Remember?
Today is remembrance Day. I like that much better than 'Veteran's Day' in the States, because I feel that the latter just doesn't encompass what the day is meant to be about... which is maybe why the US is involved in a war right now... they just have the wrong attitude about the whole thing.
My basic understanding of remembrance Day is derived from 'lest we forget', because really, its about more than just honouring the people who fought and died for our freedom. Its about recognizing the tragedy and waste of war, and remembering how capable we are of ensuring our own destruction, especially today in the Nuclear Age. I'm not trying to be a doom-sayer, I'm just pointing out the facts.
Anyways, my arrogant economics professor won himself some points today by having a minute of silence in class. This is new and exciting for me, because here in Quebec, they don't really 'do' remembrance Day... in fact, they don't do it at all. They weren't big fans of the war in the first place, and even though the rest of Canada had to be drafted and fight and die, they felt they were above the whole British war business. Well that's enough history. Sitting through my minute of silence, all I could hear were waves.
See, this summer, the Castle took us on a trip to Dieppe. For the non-history students: Dieppe is the site of the (in)famous Dieppe Raid (aka Operation Jubilee), which went down in August 1942. The Raid had a few purposes, firstly to test the viability of an amphibious landing. As we'll recall, the war at this point was happening mostly in Africa and on the Eastern Front (Barbarossa having begun the previous summer) and Stalin is getting pretty ancy. So the second purpose of Dieppe was to get Stalin of Churchill's back about opening a second front... I could go on. The significance of Dieppe to us Canadians, is that the majority of soldiers sent to 'test out' the amphibious landing capabilities of the Allies were Canadian, somewhere in the region of 80-85%. The tragedy of Dieppe is that the raid was a total failure, and almost 1000 Canadian soldiers were killed on the beaches that day.
Last July, standing on the beach in front of a monument to Canadian soldiers, all I could hear was the waves. The beaches on either side of the Channel are made up of fist-sized rocks, and the sound of the powerful waves crashing up the shore is incredible. We have all seen pictures of D-Day landings, seen movies showing terrified young men crouched in landing craft, faced with a beach covered in barbed wire, mines and surrounded by German artillery. One thing we never realise is how loud those waves are. They drag the stones across each other and create a constant deafening roar, the rhythmic pounding and scraping, it is indescribable. But the terror of those landings cannot be intimated by pictures alone, by films... if those films had the surf as loud as it really is, we would not hear the actors, the screams, the gunfire would be muffled by the sounds of rocks. This sound, eternal, as I stood with my feet in the water, the three-foot waves, soaked to the knees in the English Channel, and overwhelmed with grief as I listened to the sea mourn my country's dead. The sound of those waves makes me shiver in fear, and for a brief second I can close my eyes and imagine what it might have been like to be crouched in a landing boat, with no idea what was waiting on the other side, and hearing only the deafening roar of waves crashing up the beach.
My basic understanding of remembrance Day is derived from 'lest we forget', because really, its about more than just honouring the people who fought and died for our freedom. Its about recognizing the tragedy and waste of war, and remembering how capable we are of ensuring our own destruction, especially today in the Nuclear Age. I'm not trying to be a doom-sayer, I'm just pointing out the facts.
Anyways, my arrogant economics professor won himself some points today by having a minute of silence in class. This is new and exciting for me, because here in Quebec, they don't really 'do' remembrance Day... in fact, they don't do it at all. They weren't big fans of the war in the first place, and even though the rest of Canada had to be drafted and fight and die, they felt they were above the whole British war business. Well that's enough history. Sitting through my minute of silence, all I could hear were waves.
See, this summer, the Castle took us on a trip to Dieppe. For the non-history students: Dieppe is the site of the (in)famous Dieppe Raid (aka Operation Jubilee), which went down in August 1942. The Raid had a few purposes, firstly to test the viability of an amphibious landing. As we'll recall, the war at this point was happening mostly in Africa and on the Eastern Front (Barbarossa having begun the previous summer) and Stalin is getting pretty ancy. So the second purpose of Dieppe was to get Stalin of Churchill's back about opening a second front... I could go on. The significance of Dieppe to us Canadians, is that the majority of soldiers sent to 'test out' the amphibious landing capabilities of the Allies were Canadian, somewhere in the region of 80-85%. The tragedy of Dieppe is that the raid was a total failure, and almost 1000 Canadian soldiers were killed on the beaches that day.
Last July, standing on the beach in front of a monument to Canadian soldiers, all I could hear was the waves. The beaches on either side of the Channel are made up of fist-sized rocks, and the sound of the powerful waves crashing up the shore is incredible. We have all seen pictures of D-Day landings, seen movies showing terrified young men crouched in landing craft, faced with a beach covered in barbed wire, mines and surrounded by German artillery. One thing we never realise is how loud those waves are. They drag the stones across each other and create a constant deafening roar, the rhythmic pounding and scraping, it is indescribable. But the terror of those landings cannot be intimated by pictures alone, by films... if those films had the surf as loud as it really is, we would not hear the actors, the screams, the gunfire would be muffled by the sounds of rocks. This sound, eternal, as I stood with my feet in the water, the three-foot waves, soaked to the knees in the English Channel, and overwhelmed with grief as I listened to the sea mourn my country's dead. The sound of those waves makes me shiver in fear, and for a brief second I can close my eyes and imagine what it might have been like to be crouched in a landing boat, with no idea what was waiting on the other side, and hearing only the deafening roar of waves crashing up the beach.
posted by Care @ 12:40 a.m.
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