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© National Archives of Canada  C-38723

I had a conversation about war with my nephew recently. I had gone to the library with him and we had looked at books on all sorts of things, including ones with pictures of tanks and planes. We went back to his place and got into making Lego versions of some of these things. He asked me all sorts of questions about them, and about war in general, WW2 in particular. His grandmother is from Holland, and I am as well. I tried to explain to him why I tend to get a bit verklempt on Remembrance Day. That guys just like his dad, just like me, just like all his other uncles and the fathers of his school chums all felt that what was happening in Europe was egregious enough that they volunteered to go and do something about it. That they left behind their families, their wives, their girlfriends, their children, their homes, their businesses. That some of them didn’t come back for 6 years. That some of them spent years languishing in a POW camp, bored out of their skulls and hungry if they were guests of Hitler, tortured and starved if they were guests of Tojo. That some were horribly wounded and maimed, sometimes with grotesquely visible wounds, sometimes with invisible, though no less grotesque injuries. Sometimes they never came back - drowned in the Atlantic, burned alive inside a tank in France, blown to smithereens over Germany. Young men who wanted nothing more than to wake up next to their wives, watch their children grow up, practice their trade. Instead they did what was asked of them, doing the right thing.

I seem to recall this photo dates from 1939. I get choked up every time I look at that photo. I wonder how long this father was separated from his wife and son. I wonder how long this son and wife were separated from their father and husband. I wonder how much she and every other mother/sister/wife/daughter worried. I wonder if they ever saw each other again.

War is a horrible thing. But I will be eternally grateful to those who stand guard against tyranny. I will be eternally grateful to those people who gave up years of their lives, their freedom, their health, their mental well being, even their very lives, to liberate the country I was born in. I don’t think 2 minutes to reflect on the gravitas of that photo, to really think what was sacrificed in the accomplishment of a noble goal is too much to ask.

Follow up story to this.