By Their Names Shall You Remember

Nov 11 2017

Like the jagged rocks

that hobble horses

and bend the blades of ploughs

when frost and thaw disturb the soil,

Belgium's verdant earth

still gives-up its bones;

the remains of men

a century after

the war to end all war.

I must confess, I did not know this.

I've heard of unexploded bombs,

but not the remains of soldiers

buried where they fell.

Where shattered bodies mixed

with cold wet soil,

with horses' blood and bone and flesh

who bled the same hot red;

dumb conscripts

to human folly

straining at their loads.

His name is etched

on a consecrated wall

on a green manicured field,

surrounded by headstones

standing at attention

in vast monolithic ranks.

Where once in a lifetime

a distant relative will come,

with an offering of flowers, a mumble of prayer,

the simple gift 
of being present.

Will lay his hands
on the cold hard slab,
chiselled letters
unembellished
immortalized in stone.

Then, with a soft lead pencil

will take a careful etching

of a fallen soldier's name,

seeking answers

in marble and granite

to questions endlessly asked.

For all these years, someone saved the letters home,

crimped careful script

on thin yellowing paper.

And like the men who returned, broken and damaged

who never speak of war

the letters also never spoke.

No echoing

the pious rhetoric

of poets and kings;

not a single word

about the honour and glory

the horror and gore.

Rather, they asked about home

offered humble reassurance

requested chocolate, and smokes.

The legacy of war

is not put to rest

when the night-sweats end

or the veterans are dead

or the remembering falters.

Because in the children they beget

the scars still fester;

damaged men

who were bad at marriage

and drank to excess

and struggled at fatherhood.

The legacy of war

is generational,

and will last, I suspect

as long as cold wet soil

keeps pushing-up its bones.

Sometimes, instead of trying to forget

try harder to remember.

Because what you know, and name, and face

is drained of its power.

And the better we know history

and the names of its victims

the more likely it is

we may save ourselves.

For a period of time, I wrote a poem each November 11 (Remembrance Day here in Canada; Veterans Day in the U.S.). After several years of neglect, it's good to get back to this annual ritual. My thanks to R.H. Thompson (the well-known actor, and producer of The World Remembers project) for inspiring this. He had a beautiful piece in today's Globe, a thoughtful reflection on remembrance and silence and the men who died: men whom we collectively honour, but are rarely spoken of by name. The central image of the shattered bones heaved up by the frost is Thompson's, as is the content of the letters home. And the idea of naming names is his, as well: his passion to commemorate not just the folly of war, but the individual soldiers who were its victims.

Here's Thompson's piece, as published in The Globe and Mail, November 11, 2017:

Re­mem­brance should be by name

We observe silence for those who died fighting for Canada – but Nov. 11 has never given us the time to remember each individually

IN THEIR NAME, BUT NEVER WITH THEIR NAMES

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

On Nov. 11, we think of the men and women (mostly men) who died fighting for Canada, yet they are never named. But it seems such an obvious thing to do, to name them. At the ceremony, many words are heard: How proud we are of those that serve – and we are; how well Canada did in the wars – and we did; and most importantly, that Remembrance Day is when we remember them. Abstract nouns are also included, but I am never sure of their purpose, whereas there is a silence in the name of a dead soldier that can wear away the wall between myself and the past.

I like the two minutes of silence because words don’t crowd my remembering. The wars played heavily in my family: My father was in the navy in the Second World War and his five uncles were in the army in the First World War and, in my mother’s family, uncles and great-uncles served. We had no family deaths in the Second World War, but seven of my great uncles lost their lives in the First World War. I know those men (mostly young) only through the hundreds and hundreds of letters they sent home. The letters are deceptively simple because, mainly, they ask for news from home and rarely do they write about the fighting. Their sentences are also absent of abstract nouns such as freedom, valour or democracy, since soldiering for them was probably a practical, if deadly, business. In the silence on Nov. 11, I reflect not only on my great-uncles, but also on my great-grandmother, their mother, who also read the letters until the death notices arrived – usually in a telegram.

