Remembering A Great War For Democracy

It's just one exhibit at the Canadian War Museum: an interactive display that allows you to punch in a name of a First World War soldier and see his enlistment papers. It does not sound very dramatic. Until you try it.

I entered the name of my wife's grandfather, a veteran of the Western front. A short pause. . .and there it was, all in his own handwriting: Frederic Franklin Worthington. Address, nationality, next of kin, all inscribed in a young man's vigorous script.

The date was April, 1916, almost two full years into the war, millions already dead. And this particular young man was not so very young: 26, more than old enough to know what he was getting himself into.

This particular young man survived that war and rose to become one of Canada's most famous generals: "Worthy" Worthington, whose nickname my youngest daughter carries as one of her middle names, alongside that of my own great-grandmother, murdered in Poland by the Nazis.

The First World War seems remote to modern Canadians. Barely one Canadian in three can identify the event commemorated on Nov. 11. For those with better memories, the war is dwarfed by the more recent memories of 1939-45--or dismissed with a shrug as a meaningless slaughter.

But when you flip through page after page of handwritten commitments by the volunteers of 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917 and 1918, you are confronted with a reality sharper than memory. Here in digitized reproductions of the original black ink is the ultimate individual declaration of commitment. Between 1914 and 1918, 600,000 Canadians--out of a total population of only seven million--served in the armed forces, most of them as volunteers. Some 67,000 died; more than 170,000 were wounded or maimed. By war's end, the Canadian Corps had established itself as the most effective fighting force on the Western Front. Between August and November, 1918, Canadians would spearhead the series of battles that broke the German Army and won the war.

For the young men whose signatures are memorialized in Ottawa, the war was anything but meaningless. And they were right.

The Germany that invaded France in 1914 was not the deranged murder machine later built by the Nazis (although the German occupation of Belgium pioneered many of the brutal methods the Nazis would later use in Poland and Ukraine).

But a German victory in that first war would have done very nearly as much damage to democracy in Europe as a Germany victory in the second--and in that first war, the odds in favour of Germany stood much higher. Fully as much as the Second World War, the First deserves to be remembered as a great war for democracy, fought under conditions far more terrible.

Our free and democratic modern world is a gift paid for by the fearsome sacrifices of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. Yet our remembrance is dulled, consigned to one annual semi-holiday or a few specialized zones of commemoration.

We owe more, and let me offer a suggestion of what that "more" should be: We are rapidly approaching the centennial of the First World War. Let's begin planning now for a commemoration equal to the stupendous scale of the war itself. A federal memorial commission should invite provinces, cities, towns, universities, schools, foundations and charities across Canada to propose commemorative events--one every day from Aug. 4, 2014 until Nov. 11, 2018. One a day because there can scarcely have been a day over those four-and-a-half years when a Canadian did not give his life for the sake and benefit of those living in freedom now.

If done right, a new generation of Canadians would be taught why so many Canadian schools and streets bear the name "Courcelette"--would be encouraged to pay their respects at the war graves of Flanders and Picardy--and would come to appreciate that there is more to Canadian military history than peacekeeping.

Canada is of course a very different country today than it was in 1914. And some are bashful to suggest that people whose families arrived more recently in Canada share a story with those whose families did the bleeding a century ago. But that is what it means to be a nation.

It is a cliche to say that a nation that has no past has no future. Cliches get to be cliches by being true. The work of remembrance is not only a duty to those who are gone. It is a duty to those who remain. Let's use this looming series of anniversaries to rededicate Canadians to that work.