When I was a kid, I worked at a small country store in Wilmer, a little berg just northwest of Invermere, for most of my high school years. I made 40 cents an hour and got a ton of experience at one of the best jobs I ever had in my life.
The fellow who ran the store was a guy named Tom Seaton. He was at the end of his working life while I was just beginning mine.
The store was busy much of the time, but at other times, there was time to talk. It was during one of those times that he told me something that I have never forgotten. He had fought in both the battles of the Somme and Vimy Ridge in the First World War.
I didn’t have much interest in those battles, the names were just names.
I didn’t have any questions for Mr. Seaton, even just thinking about them was like thinking about schoolwork. But I sure wish I could ask him some questions now. Just as we wish we could ask questions of the many veterans who lie today in the local Golden Legion Cemetery.
Most of us who walk the streets of Golden today know nothing of the terribleness of war.
The Somme and Vimy Ridge were fought in 1916 and ’17, long before our time. And those battles were not only against the enemy armies, but also the cold, the mud, the lice and, of all things, the rats. But turning on our television sets today changes that a little bit.
The Israeli-Hamas war gives us very graphic pictures of what it’s all about. Those images remind us of the lessons that come from the earlier great wars that were either heeded or not.
One of those lessons has to do with a military term that we seldom hear now: appeasement.
The Europe of the late 1930s thought that if it would just give Hitler one more country, he would be satisfied. And Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of England was quick to agree.
But there was no satisfying Hitler, and it took the little bulldog, Winston Churchill, to finally say that enough was enough and that the free world would ‘never give up.’ And it took six long years and thousands of lives, but Germany has been a functioning democratic nation ever since, as has the world that would likely have been drastically changed had Hitler been allowed to carry on.
Another lesson, it seems to me, lies in the danger of quitting too soon. In times of war, we all like the thought of them coming to an end. But ending WWI too soon is what brought WWII.
Had Germany’s military strength been more completely destroyed in WWI, there might never have been a WWII or a holocaust. Notice how quickly WWII in the Pacific ended with the decisive American use of the atomic bomb. And Japan has been a model nation ever since.
I find it hard to look at the conflict today without remembering the sacrifice of lives that were made at places like the Somme and Vimy Ridge, without asking ourselves how that sacrifice should be guiding us now. Without doing so, we pay less than full tribute to the mothers who gave what mothers should never have to give, and to those words ‘Lest We Forget.’
~ Duane Crandall
