ROTHENBURGER – None of us has escaped the horrors of war

THOUGHTS OF WAR are on our minds today. Across the country, people will take time to honour those who fought, the many who died and those who are still serving in armed forces here and on the other side of the world.

We assure each other that we’ll never forget, and we won’t. But many or most of us no doubt think of war as something that happens to other people in other places, and not to us.

Certainly, those who have experienced war understand how our lives have been shaped by war. But the rest of us have been no less affected by it. I am one.

I never had to go to war, thanks to my parents’ generation that did. They signed up or were conscripted to serve both at home and at the European theatre in World War II. Their sacrifice allowed me, born as the war turned in favour of the Allies, to grow up and live my entire life without ever having to lift a weapon. It’s been the same for my kids.

Before that, one of my ancestors, Pvt. George McLean, won the distinguished Conduct Medal for bravery at Vimy Ridge in World War I. Today, he’s regarded as an indigenous hero.

War has shaped my privileged Canadian life going back generations. After the tragedy of Culloden and the brutal Highland Clearances, my McLeans ancestors fled Scotland for an unknown, incredibly difficult life in Canada, where my great-great-great grandfather was killed in a battle on the plains.

A generation later, my great-great grandfather was shot and killed in a conflict here in B.C.

On the other side of my family, the German-speaking Rothenburgers left Ukraine to avoid war at the dawn of the 20^th century, taking up farming on the Canadian Prairies.

At every turn, war redirected the lives of my ancestors. Somehow, through this twisted skein of conflict and coincidence, my German-Ukrainian father and Scottish-Indigenous mother found each other and started their life together.

I’m certain that everyone else has similar roots, though they may be roots that grew in other places at other times and in different ways, some in very recent conflicts.

So, we can appreciate them and honour them but the one thing we can’t fully understand is the horror of what so many of them went through. War is a loud, smelly, bloody, deadly business — we know that much from the movies and documentaries. But we can’t truly feel it.

I was doing some research on a particular battle yesterday and came across something I hadn’t realized, and that had to do with treatment of prisoners. There are many instances of mass ill treatment of prisoners that have become famous, of course. But it happened in singular, isolated incidents as well. One of the most dangerous moments of any soldier’s life, I read, was the act of surrender.

At the split second a soldier gave up and threw down his weapon, he was at the mercy of the enemy, and that enemy might not be in a humanitarian mood. The chances of a prisoner being executed on the spot rather than marched off as a prisoner of war were pretty good.

Ordinary people fighting for their country might never make it home if an enemy combatant’s whim swung the wrong way.

Those who do return home suffer physical and emotional scars for life. The things they’ve seen are with them forever.

So, yes, this is an important day, not just for those we honour, but for ourselves to contemplate how war has sculpted our own lives.

Mel Rothenburger is a former regular contributor to CFJC-TV and CBC radio, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, writes for the Kamloops Chronicle and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and was a Webster Foundation Commentator of the Year finalist. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor.  He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.