These are the remarks I gave at the close of the event. I am proud of them and wanted them to be out here for others to read.
They called it “the war to end all
wars”. How naïve that seems today.
But 100 years ago, people around the
world probably felt that HG Wells was right in calling it that. Surely humanity
had learned from the carnage, and bloodshed, and self-destructive tendencies
that had brought us to such a place.
Sadly, it was not to be so. And in the
century that has followed, hundreds of thousands of more young men – for it is still
mostly young men – have gone to wars around the world, and not returned, just
as these young men did not return.
The footprints imprinted in this
concrete remind us that they left the schoolyard where they once played, the
neighbourhood where they grew up, their city, and province, to fight for King
and country, only to lose their lives on battlefields in France or Belgium or
in hospitals in England.
Today, we honour their memory, and the
memories of the millions of others who fell, as they hoped to bring order, peace
and prosperity to a world of rapid changes. Even a century later, our lives
have been shaped by the sacrifice of these men. I am reminded of the words
engraved on the Soldiers’ Tower at Hart House at the University of Toronto.
Every time I walked beneath the arch, I stopped to read these words of Pericles
great funeral oration:
Their story is graven, not only on stone
over their native earth, but lives on, far away, without visible symbol, woven
into the stuff of other mens’ lives.
Thank you for your time today.
