Remembrance

[George Wallace]

Remembering all those who have fallen in the Defence of this lands values over the past two centuries:  (Link in Title)

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

Canada’s first remembrance day

LAWRENCE MARTIN
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Nov. 11 2014, 3:00 AM EST
Last updated Tuesday, Nov. 11 2014, 6:28 AM EST

Remembrance Day, or Armistice Day as it was then called, formally began with the First World War. But for what triggered Canada’s first remembrance day, we need go back to February of 1900.

Canada’s war history in the post-Confederation period began in South Africa, at the battle of Paardeberg – “Horse Hill” in translation from Afrikaans.

As one of our men on horseback put it, “the bullets came as thick as rain” that day. Paardeberg was deemed a decisive clash in the Boer War. Canadians commemorated our war dead from the conflict every Feb. 27 until the end of the First World War, when the new remembrance day began.

Today, the Boer War is seldom recalled – for good reason, some think. Even the governor-general of the day, Lord Minto, wrote privately that it was not appropriate for Canada to be part of such an unjust conflict.

But just or not, Canada’s first war was of much national significance. It enhanced Canada’s pride and its standing in the British Empire. It also provoked searing English-French tensions over whether to participate, setting a template for wars to follow.

The war was chiefly about gold. Fortune-seeking settlers of British origin were being denied basic political rights in the Transvaal, where major gold deposits had been discovered. Their treatment prompted the British to take up arms to subjugate the Dutch-speaking Boer population. Even though their own military resources overwhelmed those of the Boers, the Brits called for help from Commonwealth members.

As Lord Minto saw it, if the war proceeded, it would be “the most iniquitous we had ever engaged in … The fact is, if we fight we fight for Rhodes, Beit and Co. and the speculators of the Rand, it makes me sick.” As for Canadians, “I don’t see why they should commit their country to the expenditure of lives and money for a quarrel not threatening imperial safety.”

Lord Minto’s private views, recounted in Gwynne Dyer’s insightful new book, Canada in The Great Power Game, were hardly the same as his official ones. Publicly, he pressured Canada to fight.

In English Canada, fervour for the Empire ruled the day. But in Quebec, there was no such sentiment. The Boers’ wish for more control of their own resources, language and autonomy could have been seen as echoing those of the Québécois themselves.

With an election coming, prime minister Wilfrid Laurier had to walk a fine line. Ottawa would not send a military contingent, but it would financially support a volunteer force through an order in council that didn’t require parliamentary approval. This compromise didn’t prevent three days of rioting by students in Montreal or bitter opposition from the Liberals’ Quebec lieutenants, but the ever-smooth Laurier prevailed in the election.

At Paardeberg, about 900 Canadians took part in a blitz to seize key Boer positions. Depending on whose version of events is believed, it was either a Vimy Ridge in miniature, with the Canadians forcing a Boer surrender, or they were just lucky to be in the right place at the right time for an easy mop-up operation. In the press, where war verdicts were rendered, the Canadians were hailed as defeating a 4,000-strong Boer army and giving Britain its first significant victory in the war.

About 5,000 Canadians saw active duty in the Boer War. Two hundred and twenty-four perished. As the conflict went on, even the English Canadians who signed up had begun to express reservations about it. Six of the eight companies refused to extend their military service beyond a year. One soldier wrote of how foolish he had been: “I risked my life so that a few rich men could have full control of the gold and diamonds of the Transvaal. I was taken in by a lot of propaganda.”

The majority of Canadians didn’t see it that way, however. Since Canada was dependent on Britain for so much, wasn’t it right, they thought, to give something in return? They were proud of their boys. The country’s war history had begun well enough. It merited a day of remembrance.

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[Old Sweat]

There actually was an earlier commemoration of our war dead dating back to 1890. This story from the Globe and Mail of 11 November 2012 is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act.

PETER VRONSKY
Canada’s forgotten first remembrance day

Contributed to The Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Nov. 11 2012, 8:00 AM EST
Last updated Saturday, Nov. 10 2012, 8:11 PM EST

“We will remember” is a call heard at many military memorial ceremonies and parades, but it was only in 1931 that Ottawa passed an act permanently fixing Canada’s national military memorial day to the anniversary of Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918, marking the end of the Great War. The day was named Remembrance Day. The same act moved Thanksgiving to October from its traditional November date, still adhered to by our American neighbours.

