Honoring our Great War dead
Last week Britain laid to rest its last surviving soldier of the Great War. Harry Patch, machine gunner and Ypres veteran, was the United Kingdom’s final living link to a conflict that killed almost one million Britons and changed forever the course of human history.
As one would expect, the citizens and government of Great Britain observed Harry Patch¹s passing with the solemnity that such a watershed moment deserved. In addition to holding a moving ceremony at Wells Cathedral involving thousands of mourners, the U.K. government spent three years organizing an ambitious nation-wide day of commemoration that saw local communities and schools honour Britain’s last ”Tommy.”
The deep desire of the British to pay tribute to the service and sacrifice of Harry Patch and the generation of young men he fought with made me remember, with a keen sense of regret, the passing of Canada¹s last combat veteran of the Great War, Charles Clarence Laking.
I first met Charles Laking in 2003 when he was a sprightly 104 years of age.
At the time, the Dominion Institute was collecting oral histories from Canadian veterans, and with only a handful of Great War survivors still alive, we were eager to record his memories for posterity.
Alert, lucid and possessed of a wry sense of humour, Charles told us the story of his war, how he had enlisted as soon as he turned eighteen and how he spent the following two years trying to cheat death as a signaller on the front lines. He narrowly missed being seriously wounded or worse on more occasions than he could count, and he lost too many of his friends in battle.
Still, he was extremely proud to have been among the all-Canadian forces that were rightly celebrated as liberators in France and Belgium at the war’s end. In every way Charles was an exemplary Canadian, a man who had served his country in war, raised a family, started a business and spent the balance of his life building the country that we live in today.
In 2005, he became the last surviving Canadian to have experienced combat in the First World War, one of the last living ties between twenty-first century Canada and our war of independence.
In November 2005, at 106 years of age, Charles Laking passed away peacefully.
At the funeral organized by his family, the governments of Britain and France sent official representatives to thank Charles¹s children and grandchildren for his military service. The country for which Charles and his fellow comrades-in-arms had fought sent no one.
Our collective failure to properly honour Charles Laking¹s individual service or to comprehend, as our British and French allies clearly did, the larger significance of his death to the sweep of Canadian history, was a shameful lapse of national character. But our national institutions have one last opportunity to redeem themselves by properly commemorating the passing of the last Canadian Great War veteran, John Babcock.
The time has come for the government of Canada to finally announce a detailed plan to commemorate this watershed moment in our history. The vague commitment by Veterans Affairs to hold a ”Day of Mourning” isn¹t enough after Canadians have witnessed the thoughtful, ambitious and heartfelt commemorations that marked the passing of Harry Patch in Great Britain.
Specifically, let¹s follow the British example and organize a commemoration that is truly national in scope - that involves local communities, schools and veterans groups nation-wide in a series of remembrances that do justice to the importance of Great War to modern Canada.
The time will soon be upon us to take up the timeless and essential duty of shared nationhood, namely to honour one’s war dead and to ponder the awesome responsibilities of citizenship. Let¹s not fail our Great War dead in this last remembrance.
Rudyard Griffiths is the co-founder of the Dominion Institute and the author of Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto (Douglas & McIntyre).
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