On Remembrance Day, originally called Armistice Day, on November the 11th, at 11 a.m. Canadians recognize all those who have served in the nation’s defence.
Remembrance Day, as we know it, has gone through periods of intense observation and periodic decline.
The original Armistice Day, inaugurated in 1919 throughout much of the British Empire, was observed on the second Monday in November. In Canada Parliament passed an Armistice Day bill to observe ceremonies on the first Monday in the week of 11 November, but this combined the event with the Thanksgiving Day holiday. For much of the 1920s, Canadians observed the date with little public demonstration. Veterans and their families gathered in churches and around local memorials, observances involved few other Canadians.
It was not until 1931 that the federal government decreed that the newly named Remembrance Day, a renaming intended to put the emphasis on the soldiers whose deaths were being remembered, would be observed on 11 November and that Remembrance Day would emphasize the memory of fallen soldiers instead of the political and military events leading to victory in the First World War.
It is now a national holiday for federal and many provincial government workers, and the largest ceremonies are attended in major cities by tens of thousands. The ceremony at the National War Memorial in Ottawa is nationally televised, while most media outlets – including newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, and internet sources – run special features, interviews, or investigative reports on military history or remembrance-related themes.
Remembrance Day has proven to be a flexible event. It has grown to include the remembrance of war dead from the Second World War, the Korean War and the War in Afghanistan, at well as from peacekeeping missions and other international military engagements. It now commemorates the more than 1.6 million Canadians have served in Canada’s Armed Forces and more than 118,000 have died in foreign conflicts.
Fashions change and it may well be that just as our attitude to Remembrance Day has changed in the pas, it may change in the future. It has become easier for generations raised with the false belief that wars are optional to 'celebrate' Remembrance Day. There is no guarantee that this will always be so.
As an example of changing attitudes take the lines from the fourth stanza of the poem “For the Fallen”, written by Laurence Binyon in 1914 which have became known as the “Ode of Remembrance” or the “Act of Remembrance.” Its lines are often engraved on cenotaphs, war memorials and headstones in war cemeteries throughout the English-speaking world, or spoken at Remembrance Day memorials.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn;
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.
Not so commonly repeated are the lines of the third stanza,
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted:
They fell with their faces to the foe
It would be fair to say that those sentiments are no longer fashionable.
There are no guarantees about how future generations will remember the fallen, we can only hope that in that future, as in the past, there will always be some willing to step forward to insure that we are allowed to decide for ourselves what we choose to do on November 11th. Perhaps that is what Remembrance Day is really about, reminding ourselves that others have sacrificed so that we have those choices.
