Remembrance Day: They who question also serve

Every year I try to write a Remembrance Day post (or Veteran’s Day, as it is called here, which I feel gives the whole thing a rather different flavour). They’re generally pompous, except when they’re about buying new baby-manglers , but I’m going to go with informative this time (well, informative and pompous).

I can’t claim to be an expert on the military, nor do I feel comfortable saying Remembrance Day is “about” one thing or another. But I have always felt the emphasis that is placed on honouring those who are “willing to die for their country” is misplaced: it is far more horrifying to me that we ask our soldiers to kill for their countries. Especially if, inevitably, they should end up killing the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.

I’ve only written a couple of articles for The Beaver Canada’s History that touch on military history, but in both I was struck by the essential seriousness of senior military men about what they do, as contrasted with the sometimes flippant way politicians treat their responsibility for the lives of their citizens and of other countries.

For instance, there once was what amounted to a civil war in a country very far away. Canada had no interest there at all, but we were told by allies, who we thought were in a position to know, that our help was needed to combat an internationally coordinated threat that stood in opposition to every freedom we in the West held dear.

Our allies had bad intelligence. We sent our soldiers to a hostile environment, unprepared, under equipped, and essentially asked them to take sides in a conflict in which we did not understand either of the combatants. As a result, we ended up propping up an illegitimate and oppressive government, and contributed to the deaths of untold civilians. The threat, in the end, was less part of an international, anti-Western movement as it was an indigenous uprising.

The threat I am talking about was not terrorism, the country was not Afghanistan. Our troops were not called on to call in airstrikes on weddings. But in 1932, because of a panicky British ambassador in El Salvador who saw Communists behind every lamp-post, the Canadian navy was ended up providing support to a military dictator who took Mussolini as an inspiration, had come to power in a coup only three months before, and was recognized as legitimate nowhere (except, oddly, Norway).

The two Canadian ships had been sent by Canadian politicians who weren’t entirely sure where El Salvador was, and didn’t care to find out. They had been told the country was being overrun by Communists, and they believed it. They were told good English speaking plantation owners – Brits, Americans – were being murdered in their beds, and they believed it. They were told lies.


Victor Brodeur, the Captain with a conscience
Image from: http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo9/no4/23-book5-livre5-eng.asp

The Captain of those ships – a French Canadian called Victor Brodeur – was able to tell them the truth after the fact. He told them the vicious dictator of El Salvador was able, because Canadian vessels were securing his western port, to free up his own troops. Those soldiers were able to massacre 40,000 Pipil natives, essentially wiping out a group that formed the labour force of the British and American owned plantations and that were treated worse than dirt in the country. Venturing out into the countryside (something British ambassador that had demanded military intervention had never done) Brodeur saw that the uprising had consisted of burning some farm buildings – no plantation owners were killed, no infrastructure damaged. Shown the massacre site by some proud and preening Salvadoran generals a few days later, it was revealed that exactly one Communist party membership card was found among the corpses – many of whom were wearing white sheets, now splattered in blood, in the vain hope they would be spared death as non-combatants.

Brodeur, conscious of what his country’s actions had wrought, wrote all of this in his report to Ottawa on his return. There was no follow-up from the politicians that had sent him there, no complaints to Britain, no international censure for El Salvador. However, in an example of the high seriousness of Canadian Parliamentary Democracy that has sadly only been matched since, one far-sighted and noble MP did bravely rise in the House of Commons to complain about the cost of the fuel the ships consumed to get there.

Battle weary

_{Vimy memorial. Note the churned earth and sign to the right warning of unexploded shells}

Note – I suspect the following post is a wee bit self-righteous, and possibly even somewhat pompous. Forgive me, I do get worked up sometimes.

I had intended a Remembrance Day post here about my visit, with my family, to Vimy Ridge last month. Unfortunately, the day we went to the memorial I forgot to bring my camera, and thus decided to wait until my Dad’s CD of his pictures arrived. Given that my Dad’s a far superior photographer, you can count yourself lucky.

In any case, I’ve ranted about Vimy’s place in Canadian history before and my opinion on that score is unchanged.

That said, that despite the Parks/Heritage Canada presentation of the site, the memorial is very moving. It is staffed by fresh-faced college girls reciting troop numbers, pointing out soldiers’ graffiti and scrupulously avoiding the topic of just who all these Canadians were in France to kill. Ask where the German trenches were and a vague hand is waved “over there.” German cemeteries are nowhere in evidence, German casualties never mentioned. Overall, the displays in the visitors centre are more about the act of “remembrance” itself than about what, precisely, we are supposed to be remembering. Needless to say, the site repeats the old trope that so enrages me about how Vimy proved to Canadians what we, as a nation, could accomplish


_{Death's tool chest in the tunnels. Not historic enough}

At the risk of sounding needlessly provocative, what “we” achieved that day was monstrous. And it is this, no matter how much the myth-makers back home try to paper this over, is what the Vimy Memorial presents quite well.

The land around the battlefield is, ninety years on, pitted and scarred with shell craters, laden with unexploded ordnance. Two graveyards, filled with tombstones marked with nothing more than “A Canadian soldier” speak not just to the massacre here, but to the heartbreak of families back home who would never know what happened to their sons.


_{Canadian cemetery at Vimy}

Vimy was won underground – an enormous network consisting of miles of tunnels allowed troops to burst onto the battlefield undetected. In these, old grenades, rifles and barbed wire fencing rust away, handled occasionally by some English major from Bathurst or Toronto who explains how they were improved upon over the course of the war to better aid the massacre.

And this, to me, is what makes this a monstrosity. So much effort, so much human labour and ingenuity spent improving the efficiency of the machinery of death.

Adolph Hitler famously visited the Vimy memorial in the 1930s, having been a runner in that sector of the front; he was invalidated out just prior to the Canadian assault. After invading France, he specifically ordered that the Vimy memorial be spared the Nazi programme of destroying war monuments, reasoning that our memorial did not express triumph over an enemy, but rather sorrow over the loss. How anyone could walk through those cemeteries or see those tunnels and think to repeat the exercise, then or now, is beyond comprehension.


_{Memorial detail}

It does not take much of an imagination or sense of empathy to imagine what hell waiting in those tunnels must have been, feeling the reverberations of shells rumbling through the stone above you, knowing that eventually you would have to venture into the slaughter outside and, if you survived, walk up to a perfect stranger and kill him. It takes no great mental effort to imagine the lifetime of heartache a “Missing and presumed dead” telegram would bring a mother, wife, brother.

A word like “pride” has no place in reference to something like Vimy, and sadness is useless. I left Vimy angry, and I’m angry still.

Vimy rant

edit - note added at bottom
I am going to take a break from France posting for a while to post about something that happened in France. Namely the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

I have nothing to add to the sap-clogged rivers of ink that have been spilled on this topic in Canada in terms of the battle’s importance, or its meaning, or heart-rending recollections torn from diaries that were never intended to be plastered all over the front pages of our newspapers. To the best of my knowledge, I have no direct ancestors that served in either of the World Wars, let alone at Vimy.

Nonethless, I’m going to rant. Specifically, about Rudyard Griffiths of the Dominion Institute. You might not of heard of them, but if you’re from Canada you will know their work. Every year, at least twice a year (Canada Day and November 11) they publish a poll which will get heavy, and undeserved coverage in the media, that will purport to demonstrate Canadians woeful lack of knowledge about their history in general and military history in particular.

When there’s a special anniversary, they inevitably pop up again, as they did this year on the commemorations of Vimy Ridge Whenever they do, there is much hand wringing that we are losing our heritage and therefore our sense of national identity and forgetting the sacrifices of bleah bleah bleah.

No one who knows my writing can accuse me of being indifferent to history (Canadian history in particular) but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say something radical: Vimy does not matter. Remembering Vimy does not matter. It is completely inconsequential to understanding Canada, war, or history. Even for students of military history its importance is largely one of improved tactics and the effect the win had on Allied morale– Vimy Ridge itself was strategically insignificant.

I would argue that the deep attachment neo-Tories like Griffiths have for Vimy is of much more historic interest than the battle itself. It mattered once, to a Canada that was young and finding its way in a world that still measured national worth by the length of its muskets. No more. We have new symbols, new beliefs. It is no more natural to worship the dead at Vimy – over and above those at, say, Ypres, who were equally brave and just as dead – than it is to have a once-in-a-decade conniption over the Battle of Stoney Creek (1813).

Interestingly, those countries that participated in the Great War with less of an obsessive need to have a capital “I” identity all pick losses as their “national” battle: Passchendaele for the Brits, Verdun for the French, Gallipoli for the Australians. The tremendous loss of life for little geo-political gain in a war of which the major consequence was to set up another war is not something that can be appropriately remembered by a “glorious victory.” Canada’s fetishization of Vimy is a throwback to an era we have outgrown.

I am not suggesting that we forget the Great War or the men who fought in it, but simply remembering it as “Vimy” or even remembering Vimy divorced from the context of the propaganda that has swirled around it since 1917 is serving Canada’s history and identity just as poorly as forgetting it entirely.

Edit Just to clarify, I fully intend to visit the Vimy Memorial later this year (see comments). My beef is with the idea that knowledge of a single battle should - or even could - be considered a key part of Canada's national heritage and identity after ninety years, over and above hundreds of other equally important events and developments.