Remembrance

  It was my great honour to again speak at the Dwight Remembrance Day service this year.  Here is a copy of my text.

It’s been a century since men went to battle in the nightmare that was Ypres.  The ferocity of the fighting, the victory won at such great loss has seared it into history.  In 2015, on the centennial, over 800,000 visitors came to the war memorial site, to remember and think upon the horror of a place where combatants first saw the use of poison gas, the stagnation of trench warfare,  where constant shelling churned clay soil and drainage systems in the fields into mud so deep that men and horses drowned in it.   From August to December, the British forces alone lost 95,000 men.

The Canadians were moved into the line for the third battle, their first major appearance on a European battlefield. 

Through terrible fighting, withered with shrapnel and machine-gun fire, hampered by rifles which jammed, violently sick from the gas and gasping for air through soaked and muddy handkerchiefs, they held on until reinforcements arrived. In these 48 hours, 6,035 Canadians, one man in every three, became casualties of whom more than 2,000 died. They were heavy losses for Canada's little force whose men had been civilians only several months before

And that’s the thing – they had all been, short days before, just people. Not soldiers, not heroes, just people.

War tries hard to make us forget that.  War IS intolerance.  It creates “the other”.  It’s a form of sickness that makes us believe that the ‘other side’ needs to be destroyed.  In WWII the world stood up against the unspeakable horror that was the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel recounted in his memoir Night of being marched past open burning pits full of bodies, seeing soldiers throw in babies still alive. Because they were Jewish. They were different. They were other…

If war is fought to secure freedom, then it is fought to secure tolerance. Our freedom relies on the ability, the willingness to tolerate the existence of opinions or behaviour that one does not necessarily agree with.

I have a story, from right here in Dwight.  Beverly Payne, many of you will remember, lived here most of her life. She collected postcards, 20,000 of them. They came from the most unusual places. One of them – the one her son finds the most interesting – is from the Sino Japanese war.  Now there was a war that demonized the ‘other’, with all sides depicting their enemies as somehow less than human.

Bev had an uncle, and he flew with the legendary volunteer force known as the Flying Tigers, about 100 American pilots who fought for China in this conflict.  You’d know the planes, from the fierce fanged  faces painted on the cowling.  During one incident, the American killed a Japanese soldier – and in his pocket found a postcard.  Turned out it was from the soldier’s wife.

Bev’s uncle mailed it home to HIS wife, commenting, “it makes you think. They are people, just like us.”  .

People. Just like us.  Anne Frank was a girl with a diary.  John McCrae was  a young man who loved poetry. Tommy Prince was an Anishinaabeg hunter.

Sometimes we think that we have won the freedom, that we have made great strides forward.  But tolerance, well, that is a fragile thing. 
Rosa Parks couldn’t sit at the front of the bus until 1955 – ten years after WWII Until 1967 in England, men were jailed for being gay. In 1990 Ireland finally shut down the Catholic run homes for Illigimate babies who were taken from the mothers and many of whom died terribly young. It was 1991 when Switzerland finally gave all women the vote.  Canada didn’t shut down the shame of the residential schools until 1996.  There are still private clubs in America that won’t admit Jewish members.  We are perhaps neither as tolerant, nor as free, as we like to think.

As we pause to remember and thank those who have fought to secure our freedoms, perhaps we should pause to consider that as well. Promoting tolerance and protecting freedom is the best way we can honour them.

This year, in Suffolk, townspeople, people just like us, decorated the ancient church with 5500 hand knitted poppies.

At Ypres, this year, 430,000 people just like us came to pay homage. Harry Patch was seventeen when he survived the gas, the trenches, the shrapnel and the mud at Ypres. He died in 2009, at the age of 111. Every year on the anniversary, Harry would lock himself in a private vigil for his fallen friends. Young men, just like him, who paid the supreme price for the darkness and intolerance that swept the world into war.

Let’s never do that again.