We Are Canadians. Lest We Forget.

War is Hell. It isn’t original, but truth is stark and there it is.

Battlefields range around the earth and refugees are fleeing in all directions.The borders of nation states are permeated and the crisis is here at our door.

The weather grew cold and the sleet began to fall this afternoon on Sixth  Street.

My mind was churning with anxious thoughts of past differences with family and battles fought over nothing. The clouds wreathed the bay in white.  November and the black dog had come to visit.

Gloom held sway as I thought of a cold field in Belgium and kids not yet twenty, wet to their hips in the mud with the pounding of guns and death so near.

Fokkers in the air and Fusiliers trying to gain a foothold. I would be crapping  my drawers. Wouldn’t you?

Home now, at the Cenotaph, and your rattled body and soul is not yet twenty- five. All your friends and comrades are dead on the field and their names inscribed on the obelisk.

Midland, Penetang, Waverley, Wyebridge ,Waubaushene, Port or the Harbour, all the boys volunteered. Getting off the farm, a uniform and an adventure ahead, what’s not to like?

They went away boys, and, those lucky enough to return, became men. They shared their terror amongst themselves, where the  horrors they had witnessed remained a secret.

In less enlightened times, the idea of manly virtue was to have a stiff upper lip, suck it up buttercup … you know the refrain.

However, what the Forces discovered was that those “battled hardened soldiers” were thinking and feeling young men and women who had been, in modern vernacular, traumatized.

In the great rebuilding following the Second World  War, Veterans Associations and Legions sprung up around the country to  support these loyal Canadians that had won freedom at an awful price. Therapy had only just begun. Consider how far we have progressed.

This is the price of freedom and they shed their lives for this truth. Remember this. That is all they ask of us. 

These communities of Veterans of current conflicts, who also form around our local Legion branches, play a very important role in the community. They are  social clubs in the very best sense of the word and these values are treasured by those who care about these truths.

I hope we won’t abandon them on the field.

Copyright René Hackstetter, November 1, 2020.