Legions help canadians commemorate Remembrance

Tuesday will mark the 90th anniversary of the end of one of the most brutal conflicts in which Canadians served in more than a century.

Fighting on the Western Front during the First World War ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918, more than four years after it erupted.

Canada, a small dominion with a population of about 8 million, enlisted almost 620,000 service people for the conflict. Of that number 66,000 were fatalities. Remember the population size at the time.

The Second World War -- which included the Holocaust and the excesses of the Russian Front and the Japanese war -- was more catastrophic in total death and destruction, but Canadians lost 45,000 young service people in comparison.

The First World War -- with all the horror of modern warfare technology mixed with the unimaginable filth and degradation on the static Western Front -- was seen as the ‘Great War,’ the ‘War to End All Wars.’ After all, no one who had witnessed the carnage would be so foolish as to ever wish for it to recur.

But it did, beginning in 1939, and Canadians were in it early and for the long haul, until the end in 1945.

Canadians also took part in the United Nations war in Korea in 1950-53.

Peacekeeping was the main effort from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, when the situation in the Balkans needed more and more robust peacemaking.

And Canadians met the challenge. They still do so in the Afghan Mission.

Hants County residents have served in and around Afghanistan with the recent West Nova contingent or with the regular forces – including Navy and Air Force.

Interest in Remembrance waned during the1970s and 1980s, until the peacemaking duties in the Balkans during the 1990s brought attention to the Canadian Armed Forces and those who had served then and before.

Renewed popular interest in the Canadian First World War battles at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele are indicative of this continuing trend.

And Hants County Legionnaires have done their part in bringing Remembrance to young people.

After all, Hants County is where the first Call to Remembrance quiz program began in 1995. Founded by current Nova Scotia and Nunavut Command president David Blanchard, the program has gone province wide, with interest from elsewhere in the country over the years.

Gordon Martin now heads up the Valley Call to Remembrance games, which will get underway in January.

Remembrance certainly has no part in glorifying war. The numbers of names on local cenotaphs in Hants County and across the country prevents any such folly.

And we have to understand that wherever Canadians have had to engage in conflict – in Africa, Europe, Asia and at sea – civilian populations have been subject to wartime privations known here only in the very distant past, far beyond human memory.

In fact, the Royal Canadian Legion is the country’s largest and most vocal peace group. But its members know that to ensure peace, you have to know the horrors of the past and be prepared for the future.