Through Their Souls to Mine: The Anniversaries Begin

One of the many paintings/sketches I have made over the years of this subject.

These days I have been feeling out of touch and impotent when it comes to the strike.  I have been feeling like I have nothing interesting to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times so I have changed the focus of my writing.  

I am sure that I have little new to say about the topic I have been steeped in for decades…almost on the verge of obsession…but I need to write about it all the same.  I stumbled upon this obsession 20 summers ago whilst I read Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. 

The Great War, World War One, has been a passion of mine for a long, long time.  Twenty summers ago I was reading All Quiet... and getting to know the struggles of Paul Baumer and his friends, German soldiers, in the Great War.  Paul is a poet, a playwright, and a gentle, beautiful soul.  He, in my mind, best represents many of the young, artistic, sensitive men sent to the battlefields of that “war to end all wars.”

I have a very vivid memory of reading this book that summer:  my oldest son was then nine months old.  He was my first baby.  He was plump and soft and beautiful and I loved him (still do) with my whole soul – the kind of love you have when you see that first baby and hold them and smell them.  They are your everything.  He would reach up and touch my cheek when he nursed.  His little brown eyes filled with love and something else – something I still don’t know what it was…comfort, peace, trust…I don’t know.

One particularly hot summer afternoon I was reading the book while I was nursing him and trying to get him to go to sleep for a nap.  I had reached a very sad section of the novel – there are many - this one was the saddest.  I kept thinking about how I would feel if this baby in my arms, my son, had been one of those young men in this novel – ones who would never come home to their mothers - and I began to silently weep. One of my tears landed on his face.  He opened his eyes and looked up at me…and I will never forget this…he took his chubby little hand and touched one of the tears on my cheek, unlatched himself from my breast, and said “mama?” as if to ask me why I was crying.  This, of course, opened the flood gates and I just held him close and cried tears for other women’s sons.

That baby boy is 21 years old now and I can’t quite shake the fact that if I sat here a century ago, in one weeks time my oldest would be off to Valcartier to train with the other young men for the CEF (Canadian Expeditionary Forces) to fight, and probably die, in the mud of Flanders.   That 21 year old now has a 19 year old sister and an 11 year old brother who, 100 years ago, would most certainly have lied about his age, in the last years of the war, to join his brother.  He has asthma but he wouldn’t care.  An ocean could not keep him from his beloved older brother. 

That story had been lived out a thousand, thousand times during those four bloody years.

I promised myself that summer 20 years ago, that I would learn all I could learn about this war and I would make it my life’s mission to never forget those who had fallen in a war that no one seemed to want to remember. 

So I did.  

I started to read and collect books, memoirs, artifacts, and pictures from the Great War.  I have pictures of men I have never met from families I do not know; “adopting” them from the dusty military antiques shop I frequent in Victoria.  I could not let them go to people who did not understand what their sacrifice really meant.  I must admit that it is a little creepy to have the images of people hanging around the house from someone else’s family but I figured that I “adopt” other people’s kids all of the time, “adopting” their brothers, dads, husbands, or sons would be ok.  At least they were coming to a home where they are constantly in the open – where people can see them and honour their memory.  I just wish I knew their story.  Maybe someday I will.

I decided that if I was going to write anything any more, it would be thoughts, honourings, and remembrances of those who slogged through the mud of Belgium and France, climbed the cliffs of the Dardanelles, sweated in the sun of North Africa, or “kept the home fires burning.”  These people, of whom no one survives, shall be remembered in my house beyond the 100^th anniversary of the conflicts.  I had a place for them before that and I shall have a place for them until I am dead and gone – and then I will see to it that my children and their children pass on the knowledge and the faces. 

Too high a price has been paid for them to disappear into sepia nothingness.  

Those faces could have very easily been faces of my beloveds.  They could have been my worry, my longing, my grief to bear.  Only time protected us…time and chance.

And so it begins.

You will see into my soul through theirs.