Today was Remembrance Day here in Canada.
I'm never quite sure how to feel about that, what my reaction to the event should be. It's the fashion, these days - especially in sociological circles, remembering Professor Karzai's rants last year - to look down on the whole thing, to deride it as a glorification of war. Ego-stroking the military-industrial complex. Or to see the occasion as being faintly embarrassing, waiting for the hunched veterans to go by in their shuffling parade, listening to lisping schoolchildren recite poems.
It's impossible for my generation to fully understand the concept of a world war. 750,000 men died at Passchendaele. Five times the current population of my hometown, and Barrie is big enough now that it takes the better part of an hour to drive from one end clear to the other. When individual troops are killed in Afghanistan, their pictures are on the front page of the newspapers the next day. The memorial on Vimy Ridge bears the names of over 11,000 Canadian soldiers from World War I whose bodies have never been found. How can I, sitting warm and comfortable and safe, even dare to claim the right to judge the fallen?
I can't, of course. I don't. Last week I dropped my change in the collection kettle held by a veteran up at the mall, and claimed my poppy, and wore it until today. My father had one as well, on Saturday night, and he nodded his grave, quiet approval at mine during our family dinner. (No-one else was wearing one, that I saw. But what can you expect from a family of left-wing intelligentsia?)
I don't glorify war. I oppose the US occupation of Iraq, I don't really think Canadians should be in Afghanistan, and I have the civilian's suspicious contempt of the military in general - a feeling that war should be something we're beyond, as a species, that anyone who chooses military service as a career is either a borderline sociopath or just unqualified for any other work. Nor am I quite mature enough to see beyond the outer appearances of the veterans, past the shaking hands and age-dimmed eyes, to really appreciate the sacrifices they made.
What I remember are the faces, seen in grade school textbooks or glimpsed online while trawling military archives out of boredom. Those who died, and those who survived; photographs don't distinguish between the two. I remember being shocked, the first time I saw a service photo of a World War I soldier: He's handsome. I always feel instinctively that the human physical appearance has only improved over time, despite evidence to the contrary: I just can't think of people from fifty or a hundred years ago as being passionate, attractive creatures. I look at my own grandparents, with their sharp-edged affection, and I can dimly wonder at what a pair they must have made when they were in their prime - my grandfather must have been a giant in those days - but I can't picture it. When I see the clear, strong face of a soldier who was 20 in 1916, though, it becomes real. I suddenly *know* that he must have had a girlfriend at home, or maybe a fiancee, and his mother must have absolutely adored him, and he left that behind to sail halfway around the world to kill or be killed by men he had never even seen before, and millions of others did the exact same thing. Not all of them can have been especially brave, but they went, and they died by the hundreds of thousands. And a generation later, just as the world was starting to rebuild itself, their sons did it all again.
So, I remember them for that. They were young, and they were beautiful, and they were willing to give that up because they thought it was the right thing to do.
We will not see their like again.