beachlass | (no subject)

In the 1920's towns and villages across Canada erected cenotaphs engraved with the names of soldiers who died overseas during the war. Men who went out from trenches, and disappeared into the artillery fire, the tear gas, the horrific sucking mud and did not return. Did not return to their battalions that night, or ever again to the towns, villages, native reserves and cities from which they had come.

The Imperial War Graves Commission looked after burials, constructing those huge cemeteries filled with white headstones: "row on row, they mark our place". The hospital cemeteries have mostly marked graves, but in the battlefield clearing cemeteries, where bodies were sometimes not recovered for a year or two, up to 80% of the gravestones are anonymous.

Some families added names to family headstones in local cemeteries, but at this time each year, we gather at cenotaphs to pay our respects, and remember the cost of wars. Because, to our grief and shame, it is not only First World War deaths inscribed in the granite, but also Second World War and Korean War veterans as well.

And we have men and women serving and dying overseas now as well.

We gather not only to remember the dead, but to remember their families. Families who had cenotaphs here and unmarked graves overseas. Families who have loved ones serving overseas now, risking their lives in Afghanistan.

We owe it to these families, owe it to the soldiers we send overseas to remember the sacrifice we ask of them. Not only the sacrifice of risking their own life, but the sacrifice of living in difficult, frightening conditions, and the sacrifice of making unimaginable decisions, and living with the actions required.

We must be vigilant, critical and thoughtful, not averting our eyes from either history - remembering the grey mud and the thousands dead in places like Passhendaele; nor averting our eyes from the complications of occupying Afghanistan.

I saw the film Passchendaele this week, and I thought it was wonderfully done. And I hold in my heart the questions the film raised in me: about the complicity of those who stay behind while we send others out in our name.