REMEMBER!

Hanns F Skoutajan

I know its time for Remembrance because my wife after rummaging in her dresser drawer has found her favourite lapel badge. It is a black square  with a white dove carrying a palm branch in its beak. The message on the badge says : To Remember is to End All War. Humanity has had much time to remember the horrors and wastage of war.

I have recently been immersing myself in Margaret MacMillan’s tome  with the title , The War that Ended  Peace: The Road to 1914. It is a  recent book, out just in time for this season of the year. It calls to mind  that it is now 100 years  since the European powers  prepared for the Great War. I don’t know what was so “great” about it , except that thousands upon thousands of soldiers perished on its battlefields. Pilgrims still flock to the military cemeteries of Belgium and France to get some sense of the sacrifices committed by both sides in the wars of the 20th century.  Thousands more bore the marks of the war throughout their lives. In one of my congregations I ministered to a gentleman as he suffered and finally died of  emphysema having been exposed to mustard gas in “The Great One”.

As a child growing up in prewar Czechoslovakia it was not unusual to see men on crutches, blind or legless, victims of “the war to end all war.” I was well aware of the ravages of man’s inhumanity to man. 

In my book The Road to Peace: Memories and Reflections Along the Way I reflected on an incident in the spring of 1938.

“The shadow of an aircraft like a dark cross floated across the valley. It moved slowly for it was a World War 1 vintage machine, a double decker whose engine produced a sputtering sound. We heard it long before we saw it approach  the military encampment that housed various units of the Czech army on exercises just north of my hometown  not far from the German border.

My mother and I, along with many other people had taken our places on the grassy slope  overlooking the valley. We had come to see something of the military might of this  modern army, albeit in 1930 terms. 

The German border, our enemy, was not far up in the hills where I had learned to ski. Times were tense as Hitler turned up his rhetoric calling on the unification of all Germans which meant the surrender of the Sudetenland of Czechosloivakia to which Britain and France acceded at Munich in Septenber 1938.  

The public had been invited to come and observe the military exercises from the vantage point of the surrounding hills. Below us on the football field were rows upon rows of dark green tents and beyond that the military equipment, horse drawn gun carriages, even several tanks and armoured cars and other accoutrements of war. For me, admittedly a bit of a timid child, there was something ominous about this “death-dealing” array of power.”

What impressed me most,  ... well, alright, scared me, was that one airplane cruising over the encampment. It made my skin crawl, as it, like an evil omen, a shadowy cross, presaged war. This picture has lived with me all those years and I have been eternally grateful that my parents and I managed to escape to another continent and avoided that war altogether.

Following The Great War there came a respite of 20 years . I have a cartoon  that pictures death in the form of a skeleton astride a bass drum which he is beating vigorously and announcing, “..... and after a brief intermission we shall be back for more of the show.”

The Second World War was certainly different with many more battlefields besides the ones in Europe’s east and west and south, but also Africa and the Pacific. Civilian casualties in the Great War were relatively few compared to the Second War in which cities in Britain and Germany were set alight, to say nothing of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Each year our veterans march and stand solemnly at the cenotaph in Ottawa and most other cities and towns across the country. We gather to “Remember” and to pray that wars might cease. 

Reading Macmillan’s book I learned that in the decades before the war there were many statesmen who disparaged of the efficacy of war - it was too expensive they believed. Today, however, in his book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, Jermy Scahill writes about the privatization of war. Dick Cheney, then defense secretary and later as Vice President  in the Bush government, strove to privatize as much of the military as possible as a way of creating another barrier to civilian oversight. War and war production was not unaffordable but good business for large corporations producing military equipment. That administration and its acolytes believed war and war production was supremely profitable as long as the taxpayer was sufficiently scared to pay the bill. In our own country we need only think of the jet fighters that our government was willing to spend billions of the citizens’ dollars to acquire. For what purpose is a fair question.

Ian McKay and Jamie Swift in their book Warrior Nation: Rebranding in an Age of Anxiety write “Once known for peace-keeping, Canada is becoming a militarized nation whose apostles - the ‘new warriors’ - are fighting to shift public opinion.” 

Linda McQuaig commenting on this book  writes that, “With our federal government determined to glorify war and eradicate our enduring attachment to Canada as a promoter of peace, this engaging and highly readable book alerts us to what’s at stake  - the very soul of our nation.” Can we afford to be so changed?

In my mind I can still see and hear that lone aircraft  trailing its black cross over the valley .... and the world to come. Dare we remember  and strive for Peace and end all war?

SQ 07/11/2013