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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The face of sacrifice |
| 2007-11-12 |
| George Jonas, National Post (Canada) One morning, about 20 years ago, I heard someone make a crack about the military mind. It was an amusing remark, and I chuckled at it myself. Then, the same afternoon, I saw an old man sitting in a reception area at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital. This is the whole story. It happened in 1987, but now it crosses my mind every Remembrance Day. I never talked to the old fellow. I just watched him as he sat there, waiting patiently for some medical exam. He was obviously a veteran. I couldn't tell of which war -- he looked old and frail enough to be a veteran of the Boer war, but he couldn't have been. He could have been a veteran of the Great War, but even that was unlikely. He had probably fought in the Second World War, maybe in Normandy or at the beaches of Dieppe. Even today, a Dieppe veteran could be as young as 81, though the average Second World War veteran still alive would be pushing 85 or more. If the old man had fought under Field Marshall Montgomery's command, as he might have, with the First Canadian Army somewhere in the Calvados district of France, he would have been about 25 on D-day. That would have made him only about 68 when I saw him 20 years ago, though he appeared older. . . . I was a child at the time of the Allied landings, in hiding from the Nazis in Central Europe. I remember watching my parents search for snippets of news on the muffled, static-filled short-wave radio. I understood then, even if dimly, that the time it took for the old man and his fellow soldiers to make the trip from the beaches of Normandy to Caen could be a matter of life or death for us. Then the years passed, and other concerns intervened. I became busy drinking Calvados, and cracking jokes with intellectual friends about the military mind. My illusion was that I had come to understand the world better. I had even gone through a period -- briefly -- when I believed that it's all the soldiers' fault; that it all starts with war-toys; that war begins somehow in soldiers' minds. Smart people often believe stupid things like that. Today I know that soldiers don't cause wars. They only die in them (sometimes in greater numbers than need be, because we neglect our armed forces in peacetime). I know that, as the poet Rudyard Kipling had it, we often make mock of uniforms that guard us while we sleep. I know it, because I've been guilty of it myself. Now I keep thinking of the old man for whom I waited 63 years ago. Wherever he is now, in 1987 he was still sitting an arm's length away from me at Sunnybrook Hospital. It took him 50 days to make the 10-mile trip from the beaches to Caen, and I can write this column only because he got there in time. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #1 Truly. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-11-12 14:07 |