The 1931 Armistice Remembrance Day Act became an inauspicious memorial to those who died in what was called at the time “the war to end all wars.” As the poet W.H. Auden wrote, the 1930s were “a low dishonest decade” in which “clever hopes expired.” The decade ushered in the Second World War, which was infinitely more savage and apocalyptic than the first. It was appropriate to commemorate those killed in that futile First World War with symbolic artificial paper poppies under tombstone-cold grey skies of November.

But for 30 years before, Canadians had a different memorial called Decoration Day in which we commemorated our war dead with the laying of real flowers, not in the hopeless gloom of November but in the warm light and optimism of late spring, on the weekend closest to June 2.

On Decoration Day, Canadians gathered at war monuments, tended to soldiers’ graves after the ravages of winter and “decorated” them with flowers, wreaths and garlands, prayed that their sacrifices were not in vain and that we had come to be worthy of them. Veterans were showered in flowers as they passed, escorted by phalanxes of children. It was a popular communion of young and old with the souls of our fallen soldiers in a celebration of hope, life and rebirth. We remembered and we remembered well.

Sadly, politics trumped memory. Decoration Day began as a protest in 1890 by forgotten Canadian veterans who had fought in Canada’s first modern battle, the Battle of Ridgeway, on June 2, 1866. Nine soldiers were killed, including three University of Toronto student volunteer riflemen plucked from their final exams the day before and thrown into combat against Irish-American Fenian insurgents who had invaded Canada across the Niagara River near Fort Erie.

The Ridgeway Nine are the modern Canadian military’s first nine combat casualties, but the boys killed that day were quickly forgotten by the bungling politicians in Ottawa who had sent them to their deaths, as were another 22 soldiers who later died from wounds and disease contracted on service during the Fenian Raids that summer in 1866.

By 1890, frustrated with being forgotten for nearly 25 years, the surviving middle-aged veterans protested on the June 2 anniversary of Ridgeway by laying flowers and wreaths at the Canadian Volunteers Monument near Queen’s Park, Toronto’s oldest standing public monument. The event became Decoration Day, an annual tradition that endured until 1930 and is still commemorated today in some communities in the Niagara-Welland-Fort Erie region where the 1866 battle was fought.

Decoration Day eventually included Canadian soldiers killed in the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, and the South African War (Boer War) of 1899-1902, and the even the Great War, whose casualties were commemorated in June before there was any armistice in November of 1918.

When Remembrance Day was established in 1931, with only a few surviving Fenian Raid veterans remaining to remind Ottawa of its historical bungling, the embarrassing memory of our first fallen soldiers was purged from our national heritage and from the Remembrance Day commemoration. Today, they’re not even listed in our National Books of Remembrance, and few in Canada have even heard of the Battle of Ridgeway.

Until recently, Canada’s Veterans Affairs website used to state that Remembrance Day only “commemorates Canadians who died in service to Canada from the South African War to current missions.” Now, some Veterans Affairs webpages have begun to purge the South African War casualties, proclaiming that, on Remembrance Day, “we honour those who fought for Canada in the First World War (1914-1918), the Second World War (1939-1945), and the Korean War (1950-1953), as well as those who have served since then.” This is a further erosion of our historical memory of sacrifices that should never be forgotten no matter how long ago they might have been made.

With the recent death of the last surviving veteran of the First World War, tomorrow may see the memory of those sacrifices thoughtlessly deleted from our national heritage. And the day after tomorrow, our Second World War and Korean War fallen may be as easily forgotten, and it will be left to us to explain to our children what Nov. 11 used to signify and why we fought those wars.

Remembrance must be forever. Veterans Affairs needs to permanently restore the memory of all our forgotten soldiers who fell in service for Canada, not just the more recent ones but beginning with our very first who we used to commemorate during Decoration Day, starting with the Ridgeway Nine.

Let’s all take one more day to remember, that warm sunny one in June. Let’s revive Decoration Day and place a living flower on a soldier’s grave, tend to it tenderly, embrace a veteran and thank them for those better summers of our liberty and prosperity that define this great nation we call Canada. One more day is surely not asking too much to acknowledge entire lives given. Let’s remain true to our promise, “We shall remember.”

Peter Vronsky is a historian with Ryerson University’s history department and the author of Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada. For further information on Canada’s forgotten first casualties, visit www.ridgewaybattle.ca.

Link:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/canadas-forgotten-first-remembrance-day/article5176843/