Almost ready to go....I can hardly believe it!!!

"I wrote this short piece after I returned from my first visit to Europe in August of 2006.  I am not a writer, but I was so moved from what I saw, and even more so from what I felt as I walked through the cemeteries and battlefields of  long ago, that I knew I had to do something.  It inspired me to sit down, which I don't do much as you know by now, and put into words what has led me into this fulfilling curricular activity that I take part in every couple of years.  It has driven me to make sure that generations of kids never forget the sacrifices that were made by so many men and women that they'll never know.  Thanks for reading!"
                                                                                                                                  -DC

"EXPERIENCE OF LIFE"

        

         Each Remembrance Day Canadians gather at all the Nation’s cenotaphs to give thanks for those who made the supreme sacrifice. Subtle, to the point, and often not even spoken aloud, though on everyone’s minds, are the words "Thank you." There is also John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Field, a poem hardly anyone truly understands the significance of anymore.

            But it isn’t until visiting the shrines, battlefields and the cemeteries, acre upon acre of headstones immortalizing the dead, that a Canadian realizes our words are grossly understated. We owe our freedom and our very lives to the thousands of young men and women who stood their ground against evil. How do simple words repay such generosity?  The truth is…there are none.

            Far too many 21st century Canadians think that saying "Thank You" once a year is enough. It seems to me that the one-day tribute to tens of thousands of dead in the prime of their lives is sickeningly wrong. That sentiment was driven home in me during what I call "My Experience of Life" in August of 2006 when I first visited the battlefields of France and Belgium. I used to think that remembrance of war and loss of life is all about death on a huge scale. But their deaths can be more than tragic and at the same time overwhelmingly powerful.   They truly can be life affirming and most certainly life changing.

         As I walked with a group of history teachers through each battlefield and military cemetery in Belgium and northwest France, I found myself trying to imagine the thoughts of these young soldiers, who so generously gave up not only a few years of their lives, which many thought both wars would be, but the gave the whole of their very lives.

            CJ Macdonald, a young Summerside man and a personal hero, who is buried in Beny-Sur-Mer cemetery, certainly didn’t return home. I was very proud to read the memorial on his headstone that read “God Grant this Summerside boy his eternal rest.”   Then there was "Uncle Max," the grand uncle of my new friend Darryl from Newfoundland who some say did not return either. If you were to look at his discharge records, "Uncle Max" did indeed return to St. John’s, Newfoundland. But as the stories were recounted, this wasn’t the same uncle Max that fought in France. The former fun-loving, practical joking (and rarely sober) uncle Max “died” with many of his Newfoundland brothers in the famous battle at Beaumont-Hamel.

            These young men were no different from me.  Had they lived, their lives would probably been very much like mine.  They would have returned home to meet a special lady, got married, and started a family.  It occurred to me that many of these soldiers were so young that their tragic deaths deprived them of the simple pleasures we so often take for granted - being with friends, attending a birthday or an anniversary party, and accompanying their parents and friends into old age.

         The ghosts of the two Great Wars walked with me as I ventured some 90 and 60 years into the past, respectively.  I imagined being one of those brave young men.  I could sense, almost hear, the American platoons walking beside me through the woods of Cantigny, quickly closing on a retreating German division in November of 1917. We actually stood in the fields of Flanders where John McRae once was and I could sense his call to take up the torch for freedom, or the dead would not rest. But what was the torch?  And how does a Canadian in 2006(2012) take up the torch?  These ghosts haunted me again in places like Vimy Ridge,  Kitchener’s Wood, Mousetrap Farm, Passchendaele, and Ypres, Belgium, where Canadians were among the first to experience the first attacks of new age weapons - like chlorine gas. 

            My mind continually raced with fear, sorrow, and gratitude to the voices of youthful soldiers as we read excerpts from the war diaries.  These diaries were first hand accounts of panicking men rushing to urinate on any cloth, so they could hold it to their mouths to filter out the yellow gas that was killing their friends miserably. Again I could hear their gasps and feel my lungs drawing air, but try as I might, it was surreal.

            And then the questions….. Why not me? Why was I born generations after these men? Could it have been me, could it still be me some day? I wondered how I would have died.  Could it be my son or my daughter some day? How did their parents endure the agony of not knowing what dangers their children were in? I could hardly focus on the tour guide’s sentences. No words could carry that weight of hearing these grim details. I was caught in a wave of emotions that well up from the soil where I was standing.

            There’s a saying urges us to "walk a mile in someone’s shoes" so we might understand that person. I thought I had walked the proverbial mile in their shoes. I had traveled from Canada, made my pilgrimage to these shrines, listened dutifully to the grim details of war and sacrifice. But I had come without a 75 pound pack on my back, there we no pains of hunger,  there was almost certainty of reuniting with my family and friends, and, most evidently, without anyone taking aim at me through a sniper’s scope and trying to kill me. Yes, the wind was cool for August and days of travel were long, these were definitely minor inconveniences in comparison. I must have said thank you to these soldiers a thousand times over those days in my head, but it still wasn’t enough. It never will be.

