John McCrae’s Medals

From the North Shore News Nov. 16, 1998

Pondering Canada’s Pallid Patriotism

John Moore, Contributing Columnist

LAST year's 11th-hour rescue of Canadian Second World War poet John McCrae's medals remains the most inspiring example of patriotism Canadians have witnessed in many years.

The Royal Canadian Legion, which scrambled desperately for financing to save the medals for The McCrae House Museum in Guelph, was treated like a street panhandler by our minister of defence, who refused to kick in a dime to preserve the medals awarded to the author of In Flanders Fields.

The legion was about to take a hammer to the Poppy Fund piggy-bank when Chinese-Canadian businessman Arthur Lee felt it was his "responsibility as a Canadian" to ensure the medals stayed in Canada.

Out-bidding collectors at the auction, he paid $400,000 and immediately donated the medals to McCrae House.

Let cynics say that Lee will get his money back in tax deductions this year, or whatever snide calumnies they care to. The fact remains that Lee responded instantly while we floundered in more typically Canadian unfocused outrage.

The grandeur of Lee's gesture is in no way diminished by the fact that he'd never heard of John McCrae until the groundswell of public anger turned into a political gale-warning, or by the fact that he first read In Flanders Fields in the auction room. Those facts do say something rather unflattering about us: we who are so quick to characterize new Canadians as opportunists who treat this country as nothing but a "soft landing," yet who are so lamentably reluctant to set an example of what being Canadian really means.

Today, we Canadians will again pause to try to remember where our local cenotaph is located.

Like most Canadian war memorials, ours on the North Shore are located in parks (across from the West Vancouver Library and in east Victoria Park off Lonsdale), out of the mainstream of everyday life, unvisited 364 days of the year except by strollers, joggers and parents airing their infants.

The main cenotaph in downtown Vancouver is a disgrace to the memory of the men it honours: an alfresco flophouse for winos and junkies for all but one day of the year.

How we commemorate the wartime birth of our national identity says much about us as a people.

We are a modest, undemonstrative lot who barely mumble a verse of our national anthem before hockey games and express our restrained patriotism in abstract memorials.

We are also a country with a deepening identity crisis that has festered like a running sore for four decades.

In Australia, another Commonwealth country born in the Great War, I was surprised to discover the most aggressively "Australian" citizens were often the most recent arrivals.

Like the U.S., Australia seems to have some knack of inspiring genuine patriotic pride in its adoptees. As we travelled around, I began to notice that every city and town, no matter how small, has a monument to those who died in the Great War -- not tucked away in quiet parks, but usually occupying a main boulevard or town square.

No abstract pillars, they are invariably realist bronze or stone statues of the Aussie Digger/Soldier with his slouch hat, breeches and Enfield rifle. The plaque on the plinth may immortalize 5,000, 500, 50 or five, from that community who never came marching home.

Outside Bendigo, a mining town that contributed a large number of digger-soldiers, we found ourselves on an "Avenue of Honour", a typical two-lane highway except that every one of its tall bordering trees had been planted in honour of a soldier from the area who fell in the Great War.

Each tree bears a small plaque with the name of a long-dead Digger. The trees are 80 years old. No one steals the plaques. For the first few miles, this seems a fine and public way to remember the fallen, their names flashing past like a silent roll-call on the windscreen. But it goes on. And on. And on. Until you can't drive through the tears.

In the large cosmopolitan city of Melbourne there is a war memorial, located on the edge of a large park within sight of major thoroughfares and a bustling downtown core.

A large domed blockhouse, cornered by four squat pillars representing wars from the First World War to Vietnam in which Australians have served and died, it initially seems like a typical government-designed ceremonial venue; sterile, inhuman, irrelevant.

But the vast surrounding plaza distances the varied and vocal bird life. You can see the traffic, but you can't hear it. In fact, you can't hear anything but your own voices, which reflexively sink to a reverent whisper.

It's a very cleverly contrived warp in time/space, a "still point in the turning world," uncanny without being frightening, a deft recreation of an ancient sacred site which forces you to focus on its "less is more" message of remembrance.

The form and prominence of our war memorials is one highly visible point of difference between our two post-colonial, post-Imperial cultures; these monuments transcend social politics, arguments about racism, multiculturalism or immigration -- they are physical embodiments of non-revisionist history which say, "These gave their lives so you might have the freedom to bicker among yourselves."

Which makes Arthur Lee's grand gesture stand out in even sharper relief in this country.

It's a sad fact of life in the Information Age that the ravenous appetite for something to fill the unforgiving electronic minute trivializes every bit of information by turning it into a "news bite," someone's 15 minutes of fame.

Arthur Lee and the McCrae medals deserve more than a quarter-hour. What he did for his adopted country is more than "last year's news" and politicians, defenders of multiculturalism and members of aggrieved minorities should all take a minute of silence to consider its significance.

At the very least, when the glasses are raised in Legion posts across Canada this and every Remembrance Day, there should be another toast after The Queen and The Regiment and the glorious dead: to Arthur Lee, a man who fought in no wars under the old Red Ensign, but a Canadian who "stood on guard for thee."