Canada’s World War I Vets Are All Ghosts Now

By Doug Draper

I can still remember them marching by  so proudly, wearing their neatly tailored uniforms with all those metals pinned on their chests.

Canadian troops land in Plymouth, England on their way to the killing fields of the First World War. Photo courtesy of Great War Primary Document Archive: Photos of the Great War - http://www.gwpda.org/photos.

I was barely seven years old as I watched them march by in a parade to mark Welland’s 1958 Centennial celebrations and most of them were probably in their late 50s and early 60s. And to my youthful eyes, they all seemed so old then.

They were veterans of World War I – ‘the Great War’, as so many then called it – and they were actually a good deal younger at the time I was watching them march by than our remaining World War II veterans are today.

And now they are all gone. With the death this February 18 of Canada’s last World War I veteran John Babcock, who was born and raised in Kingston, Ontario in 1900 and died at his home in Spokane, Washington, we have lost the last living Canadian who wore a uniform during five of the bloodiest, most nightmarish years in more than two thousand years of recorded human history.

Other than the fascination I think many young boys (I can’t pretend to speak for young girls) have for wars and possibly joining the army, I have opposed wars all of my adult life. Other than agreeing that it was a good idea to finally blast our way in and put an end to that Nazi plague lead  by one of history’s maddest mass murders Adolf Hitler, I can hardly accept the possibility that we can’t resolve conflicts between one another in some other way.

As a reporter for more than 30 years, I ‘ve joined fellow staff at the old St. Catharines Standard, The Thorold News, Niagara This Week and other newsrooms where I’ve worked in covering Remembrance Days and other anniversaries of conflicts our veterans have fought it. And what almost always strikes me is this.  Very few of the veterans I’ve met have any taste for more war or the conflicts we continue to get ourselves entangled in today.
 

They almost always take a far less aggressive stance than those we hear from, let’s say, Sarah Palin, who recently went on a Fox News program in the U.S. and suggested she might take more of a liking to U.S. President Barack Obama if he played the “war card” with Iran. They also come across as far less hawkish than former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney, who took advantage of every draft deferment a more privileged youth at that time could during the Vietnam War era, as did his fellow traveler, former U.S. president George W. Bush.

The same might be said about Canada’s current prime minister, Stephen Harper, who seems pretty pro-military for someone who has never put on a uniform and had bullets whistling past his head, and Canada’s federal Liberal opposition leader Michael Ignatieff, who would have done just what Harper wanted to do if he were prime minister earlier this decade, and pushed Canadian troops into Iraq.

When I was studying the history of World War I back in high school, students were asked to write essays about the causes of that war. And I got to be honest. I could never figure it out and probably got lousy marks on my papers. It almost always came down to some dangerous game a bunch of privileged people – queens and kings, and dukes and duchesses, and kaisers and czars, and so on (many of them related by blood) – were playing on a world map they turned into their own little chess board.

At the end of it all, tens of millions of people had their lives destroyed for the “glorious cause” in one of the most butcherous conflicts in human history and the so-called “war to end all wars” never lived up to its promise. So why were so many millions of people slaughtered over that one, and why does one war after another in our world just keep raging on and on and on?  Why?

By the way the photo image for this post of a group of Canadian soldiers landing in England, before being shipped off to France to fight in World War 1 is available, along with so many others, through Great War Primary Document Archive: Photos of the Great War –  www.gwpda.org/photos. Given when this group of Canadians had their pictures taken during the more than four years of this conflict, one cannot help but wonder how few of them made it back home intact at the end of it all. Chances are, most of them perished in the blood and the mud on the field.

And for our American neighbours, reportedly the last living U.S. veteran of World War I is Frank Woodruff Buckles, age 109 and living in West Virginia.

(click on www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary, from Niagara At Large, of interest to our greater Niagara region.)