By Brent Bloch
MOUNT FOREST – Remembrance Day is celebrated every fall, but soon after forgotten.
In schools, children are marched into gymnasiums and taught the importance of Remembrance Day. Poems are recited, war histories are chronicled and dramatic interpretations are witnessed.
Crimson poppies are pinned above hearts and silence is observed.
Then students return to their everyday lives of trigonometry and Shakespeare.
As an educator, traveller and history enthusiast, I have endeavoured to honour Canada’s fallen soldiers through pilgrimages to sites of the great wars on my own and with my students.
I have walked the trenches of Vimy Ridge and stood in the pouring rain on a frigid day; but I have not done so with muck and grime stuck to my uniform, or with the cavalry charging straight at me with bayonets brandished.
I have not stormed machine-gun nests where the rat-a-tat of fired ammunition reverberated in the air. I have not breathed my last breath on the ridge in Vimy with 3,598 of my countrymen.
I have faced the imposing, impenetrable cliffs of Dieppe and imagined the impossibility of scaling them; but I have not done so as hot metal ripped through my comrades beside me.
I was not mowed down like ripe grain when my landing craft boat lowered its ramp to the delight of waiting enemy guns.
My dead body was not washed away by the waves on the beach like some of the 907 Canadian soldiers who died during the raid on Dieppe.
I have celebrated the anniversary of D-Day with Canadian war veterans, eagerly drunk up their stories of war like a thirsty school boy, and admired them as they paraded through the streets of Bayeux.
I spilled tears with these veterans on Juno beach in Normandy; but I did not spill my blood with them 70 years earlier when the smell and fear of death were lingering near.
I did not pay for the feeling of the white sand between my toes, unlike the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, where the battle for the beachhead cost 340 Canadian lives.
Despite my pilgrimages and hunger for history, I have come to realize that I have no idea what it must have been like to claim Vimy Ridge, raid Dieppe, land on D-Day or literally stand on guard for my country.
I have never looked death in the eye, starved, suffered torture or felt true fear – and for that I am thankful.
Just as the maple leaves sacrifice their existence each autumn so that the tree has a better chance at survival in the winter, so too did Canada’s soldiers give up their lives for us so that we might have a better chance to weather the storms of discrimination, tyranny and hatred that periodically batter our world.
Let us not only remember our past when the blood-red poppies appear momentarily between Halloween pumpkins and Christmas cards.
Let us also remember the sacrifices of our fallen Canadians every time we see a maple leaf fly.
*Brent Bloch is principal of Wellington Heights Secondary School in Mount Forest.