Photo of World War One commemorative ceremony at Ottawa's National War Memorial by Tom Douglas
The old soldiers, including a woman in her nineties, marched proudly down the Champs Elysées on that cold, bright day in November more than thirty years ago. Ramrod straight, arms swinging in unison, they kept perfect time to the martial music, eyes front.
The crowd, made up of Parisians as well as men, women and children from various parts of France – and a multitude of visitors from places around the world – broke into ecstatic applause as they spotted the bright red maple leaf on the banner held high by the white-haired veteran leading the marchers.
“Vivent les Canadiens!” someone shouted and the words ricocheted through the assembled throng like a bullet from a Lee-Enfield rifle. The French military band leading the parade broke into the opening bars of “O Canada” and tears of patriotic pride welled up in my eyes.
Among the marchers was Elizabeth – a nursing sister during World War One – who could drink the rest of the crowd under the table, belting back five mugs of Scotch and hot water as though it was camomile tea at a ladies’ church social.
There was Abe, a Newfoundlander, who still felt guilty about “letting the boys down” by having the flu and not being able to go “over the top” with them almost 70 years before. It didn’t matter that about nine out of ten of “the boys” were killed or wounded on that first day of the Battle of the Somme – he was still wracked with guilt.
For Fred, “marching” was a misnomer because he was actually being pushed in a wheelchair by his buddy Duncan. Fred had lost his leg at Passchendaele – the Third Battle of Ypres – and was a crusty old bugger who regaled the rest of the crew with his salty and seemingly far-fetched tales.
And at the tag end of the marchers, but keeping up despite his emotional problems, was Danny, the recluse of the group. The pilgrimage back to the killing fields of Northern Europe had been too much for Danny, who had witnessed terrible things as a young soldier on the Western Front. For most of the trip, all he did was sit in his hotel room and sob.
Elsewhere within this account of some of the social ramifications of World War One, we’ll hear more about these larger-than-life individuals. They’re all gone now, of course, but one of the proudest moments of my life was to be able to befriend them over seven days in my capacity as communications assistant to the Honorable Bennett Campbell, now deceased as well but at the time the Canadian Minister of Veterans Affairs.
In total, there were nineteen Canadian veterans of World War One in that special squad of marchers that had been invited personally by French President François Mitterrand to take part in the 1983 Remembrance Day ceremony at the Arch of Triumph.
The president had been delighted to hear that the old soldiers were on a Veterans Affairs Canada tour of Belgium and Northern France, including a visit to the Vimy Ridge Memorial. He had subsequently requested that they be his guests at the armistice ceremonies held every year since 1919 – except, not surprisingly, during the Nazi occupation of the French capital from 1940 to 1944.
Over the years, the events of 1983 faded from memory, but would flare up from time to time, especially when each November 11 rolled around. In recent times, as newspapers and websites began looking toward the one hundredth anniversary of World War One, the memory of Elizabeth and Abe and Fred and their comrades started flooding back. The stories they had related about the death and disease and destruction that this not-so-great war had visited upon them and millions of others began to take on new relevance.
One overriding thought was that I really couldn’t understand why supposedly rational people from so many so-called civilized nations had allowed such an insane conflict to happen. Nor could my wife Gail, whose keen interest in history had led her to write a book about the French Canadian explorer Étienne Brulé and another about Princess Diana’s feisty female ancestors dating back more than five hundred years.
Even though I had written a best-selling book, Valour at Vimy Ridge, depicting the epic World War One battle that had put Canada on the world map, I realized I knew very little about the events leading up to the outbreak of war in 1914. And no matter how many books Gail and I pored over in our efforts to fathom the tangled web of events of 1914 to 1918, we ended up ever more confused.
Over several years, we visited as many battlefields and war cemeteries in Europe as time and opportunity would allow. We stood on battle sites where so many young Canadians, Americans, Brits, Australians and New Zealanders - as well as those in opposing armies - had paid the supreme sacrifice. We read with heavy heart the inscriptions on hundreds of headstones – cursing the cruel fate that had snuffed out so many men and women in the prime of their lives. After one particularly arduous and emotional trip, Gail offered the suggestion that she wasn’t worn out, she was warred out.
One positive result of our efforts was a growing admiration for the people of Belgium and Northern France who had lost everything in the war – their loved ones, their homes, their communities and their livelihood. Yet they picked up the pieces of their shattered lives at the end of that horrible time and rebuilt everything literally from the ground up. Rising from the Ashes is the sub-theme of this blog.
With the signing of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Germany found itself on the hook for huge reparation payments, much of which would be used for rebuilding the communities their aggression had brutally affected.
With the help of the countries’ tourist departments and others whose assistance is acknowledged elsewhere in this account, Gail and I visited a number of communities ravaged by war and rebuilt afterwards. The difficult job of trying to boil down more than four years of war on the Western Front into a readable – and understandable – first section of this blog fell to Gail. She literally spent months sifting through dozens upon dozens of books, magazine articles, websites, videos and newspapers, then picking the salient (no pun intended) information and weaving it into a narrative that even a reader with a casual interest in World War One could fathom.
Writers of history who have to rely on secondary sources – and sometimes even primary sources – for their facts run across a common problem. You can read five different books on a particular event and come away with five different – and widely variant – accounts of what happened. Every effort has been made to check and triple-check the particulars included herein. On the rare occasion when it was impossible to decide which source was correct, we have gone with the version that made the most sense under the circumstances. Readers who find errors in our research – and have verifiable proof that we’ve been wrong-headed – are asked to contact us so that we can correct the information.
It should be evident by now that both the authors are anti-war. However, we have the greatest respect for those who paid the supreme sacrifice, those whose lives were forever altered by the insanity that took place between 1914 and 1918 and especially those who rose above it all and got their lives back together.
Arch of Triumph photo by Tom Douglas