11 November is Remembrance Day. Along with many of my diplomatic colleagues, I’ll be laying a wreath at the War Memorial in Ottawa, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when the guns finally fell silent on the Western Front in 1918.
This will be particularly poignant for me, as it’s the first time I’ll have done it in Canada. It recalls not only the sacrifice of soldiers, sailors, marines and aviators – both Canadian and British, in two world wars – but of everyone involved in those vast conflicts: families separated for years, children from parents, women who worked in factories, mines and a thousand new jobs while men were at the front, all the non-combatants who in so many ways supported the war effort, and transformed their societies.
Much of the run-up to Remembrance Day in Canada reminds me of Britain, particularly the wearing of the poppy. The shared memory of Flanders runs deep, as do the words of John McRae, the Canadian army doctor who wrote “In Flanders Fields”. It’s both humbling and warming to recall that in the other posts in which I’ve served – Washington, Dar es Salaam, Canberra – those who fought and those who are descended from them, and all those who are free because they fought, will also, at the eleventh hour, be engaged in the same solemn commemoration.
Back to Canada. Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, laid a wreath at the Memorial on his visit here in September. He wanted to honour both the past and the present: Canada’s continuing contribution in Afghanistan, and the then NATO operation in Libya, side by side with British and other NATO colleagues. Laying the wreath has another dimension too: a commitment to the future, to protecting the values and liberties that earlier generations forged, and fought to defend. To do less than honour and maintain their legacy would be a betrayal, not just of them, but of ourselves.
I look forward to laying the wreath.