Remembering...

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day or Armistice Day or Veteran's Day. Whatever you may call it, November the 11th is the 90th anniversary of signing of the Armistice that ended the Great War. It was to be the war that ended all wars but now it is best known as World War I.

Like most Newfoundlanders of my generation I grew up hearing about the men who did not come home or the one's who were maimed both through loss of limb and perhaps loss of part of their souls. No one who crawled through the mud of those battlefields came away intact. My dad's Uncle Jack Temple came back with a shattered shoulder. He took a piece of shrapnel in the shoulder just before the order came that sent almost 700 men to their deaths in the withering crossfire of German machine guns at Beaumont Hamel. July 1st is their day. My mom's Uncle Jimmy Morris died there. I grew up with his portrait hanging at the top of our stairs. When I was a small child he seemed to me that he was the prefect image of the stalwart warrior. But every year as I got older he seemed to get younger until at last he was just this young man with a gentle smile. He gets younger every year now. My adult children are older than he was.

I looked for his name today when the CBC ran an item on Project Vigil. This is an amazing project created by R. H. Thompson, the Canadian actor/producer who lost seven uncles in World War I. Over a one week period culminating tomorrow the names of the more than 68,000 Canadian soldiers killed in the war are being walked across the country, projected onto public buildings and monuments. The ceremony attended by Queen Elizabeth began at Canada House in London and was then beamed across the Atlantic, to bring home the fallen. Lest we forget...