ROTHENBURGER – The wars and soldiers we seem to have forgotten
Cenotaph on Battle Street. (Image: Mel Rothenburger file photo)
Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Charge of the Light Brigade
TALK TO war veterans, and one of their biggest worries is that we’ll forget them. We understand this, so we’ve adopted a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Recessional” as the slogan and commitment for Remembrance Day.
Some people think it’s taken from In Flanders Fields, written by Canada’s John McCrae, but it was Kipling who wrote “Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, lest we forget — lest we forget!”
The poem is a call to remember brave soldiers after “the tumult and the shouting dies.”
Our record on that is somewhat spotty. We can’t even remember where we put our car keys let alone think about a war that happened a hundred years ago or halfway around the world, or both.
Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops, former school board chair, former editor of The Kamloops Daily News, and a current director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He was awarded the Jack Webster Foundation’s lifetime achievement award in 2011. His editorials are published Monday through Thursdays, and Saturdays on CFJC Today, CFJC Midday and CFJC Evening News. Contact him at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca
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