The Great War
10:07 p.m.
As we were watching the credits, my husband told us that he had read that when Hitler was advancing across France and came to the memorial to the Canadians who fell at Vimy, he stopped and paid homage to the dead. Of course, many Germans also died in that battle, but the loss of lives in general is just staggering.
As a child, my father would take me every Remembrance Day to the service at Eat0n’s, that now-defunct department store, where we would watch ancient veterans lay flowers at a memorial plaque marking the names of those who had given their lives in both wars. But when I think about it, the particularly ancient ones would have been survivors of the Great War, and I remember them crying. I was just a child in the early 1960’s, but watching the film tonight brought that back to me.
Then, right after it was over, the news came on. Six Canadian soldiers died in Afghanistan today when a roadside bomb exploded, the worst day yet. Why are we still doing this? What point is there to people dying in this horrible way? It makes me think that humanity is not the top of the food chain, is not the pinnacle of evolution that we think it is. We are still animals at the core, driven by our basic instincts to protect our territory and ensure our survival, to suspect all others, to kill instead of seeking out a more diplomatic solution.
I fear that we really are just another step in the chain. Homo sapiens is not so sapient after all.
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