Today is November 11th. If you're from the United States, that means it's Veteran's Day. If you're British or Canadian (like me) that means today is Remembrance Day.
When I was little, my mother always taught me the importance of wearing a poppy and being silent to honour this important day. If it fell on a weekend, we would go to the cenotaph and see all the veterans and the pipes being played. If it was a weekday, we would have an assembly in school where someone would read 'In Flanders Fields'.
As I grew older, I never lost that feeling of solemness on Remembrance Day. I would wear my poppy, without fail, over my heart until it fell off. But I began to notice that not everyone my age paid the same respect to November 11th as I did.
I've always loved history. I would read books on World Wars 1 and 2 and absorb facts and names and dates and places. I spent hours staring at black-and-white pictures of young men in uniform and wondering to myself who they were, and if they ever came home. To many of the other kids, the 65 thousand Canadians killed in World War 1 were just statistics. They weren't real, they didn't mean anything. To me, they were very real and it made me horribly sad because I felt like I knew them, as much as anyone can 'know' a person (real or fictional) that they've only read about.
When I reached high school, the yearly assembly was just a nuisance to many of the students - they didn't want to sit still in a dark room for an hour and a half. One year I heard a boy tell his friend that he'd taken off his poppy and thrown it out because it 'was annoying' that it kept pricking him. I couldn't believe that someone would be so shallow and disrespectful; that he'd be so irritated by the tiny pinprick that he would disregard that it stood for something much larger and more important than himself, or any of us. I wanted to turn around in the hallway and tell him that pinpricks are nothing compared to bullets or landmines or mustard gas. That hundreds of thousands of people had suffered and died because they loved and believed in their country and in the world - and yet he didn't think remembering them was worth the inconvenience.
Even those who didn't die were changed forever by what they experienced. They may have lost limbs, or their eyesight, or had less visible scars. Seeing their friends get blown up or shot in front of them leaves lasting devastating marks on their mind and their emotions. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was not really recognized until after World War 1, and as a result, many soldiers who returned home didn't get the help they needed and suffered 'shell shock' for years afterward. They were never quite the same.
World War one began over a hundred years ago. Today, there are no living people who saw combat during this war, and very few who were at home while it was happening. Veterans of the Second World War are dwindling in numbers every year, and during my lifetime, I know they'll all be gone too. So every year we are left with fewer living reminders of why we have this day. And many of the younger generations (such as mine, or my sisters') don't have parents or even grandparents who were around at that time and can remind us of the significance. These wars shaped world history, and many of us seem to have forgotten that.
My mom told me once about one of my grandfather's distant relatives who fought in World War 1, whose wife was supposed to meet him when he was in England on leave. He wound up being delayed and she had to return to Canada before he got there. A few months later, he went missing during the Battle of Vimy Ridge and was presumed to have died without seeing her ever again. Not only is that story sad, but it made me think about all the families and possible lives that never came to be. If he'd survived and returned home, I might have distant cousins on that branch of my family tree. But instead it just ends with his name.
Something else we forget is how the statistics we read about in history books were people, just like us. They had homes, and childhoods, and parents and siblings and many of them had spouses and even children. They had favourite foods and pets and hopes and dreams just like we do. They had names and faces and people who loved them and missed them. They weren't just members of a regiment who fought at a certain battle, they weren't just part of a number. They were human beings. And while some politicians argue that many wars are unnecessary, that's not the point here.
We can't change history. We can't bring these people back. But what we can do, and we absolutely must do, is remember them. Thank them for all they did for the country that we love, and respect their memories. Learn from the mistakes of the past so that history doesn't repeat itself. Because if we don't do that, then everything they did, all that they fought and sacrificed and died for will have been pointless. And that would be the worst tragedy of all.
Lest We Forget.
