude to Canada, the Netherlands have sent thousands of tulips to Ottawa. That stunning display of tulips in our Nation's capital represents the stunning display of bravery shown by Canadian's in that awful war.
We need to remember their sacrifice for us. We need to teach our children to remember those heroes sacrifices for us. We live in Freedom. Because of them we live in a multi-cultural society. We are free to choose to practice any religion we would like to. We can love anyone we want to love, man or woman. We speak English or French, not German. We are free to marry whomever we chose, no matter their colour or health. Hitler was obsessed with creating a perfect race, an Arian race. He had already begun to murder the Jewish, the gays, the handicapped anyone who tried to stop him. He wanted a blonde haired, blue eyed super race.
This door is the pathway to knowledge, all you need do is open it. Go and see the faces that go with the inscriptions on the Cenotaph. See those heroes for who they were, sons, brothers, fathers. They gave their lives so that we could have a better world, a safe world. Thank you. Thank you for your sacrifice. To those Men and Women who returned from war, I say Thank you. Thank you for your sacrifice.
