The numbers of aged people as a proportion of the total global population is growing. I am one of those persons politely entitled a “senior.” We are the ones who misplace things every day and enter rooms to accomplish small tasks and then forget why we are there. It is strange that, in the confusion of the present, our minds revive dim memories of long ago. In the past weeks my mind has been building a library of old songs. One ditty from the Second World War is Bless’em All. It begins with these words: “There’s a troopship just leaving Bombay …” Then I remember my departed friend Donald. He was born on an island off the coast of Scotland where, as a stripling of 17 years, he joined the army. He was sent to Bombay.
At that time, hatred of the Japanese was at a fever pitch because of reports, true and untrue, of the brutality of Japanese soldiers. Donald served as a prison camp guard. He befriended Japanese prisoners whenever he could. Perhaps he believed, as did Robbie Burns, that “ for a’ that and a’ that, a man’s a man for a’ that.” For Donald, the Japanese men were human beings, not just statistics.
Earlier this month, I read a book featuring a collection of letters written by a man born in England who came to homestead near a vanished settlement not far from where I live. The letters make of him a whole man, not just an entry on a casualty list. He was sure he would survive and return to his loved ones in Canada. He died in battle in 1916. He was only one of the millions who perished in rat-infested dugouts and in the fetid soup of mud and broken body parts that could never be put together again. Men who tried to escape from the horror through desertion were shot at dawn. Among their numbers were 23 Canadians.
I remember men and youths who died in the Second World War. One was a close friend, gentle Edgar who stepped on a land mine in Normandy. I remember John and John and Stanley and Ross. They were young men, not statistics.
In the museum where I sometimes work there are forage caps and badges of the German Civil Defence Force, that ragtag group of grandfathers and children who were pressed into service to protect Hitler and his henchman during the bloody sunset of the Third Reich. I wonder if one of the defence force soldiers was a boy called Hans who died of a bullet wound before his 15th birthday. And I wonder if a man called Rudolf was serving on the Eastern Front when his house and family were burned into cinders during the bombing raids on Hamburg.
If I see another Rembrance Day, I will wear a red poppy for all of them – on both sides. Most of the people who perished were young and politically powerless. They followed their leaders into a maelstrom of death and destruction.
And if world leaders neglect to acknowledge that we are our own worst enemies, that global warming is a greater threat than crazed terrorists, I shall wear my poppy for the politically powerless yet to die. When sea levels rise they will perish in drowned cities, earthquakes, violent storms and of starvation when fertile fields turn into deserts. If we follow selfish, incompetent leaders, we follow them to global destruction.
