I wonder if we'll have a pissing contest for Remembrance Day threads

[Asher]

I see Ben posted the first. But I don't agree with him. I was going to troll that thread like he trolled the first memorial thread for the Fort Hood dead, but I've too much respect for the soldiers who died to pull a Ben.

So this thread will serve for people like myself to post about Remembrance Day but can't stomach posting in Ben's thread.

[Asher]

(moment of silence)

[Wiglaf]

You said the dead should be forgotten as little more than evidence of a failed military policy, you douche.

[KrazyHorse]

I don't particularly care about the pissing contest, but I'd like to take this opportunity to thank grandpa McEvoy, grandpa Beaupre and all the other veterans of Canada's wars, living or dead.

In a very real sense, our country won its true independence from Great Britain by fighting Germans on the fields of France and Belgium.

[Ben Kenobi]

Word up KH.

Oh, and as for Asher's thread, I have an enormous wang.

That is all.

[SlowwHand]

In the USA, Veteran's Day is a day for saying thanks to veterans. (You're welcome.)
Memorial Day is for remembering those who paid the ultimate price.

[notyoueither]

I don't particularly care about the pissing contest, but I'd like to take this opportunity to thank grandpa McEvoy, grandpa Beaupre and all the other veterans of Canada's wars, living or dead.

In a very real sense, our country won its true independence from Great Britain by fighting Germans on the fields of France and Belgium.

You might appreciate this. I was thinking of posting it for discussion. It isn't perfect, but it's good.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/travel/Heroes+landscape/2196986/story.html

Heroes in a landscape of war
Gift to the modern world treasured at Vimy Ridge, Flanders and London
By Karl Wilberg, Edmonton Journal November 7, 2009

How could I forget?

Twenty-five years ago, in the midst of a training ride on the N9 from Ghent to the Belgian seaside town of Knokke, I lost track of where I was. Over my left shoulder, I saw the Maple Leaf flying in a dense green grove. The sight of the flag took me home, to the country I had left behind to pursue a season of international competition.

Every hour of a top amateur cyclist's life is planned, and the plan is inviolable.

Except this day.

I hit the brakes, and remembered what I had forgotten --the Canadians who had preceded me here.

I read the names on the markers: "McLeod, Kosack, Riel." They were my age, and those names could have been from my Law grad class. And there were more-- 800 more in a wind-whipped maple grove in the Adegem Canadian War Cemetery in East Flanders.

There were so many white stones, so far from home.

Silent, surrounded by hundreds of the stones, I struggled to merge my received knowledge of war with the unspoken stories of those silent white stones.

Back then, I knew of the late mythologist Joseph Campbell's theories. There's really only one myth, he wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In short, the hero ventures forth into a region of supernatural wonder, encounters adversity, and a decisive victory is won. He returns with a boon for his fellow man.

Campbell's idea remained abstract. Like many Canadians born into peace and prosperity, I knew a great deal, but had learned little. Twenty-five years later, I returned to Europe, but this time with a wife and three sons. As we travelled the continent, history and the myth merged.

The hero ventures forth...

Aside from a cycling bias, our European family voyage had a conventional agenda. The boys ventured from the common teenage experience in North America and saw Rome, Paris, Flanders, London: loci of exceptional human creativity. But the capital cities also illuminated the duality of human nature.

Rome? The Colosseum and its degenerate spectacle. Paris? The Place de la Concorde, scene of the guillotine. Belgium? Flanders Fields. London? The Blitz. Playgrounds, one and all, for the basement impulses of the human beast.

Inexorably, the trip became an odyssey, and the gravity of history drew us along the road travelled by Canadian heroes into the heart of 20th-century darkness.

Into a region of supernatural wonder...

Vimy Ridge, the scene of Canada's Great War Memorial, and site of the Canadian's Corps' most famous victory, was a deliberate detour from the intended path, and was easy to reach. From the Gare du Nord in Paris, take the TGV to Arras, and then cab it to the memorial. You'll be there in less than two hours.

Of course, as you walk from the visitor centre into the quiet and green peace of a rural French July day, you wonder, "What was it like in 1917?" The 45-minute guided tour of the Grange tunnels, sanctuaries from the ever-present shells, gives a partial answer. We descend into the moss-covered chalk tunnels and shuffle along in the feeble light.

Encounters adversity...

We don't have ankle-deep water, and rats to contend with. Want some sunlight and fresh air? In 1917, you could take to the trenches, and brave the bullets, bombs and poison gas. Messengers running from the tunnels to the trenches lasted, on average, four days.

It's amazing that anyone lived an hour. One tonne of explosives fell on each metre of the Ridge. Although sheep now graze over the bomb-blasted craterscape, the earth is still infested with explosives.

After the tunnel tour, we walk up the ridge to the memorial. The sight stuns us into silence.

So, what was Vimy Ridge? The answer is in the soaring, brooding, bone-white spires of the Memorial. The gleaming marble stands against the hard blue sky, the wind from the English Channel rustling the grass.

The sunlight on the stone is ... blinding.

You don't want to look, but you must. You must stop squinting, and confront the sculptures, the sombre warriors, one breaking a sword, and a woman--the grieving nation-- and the bereft parents of the dead, a mother and father.

