City marks 100 years since Armistice Day
Bells of Peace ceremony followed Remembrance Day event at Grandview Park cenotaph
Soldiers from Canada’s most recent war gathered with other veterans to remember the signing, 100 years ago, of the Armistice that ended the First World War on Sunday for the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Grandview Park cenotaph on Commercial Drive.
“The First World War was called the Great War for a reason,” master of ceremonies Gerry Vowles said. “The horrors of that conflict had never been seen before.
“With the war finally over, it was hoped a war of that scale would not be seen again.”
It was a beautiful late-autumn morning, the downtown Vancouver skyline spread out to the northwest, brunchers enjoying the sunshine on the sidewalk at Fets and Havana across the street, perhaps 300 people crowded around the moving November 11 ceremony hosted by the Grandview-Collingwood Legion.
“I signed up because my family served,” 28-year-old Afghanistan veteran Kreed Jandrew said. “My grandfather, my uncle served, my brother is currently serving.”
Growing up in Waywayseecappo First Nation outside of Russell, Man., Jandrew could not have imagined a more foreign world than Kandahar, where he was a combat instructor, or later in Haiti, where he worked in body recovery.
“I lost a few friends in Kandahar,” he said. “And Haiti was hard, too.”
As people gathered at the ceremony, Charles Davey was selling poppies.
A member of the since-disbanded Canadian Airborne Regiment, he wore with pride a patch of the Métis flag, a Royal Canadian Regiment badge and, on a black-cloth background of mourning, a badge for the Airborne, controversially disbanded in 1995.
“This is a day of remembrance to honour all the people who made the sacrifice on the front lines, the guys in the trenches, the people in back,” the 65-year-old veteran of Cyprus, Germany and the Middle East said. “This day is to remember everyone who had a brother or sister, mother or father in service overseas, and everyone serving today.”
Father Expeditor Farinas of the Church of Mary the Virgin in East Vancouver’s Sunset neighbourhood delivered a sermon from Micah, in which he prophesied swords would be beat into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
“We must remind ourselves of the horror of war and heal the cycle of violence our planet is caught up in,” the Anglican priest said.
The First World War claimed almost 66,000 Canadian lives and 172,000 Canadians were wounded, 3,461 of whom had a limb amputated.
“Many more returned home broken in mind and body,” Legionnaire Vowles, a member of the Royal Canadian Navy for 30 years, said. “No reliable method existed for tracking or treating psychological casualties, but authorities identified over 9,000 Canadians as suffering from shell shock, or as we call it now PTSD.”
At 1 p.m., a Bells of Peace ceremony was held at the Grandview-Collingwood Legion, as it was in communities across Canada, emulating the pealing bells that rang joyously from church towers 100 years ago to celebrate the end of the war to end all wars.