            Our journey continued from the inland sites of WWI to the coastal sites of WWII. First, the views of the English Channel arose while we approached the picturesque, quiet harbor town of Dieppe, France. Although booming with tourists, it seemed so quaint and quiet, assuredly much different than it was this same time of year 64 years ago.

            It was hard to imagine the horror and massacre that met the Canadian soldiers on 19 August 1942. Hard to imagine, that was until I spotted the German machine gun installations that can still be seen from atop the chalk cliffs overlooking the English Channel. In 1942, these Canadian men had a mission, the objective was to take this town, and they paid a dear price.  They were cut to pieces on that savage shore by machine gun fire.

            Following dinner a few of my tour group friends and I walked down to the very beach that these men were trying to land their barges on, where they died, and once again the horror replayed in my head. A thousand “thank yous” were not good enough, but I had nothing else to give these fallen soldiers. I felt helpless. Probably much like these men did on that very day in August of 1942.

            The English Channel was in an ugly mood that night. Waves were crashing with a deafening roar, and I imagined these conditions to be much the same as in 1942. I was wrong. These men weren’t going for a leisurely walk on a popular beach along the English Channel. They were wading up to their waists in what would eventually be blood-filled waters; they would have been holding their rifles above their heads and walking headlong into a hail of machine gun fire.  They were walking into, arguably, the biggest one-day slaughter in Canadian military history. Of the almost 5,000 Canadians that left England in the middle of the night, very few returned. 3700 were either dead, wounded or captured.

            Many view this operation in Dieppe as a failure, but it was also one of those tragedies that military strategists learn from. And for me it was yet another example of Canadian bravery and sacrifice beyond all realm of imagination. The lessons learned at Dieppe, though it was a slaughter, led to the overwhelming successes of Operation Overlord in June of 1944, more commonly known as D-Day, which would signal the beginning of the end of these two great tragedies. Knowing this my emotional state at Juno Beach was much more positive and upbeat for that very reason, but men still died. I hoped that these men knew, with the success reached in the initial hours of taking the beach at Juno, that there was light, that someone was taking up the torch and moving on to victory.  It is hard to reconcile sacrifice with success, but it seems that Canadian soldiers, fierce in the face of the enemy, were prepared to honor the call to defend their country with their lives.

            As a social studies teacher, I have always approached the Great Wars from the logical cause and effect point of view, or the prototypical "strategic military angle." There were always times when, which now seem almost criminal, I talked about the courage and the bravery of these young people who fought and died so that we can live in a free society. To those young men and women who have gone before me and those still alive and able to hear this today, I apologize, a belated gesture, which, like my thousands of “thank yous”, remains inadequate. But I am sorry, nevertheless. It wasn’t intentional, and I always recognized their bravery and courage, but I unknowingly underestimated the level of courage that it took to storm those beaches at Dieppe and Juno and many other areas in Europe.

            As a society we have begun an unfair disconnect in many ways with these brave souls of WWI, WWII and other wars. It is something romantic, a dream, and beyond comprehension. That is why we have to be grounded in reality by connecting with the veterans still living. The saddest day is yet to come, and that will be when the last of these survivors from the battlefields of Europe pass away. At that time, the responsibility of re-telling these stories solely rests on the scholarship and memory of historians and teachers and now the students of Three Oaks, who have made the pilgrimage to the battlefields of Europe. What we must then do is re-connect society to these people who secured our freedoms with their courage. 

         The TOSH students who have had, and will have, the good fortune of experiencing the memorials of Europe have once again accepted the “torch” of freedom which John McCrae mentioned so many years ago in Flanders.  Still there are Canadian soldiers who are at the mercy of a society “dying” to pin fault and blame on a government for a war that raged in Afghanistan or a peacekeeping mission in the Sudan. The point is not whether a war or conflict is right or wrong, in fact there are soldiers fighting that don’t necessarily support the wars, but it’s important for Canadians to support their own men and women who are once again putting their lives on the line for our freedom.  Respect them for who they are, they are sons, they are daughters, they are brothers, they are sisters, they are mothers and they are fathers.  Please think of that first, because it has been said in the past that sometimes peace can only be achieved on the other side of war.

            When I began to write this, I wasn’t sure where the haunting presences of the dead would lead me. They were certainly telling me I too often take my peaceful life for granted. The original tour was definitely an experience of a lifetime. Was this the deeper meaning of the journey, that because of these dead I get to live freely? I felt compelled to tell this story to you today, and that is my torch in reference to McCrae’s poem once again.   I truly believe it is. The torch is my responsibility to the dead and the foe was my indifference; my indifference towards these brave and beautiful souls. I have learned gratitude. That’s the thanks that you and I can give them daily. That is where my journey lead and now it has connected with your journey.  That is my experience of life.