Young Canadian carries torch of Remembrance

Isabelle Ava-Pointon, 2015 Beaverbrook Vimy prize winner, scans the names of 580,000 men who died in northern France during the First Word war. The alphabetically engraved names reside on the Ring of Remembrance – Notre Dame de Lorette.

November 11th is coming. Once again we feel mildly uncomfortable at the thought of having to stand in silence and think of unpleasant things.

We are in the midst of the centenary of the First World War, and there are no living veterans of that conflict.

Now, more than ever, it is our duty to keep the flame of remembrance burning.

That word, remembrance, is often heard this time of year. But why commemorate events that happened a century ago? Why must we honour lives that were cut short 100 years past?

Some answers are easily apparent. Remembering the horrors of war will ensure that we do everything in our power to avoid armed conflict. Yet some reasons are not so evident, and thus for young people like myself, it can be hard to understand the importance of this day.

Before I participated in the Beaverbrook Vimy Prize, I knew it was important to remember the World Wars, but I was not entirely sure why. A fortnight in Europe changed all that.

There is another reason for remembrance equally as important as ensuring future peace, but much harder to grasp: it is our duty to remember and honour the lives of the tens of thousands who gave their all for their country. The suffering that these men and women had to endure is beyond the scope of most of our imaginations.

This summer I walked across the battlefields of Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. I ran across No Man’s Land on the Somme. I waded in the sea and marched through the sands of Juno beach. I crawled through muddy trenches and descended into souterrains. I studied military strategy and battle tactics. Still, I will never understand what the soldiers of the Great War went through.

But there is one thing I now understand.

It began with a visit to Essex Farm Cemetery, Belgium, located right beside the field dressing station where John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields. It was a beautiful, peaceful plot of land, surrounded by farmers’ fields. There were trees, shrubs, flowers, and 1,200 white headstones. We walked among them, reading names, ages, regiments, dates of death and epitaphs. It was silent, apart from the quiet murmurings of my friends as they addressed the dead.

From that moment on I understood. A number in a book is one thing, we can read there were 66,000 Canadian fatalities in the First World War, and not be able to truly comprehend. But it is much easier to imagine 66,000 men when standing in Tyne Cot Cemetery, looking over 12,000 graves. Each gleaming stone was once a man with a mother, a father, brothers, sisters, a sweetheart, and comrades. All the love of a family, of friends and neighbours was poured into this man, and one bullet or shell in France ended it all.

These soldiers fought for the peace we now enjoy, for the freedom of peoples across the globe. They fought for friends and for family and for home. And some never returned home.

We owe them this much at least: to remember them. In songs, in poems, in paintings and monuments. In tears at a graveside, in silence on this day. Remember their names and their deeds and their love.

As is written on countless of those white stones in France: “Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friends”.

Isabelle Ava-Pointon travelled to Europe in August 2015 as a winner of the Vimy Foundation’s Beaverbrook Vimy Prize. This scholarship program gives youth the opportunity to study the interwoven history of Canada, France, and Great Britain during the First and Second World War.

The Vimy Foundation is a Canadian charity that works to preserve and promote Canada’s First World War legacy as symbolized with the victory at Vimy Ridge in April 1917, a milestone where Canada came of age and was then recognized on the world stage.

Isabelle Ava-Pointon, Vimy Prize Winner