Vimy Ridge is a dual memorial: It marks an achievement -- that Canada became a nation--but it is also a reminder of the cost: 10,000 Canadians were casualties at Vimy Ridge, and 61,000 Canadians perished in the Great War.

A decisive victory...

According to Tim Cook, curator of the Canadian War Museum, the Canadian Corps--from Vimy Ridge onwards--were the most effective force in the war. In his book, Shock Troops, Cook quotes one German prisoner: "The British, they are good soldiers but the Canadians they are madmen." From Vimy onward, the Canadians never lost a battle.

The great boon for their kind...

At Vimy Ridge, Canada was only 50 years old. Most Canadians had left the Old World for a wide, clean land where anyone with wit and ambition could thrive. Why return?Why fight a kaiser who had no ambitions for Orillia or the Okanagan? It wasn't about saving their homes, or even their civilization (that would come a generation later). The journey started with duty, adventure, and honour. It ended with suffering, sacrifice and a great wish.

By 1918, they had won a tremendous victory, in a landscape of horror. But victory didn't mean a book deal with a movie tie-in. The surviving heroes had won the best boon there is--peace for their kind, and that was plenty.

Afterwards, we visited Rome, and later travelled north to Belgium and a reunion with the Van Kerkhoves, my old cycling hosts in Flanders. After a quarter century, they're still the kind and generous folks that welcomed a Canadian cyclist into the heart of the European cycling circus.

Of course, the official tour includes Flanders' medieval towns, museums and squares. But the murderous trace of the 20th century is also present.

We return to Adegem, the scene of my accidental visit in 1984.The road is busier, but the Belgians' love for their liberators is evident. The cemetery is meticulously maintained, and we wander in the soft rain, hushed by remembrance. The boys buried here were another wave of heroes. In 1944-45 Canadians drove the Nazis inland from Normandy and slogged across flooded fields into Germany. Their sacrifice ended a barbaric occupation.

The German occupation of Belgium brought unspeakable results. Collaboration. Betrayal. Forced labour. Starvation. Anyone caught resisting was executed or sent to death camps.

My hosts in Belgium, Andre and Helene VanKerkhoves, are in their 70s, and remember the evils of occupation. Once, and only once, 25 years ago, I had asked Andre about the war--did he remember it?He looked at me like I had a third eye. Andre sighed, and mentioned the V-1 strike on his village, summary executions and the Germans evicting him from his home. There was no need to say anything more then, or this time.

Our official tour continued to London. Again, evidence of the heroes' journey is at hand. Outside St. Paul's Cathedral stands a bronze of firefighters quelling the flames of the Blitz. In the Science Museum in Kensington, and in the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, Spitfires and Hurricanes hover over the top galleries. If Britain had done nothing else in 1940, their pilots and aircraft spared their civilization, and ours, from a very long oppressive night.

On the way home, I reflect that it's more than 60 years since the heroes at Adegem ended their journey. I wonder if their voyage holds any modern meaning. Even in Europe, in spite of the obvious reminders of the past, the media blizzard is seldom concerned with heroism. In modern Western culture, celebrity has hijacked heroism.

It's a crime. Heroism is about sacrifice of self. Celebrity is about... celebrity.

The Belgians understand. They know what it was like to be rescued, and to have their future restored to them. That's why the memorials are unblemished, and Canadians, even now, are showered with attention. The heroes'gift to the modern world isn't just the memory of their sacrifice. They've done better than that.

Their gift to you is a future. And that, is worth remembering.

[bc1871]

LEST WE FORGET

[Wezil]

I don't particularly care about the pissing contest, but I'd like to take this opportunity to thank grandpa McEvoy, grandpa Beaupre and all the other veterans of Canada's wars, living or dead.

In a very real sense, our country won its true independence from Great Britain by fighting Germans on the fields of France and Belgium.

My grandfather was wounded early November 1917 at Passchendaele. A shrapnel wound to the leg that he suffered with until his death in the 60's.


I have the utmost respect for all our veterans.

[dannubis]

My great grandfather survived 4 years at the Yser. I was too young to remember much of him but the one thing that will have a lasting impression on me is that he never wore his medals. He said that so much horror and suffering took place that it wasn't something to be proud of.

He was brancardier by the way.

Anyway, to all good men

[Asher]

I don't particularly care about the pissing contest, but I'd like to take this opportunity to thank grandpa McEvoy, grandpa Beaupre and all the other veterans of Canada's wars, living or dead.

In a very real sense, our country won its true independence from Great Britain by fighting Germans on the fields of France and Belgium.

I'd like to thank both of my late grandpas, also veterans of WW2.

[loinburger]

Grandpa #1 was a lt. working as a mechanic on P-38's in the Pacific theater. Grandpa #2 was a PFC captured early in the war and subsequently death-marched across the Bataan peninsula.

[KrazyHorse]

Both of my grandparents were mechanics. McEvoy as an aircraft mechanic in England and then the Continent; Beaupre as a motor-pool mechanic and then driver for a Col. in Italy. In 1945-46 he also guarded German POWs on sea transports.

[loinburger]

Redacted because Rah is a terrible human being

[Felch]

****, loin. That's a well written account. Without embellishment, it clearly describes the nastiness of the IJA.