Remembrance Day — lest we ever forget

You may have seen the Remembrance Day television ad from Veterans Affairs Canada that aired in the lead-up to Nov. 11.

Appropriately sombre, it acknowledged the tenacity of Canadian soldiers, but also their quiet heroism — whether slogging through mud, sailing perilous seas or, during more contemporary deployments, risking life and limb, aiding the wounded, remembering the dead.

Remembrance Day, the narrator says, is: “The hardest day of the year. The longest day of the year. The scariest day of the year. The loudest. Quietest. Darkest. Brightest. The bravest … The most unforgettable day of the year.”

And on Nov. 11, many of us did think of those who risked their lives for a better world — and of those making that sacrifice today.

We stood solemnly at cenotaphs, heads bowed as the plaintive notes of Last Post echoed among the stilled crowd. We laid wreaths, recounted family lore, looked at sepia photos of uniformed relatives we never knew, observed moments of silence.

We may have also thought of the terrible price of war as we dropped a couple of toonies through the slot of a plexiglass box for the poppy campaign. We may have met a member of the Armed Forces and thanked them for their service.

But we need to remember war’s great cost every day, not just on Nov. 11, because as long as invasion is seen and supported as an acceptable option, no one is immune.

History reminds us of battlefield strategies and statistics, but it’s the human anguish that takes its toll on generations we must never forget.

Since April 2023 in Sudan, the power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has been fuelled, in part, by a desire to control the country’s gold resources. Both groups stand to gain if the Northeast African country maintains a system of military rule.

The situation is dire — more than 150,000 people dead and 14 million displaced. Countless others are starving. The Norwegian Refugee Council calls it “the world’s largest displacement crisis and a deepening humanitarian catastrophe.”

“For months,” the council reports, “people have survived on pest-infested animal feed, but even that meagre source has now vanished.”

As of Nov. 7, the RSF had agreed to an American and Arab-brokered humanitarian ceasefire.

We hope for peace, but we know it is elusive as long as there are riches to be gained, power to be had and hatred and bigotry to spur things along, no matter how many people are maimed, killed and traumatized in the process.

In Ukraine, Palestine, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Somalia and many other places — battles continue, leaving emotional and physical debris fields that can never be cleared. Every day, lives are uprooted, shattered, ended.

The Geneva Academy is currently monitoring 110 armed conflicts in the world. “Some of these conflicts make the headlines,” its website says, “others do not. Some of them started recently, while others have lasted for more than 50 years.”

I find it astonishing that even after all the wars in recent history that have touched us directly, even after reading the harrowing stories of those who were there, war is still with us, even if we console ourselves with the fact that it’s happening somewhere else. A true part of remembering and honouring the terrible events of the past, surely, is acknowledging that they could also happen here.

George G. Blackburn, author of The Guns of Normandy, an unvarnished account of Canadian soldiers’ experiences in France during the Second World War (including his own), makes it clear that going to war means experiencing the hell of “continuously living with grinding tension arising from the irrepressible dread of being blown to pieces or being left mangled…”

In her diary, Anne Frank wrote of the grim world she glimpsed from a window as she hid with her family in an Amsterdam annex when the Nazis were ramping up their reign of terror, pulling Jews from their houses: “Rows of good, innocent people accompanied by crying children, walking on and on … bullied and knocked about until they almost drop. No one is spared — old people, babies, expectant mothers, the sick — each and all join in the march of death.”

When we think that war can’t touch us in our communities or that our democratic rights are immune from threat, even in these dangerous and divisive times, these are the kinds of stories we must heed — the first-hand experiences of soldiers, nurses, medics, journalists and others, from the battleground and the home front.

We must take their warnings to heart and keep them there, always.

In the immortal words of Murtagh Fitzgibbons from the streaming series Outlander, “There’s always a war coming.”

Pam Frampton lives in St. John’s.

Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com | X: @Pam_Frampton Bluesky: @pamframpton.bsky.social