Today, seriously senior veterans will sit for hours in front of our national cenotaph. Ottawa’s weather on Remembrance Day usually offers a nasty choice: wet and chilly, overcast and cold, or clear but even colder. Today we have the latter.
Today’s images were taken last year in a happier season altogether.
Today is the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended WWI. As a fair-weather photographer, I have trouble even imagining the horrors of trench warfare. Even if I were inclined to glorify or sentimentalize that war or any other, this year it would seem especially inappropriate. The Silver Cross Mother is the parent of a soldier who killed himself three months after he got home from Afghanistan.
The members of the Canadian Armed Forces that I know, active and retired, don’t glorify or sentimentalize war. But they do institutionalize the act of remembrance. I think that’s the least I can do, too, honouring all those who fought and suffered, all those who died, and all their families.
There’s a new exhibit at the London Imperial War Museum that lets visitors both feel and hear a recreation or interpretation of what it was like when the guns finally fell silent.
Listen to the Armistice Interpretation here