The letters cease seeming simple when you realize the context in which they were written. When a letter’s date is cross-referenced with their regiment’s war diary, the events of the day become clear and sentences in the letters become crowded with meaning. On Nov. 13, 1917, my great-uncle George Stratford wrote “the battalion had done the odd bit of fighting.” The record in the regimental diary says that they had been fighting the battle of Passchendaele – one of the great slaughters of the First World War. George’s understatement of his war collides in my mind with our heightened remembrance language, the epitaphs on monuments and even sometimes with the architecture of the memorials themselves – all honourably intended. Yet, in my heart, I would prefer something simple.

George’s remains lie somewhere near Passchendaele, although exactly where, no one is sure. He was killed four days after he wrote that letter. His soldier brothers wrote their mother not to fret since “he was killed instantly” – but he wasn’t. He took at least half an hour to die after his friends had dug him out from where he’d been buried alive by a shell.

His name is one of the 54,000 on Belgium’s Menin Gate. They are the names of the Commonwealth soldiers who, as with George, were never found or whose pieces were never identified. Wondering where his bones (or pieces) might lie, last spring I made a quixotic trip to Passchendaele, taking with me a pencilled map that was among the letters. It had been sent to George’s mother and was a sketch of a field by the road to Ypres where his friends had dug the quick grave. I was looking for a place that had been hidden for 100 years.

I travelled with my great-grandmother (in my imagination) since she never knew his resting place. I took with me the map and George’s last letters. There was the possibility that George’s pieces may have surfaced one spring (because bones appear every year, heaved up by the frosts) and had been officially reburied. So I searched the Commonwealth cemeteries with their fine words and perfect headstones, but nothing. I also read wild and passionate words, written by Irish First World War soldiers, that had been chiselled into the stones in Ireland’s Peace Park in Belgium. And not far from Passchendaele, I visited Vladslo cemetery, which holds 25,000 German graves. Even with so many, Vladslo doesn’t display much memorial language. Instead, kneeling among the graves are two stone figures, a mother and father on their knees before the thousands.

The Grieving Parents were carved by German sculptor Kathe Kollwitz and they maintain a silence that would put our silence to shame. In the cemetery of George’s enemies, the father’s eyes are fixed on a grave marker a few metres away. Seeing where his gaze lands, I read the name Peter Kollwitz – Kathe’s son. At that moment, my greatgrandmother seemed even more present, since she was accompanied by another parent’s grief. The deaths of sons are equal burdens to mothers, as the bodies of the sons, both enemy and friend, lie equal to their graves.

But with no known resting place, George’s memories also have little rest. With the pencilled map and the help of Belgian researchers, I finally found the place in a field of young corn where his soldier friends had hastily buried him. Yet, the continued shelling had probably reworked that land, redistributing what had been quickly buried, including my great-grandmother’s son. I saw a piece of cast-iron shell casing and a few balls of shrapnel that had heaved to the surface, but nothing else.

George’s bones must be somewhere, I thought. Except for a light wind and the motion of the corn, there was nothing but silence around me. I stood with the quiet of the dead. No words or language of remembrance crowded my thoughts. I stood with the grief of my great-grandmother and all the mothers for their sons who we had asked to fight our wars and who had never come home.

For years I have worked on naming them by building a commemoration simply called The World

Remembers. What I really wish is that on the morning of Nov. 11, our silence lasted more than two minutes – an insignificant passage of time. Twenty minutes might be a start and two hours would begin to be significant. Remembrance Day has never given us the time to remember each of them by name, although there was plenty of time for each of them to die.

( Actor R. H. Thomson is the greatnephew of George Stratford, killed in 1917, and the producer of The World Remembers project, which seeks to name each soldier killed in the First World War; theworldremembers.org.)