To the Unknown Soldier
Son,
At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when the guns of the Great War at last fell silent, the fury of conflict was replaced by a deafening silence. In that fragile gap between the sounds of massacre and the cries of relief, we were faced with all we had done, all we had lost, all we had sacrificed. In that silence, we met a truth so obvious and so terrifying we swore we would never take up arms again. “One owes respect to the living,” said Voltaire. “To the dead, one owes only the truth.”
We vowed never to forget. We built monuments – massive pillars of stone and metal – and placed them at the very heart of our towns and cities, so they might stop us daily in our tracks. We collected names, wrote these names in books, and carved them into walls in our anguished effort to save those we failed from the damnation of anonymity. And we pledged to gather in our communities each year at this hour on this singular day of Remembrance so that we might fall silent again…and again…and again.
Each year – on that day, at that hour – many thousands stand as one in silent tribute to them at our National War Memorial, a monument that King George VI called “the spontaneous response of the nation’s conscience, revealing the very soul of the nation.”
When I invite people to visit our memorial, I urge them to look upward and against the sky see the bronze figures of Peace and Freedom. Their arms are linked. They cannot be separated. Because freedom without peace is agony, and peace without freedom is slavery, and we will tolerate neither. This is the truth we owe our dead.
Then I urge them to look down, to your own resting place. We don’t know your name. You are our unknown soldier. In anonymity, you honour all Canadians who died and may yet die for their country. Sadly, Nathan Cirillo and Patrice Vincent are now among them. We stand on guard for you and for them.
We are people of peace. Of respect and tolerance, kindness and honour. These qualities are alive in our national conscience precisely because we hold them as precious. We have the luxury to do so because those we remember believed those qualities to be precious enough to die for. That is why we will keep those men and women in our memory for all time. “Without memory,” said Rabbi Dow Marmur, “there can be neither continuity nor identity.”
We have had sombre occasion to ponder our identity as this very symbol of our peace and freedom was mocked and violated on an October day not long ago. Yet here at your side we continue to stand, and here we shall remain: unshaken in resolve; grateful in remembrance of those who have sacrificed; dedicated, like the memorial, to our eternal duty: peace and freedom – the very soul of our nation.
In gratitude,
David
The Canadian Tomb of the Unknown Soldier lies in the shadow of the National War Memorial in Confederation Square, Ottawa. The tomb holds the remains of an unidentified Canadian soldier who fell near Vimy Ridge, the site of a fierce battle in France in 1917 that still holds deep symbolic value for Canadians. Corporal Nathan Frank Cirillo was a twenty-four-year-old reservist with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada who, while standing sentry over the tomb on October 22, 2014, was wounded by a gunman and subsequently died. Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent had been killed two days earlier when an assailant deliberately drove his vehicle into Vincent and another member of the Canadian Armed Forces as a premeditated act of terrorism.