A Remembrance Day like no other

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/11/2018 (2787 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a pause after uniformed soldiers troop in the military colours on Remembrance Day, at the Winnipeg convention centre and at every other gathering like it from coast to coast.

It’s the stillness that precedes the other, more familiar rites: The Last Post, the moment of silence, the bagpiper’s lament and the reading of John McCrae’s poem, In Flanders Fields.

It’s usually a brief moment, marked by the shuffling of boots as standard bearers find their spots on stage, hold their flags skyward and stand at attention.

As the moment stretched out Sunday, one woman leaned in and asked if it was normal to take so long to start the speeches and lay the wreaths that mark Remembrance Day in Canada.

If that moment seemed to stretch out a little longer Sunday, it was perhaps an unconscious tribute. This Remembrance Day marked a singular occasion, a historic moment of peace.

Some 3,000 people gathered at the city’s main Remembrance Day event. Hundreds more attended similar services at churches, parks, at least one cemetery, at the Minto and McGregor armouries and on Valour Road at Sargent Avenue.

As dusk fell, church bells rang out 100 times in parts of the city and across the country.

The armistice that ended the First World War, on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th month, happened exactly 100 years ago on Sunday.

“A hundred years ago, the guns of August fell silent and the bells of November rang out for the first time in four years, even as they will ring out this morning from St. John’s, N.L. to Vancouver, B.C., four hours later,” said Paul Johnson, the first Lutheran dean of an Anglican church in Canada, in his official address at the convention centre.

Drawing on information from dispatches, letters from soldiers and poetry and prose that later memorialized the First World War, Johnson spoke graphically about the conditions at the front a century ago, when the first modern weapons of warfare exacted destruction on a scale never seen before.

He talked about the trench warfare, the gas attacks, the carnage and the high hopes the armistice brought with it.

Some 619,636 Canadians enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the war; one in 10 — 61,000 — died and nearly three times that number were wounded.

Manitoba Lt.-Gov. Janice Filmon laid the first of approximately two dozen wreaths in honour of the war dead at the city’s main ceremony. Dignitaries and federal and provincial politicians, including Premier Brian Pallister, attended and were piped in to the event and back out, led by military veterans and followed by serving Canadian Forces members.

“As it turned out, the war to end all wars wasn’t,” Johnson noted.

The decades to follow would see 100 million more lose their lives, Johnson said, directly in battle or indirectly, as the Second World War and countless other smaller, but no less devastating conflicts, were waged during the 20th century.

In the audience, one family turned out three generations to remember a single grenadier who’d made it back, despite everything.

“His name was Herb Millar. Millar with an ‘A,’” said Tannis Wall, the daughter of a Winnipeg man who enlisted in the Winnipeg Grenadiers as the Second World War heated up. Her father, Herb ,was among the troops who fought the Battle of Hong Kong in 1941. Against all odds, he survived, only to endure years of torture and starvation as a Japanese prisoner of war. He made it back to become Tannis’s father.

Next to Wall sat her grandson, Jacob Wall. He said he was 17 years old and found it hard to absorb the sacrifice teenagers his own age had made, serving alongside his great-grandfather.

“All I can think about is the age of the people who served their country and fell, they were between the ages of 17 and 20,” he said. Next to him, Tannis’s son and Jacob’s father, Sean Wall, continued the service in peacetime that his grandfather had started in war. Sean Wall said he served in the Royal Winnipeg Rifles in the ’80s and ’90s.

The last Canadian veteran of the First World War dug ditches when he joined up at age 16 as the war entered its final stages. Proud of his status as the last Great War veteran, John (Jack) Babcock died on Feb. 19, 2010.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca