The honoring of those who were killed in our wars has a special place for me, as it must do for countless others. Though frankly, I have some difficulty in saying that "they gave their lives"; I'm not sure that was their intent when they joined and went to war. Going into action was a way of defending values and causes, and if this meant that you were injured or killed, that was the cost. But of all the men (there were no women in combat then) I've served with, I can't say that they joined the Forces to "give their lives".
Which is all the more the reason to honor them.
For many years the time of honoring was the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the day that the Armistice was signed ending the so-called Great War in 1918. As a youngster growing up in California years later, that was the day the Legion handed out poppies (remember Flander's Field?) and solemn ceremonies were held at the town's cenotaphs as wreaths were laid and vets remembered their chums and toasted them well into the night at Legion halls across the land.
Memorial Day has an interesting history, staring in the mid-1800's as a remembering of the Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. And it well may have started with formerly enslaved blacks who created a Confederate cemetery from a mass grave to individual grave sites in Charleston, North Carolina, and marked May 1, 1865 as the first memorial, or 'Decoration' day. It wasn't until 106 years later, in 1971, that Memorial Day became a nation-wide observance and a federal holiday, reaching beyond the South to all of the USA, to be observed on the last Monday of May each year.
An unique side-bar, at least for Canadians, is that Newfoundland and Labrador also have a Memorial Day. During the First World War Newfoundland was a largely rural Dominion of the British Empire with a population of 240,000, not yet part of Canada. The Royal Newfoundland Regiment was deployed first in Gallipoli, and at the end of that campaign the regiment spent a short period recuperating before being transferred to the Western Front in March 1916. In France, the regiment regained battalion strength in preparation for the Battle of the Somme. The infantry assault was to began on July 1, 1916 and at 8:45 a.m. the Newfoundland Regiment received orders to move forward. All the officers and slightly under 658 other ranks became casualties. Of the men who went forward only 68 were available for roll call the following day. For all intents and purposes the Newfoundland Regiment had been wiped out, the unit as a whole having suffered a casualty rate of approximately 90%.
The province of Newfoundland and Labrador observes Memorial Day during the morning of July 1 (now Canada Day) at the National War Memorial in St. John's and at the cenotaphs around the province, flying the Union Flag at half staff, and in the afternoon and that evening celebrates Canada Day with the rest of the Canada, of which they became a province in 1949.
Be it an Army of the Confederacy memorial, a memorial of the United States forces in the Great War and World War II, a memorial of those who fell in Korea (which was my war), in Viet Nam, in the Middle East, and in all of those conflicts small and large of recent memory, we do them a grave injustice if we do not remember their dying. We perhaps do ourselves an even greater injustice if we do not remember, humbly and not with noisy and hollow bravado, what those thousands and thousands of deaths meant.
For many, Monday will be simply part of a three day weekend, and three day weekends play an important part in the our hectic and oh-so-busy daily lives. But it would be good for each of us if we but took a moment to reflect what this Monday is really about, to center in for a moment of time, to reflect on why we even have this particular Monday and what it may, what it can mean for each of us and our common humanity on this fragile island planet we call our Earth.
Lest we forget . . . . .
Photo: the National War Memorial, St. John's, Newfoundland
