LET US REMEMBER EVERYONE
Fallen of the First World War are finally getting their due
You see the battlefield tours and the souvenirs and the army helmets made of chocolates being sold in stores. Part of what you experience is a very necessary and very good remembrance, and bravo to the Belgians for doing this — but on the other hand it is a revenue stream. R.H. Thomson
By the Ghost Light R.H. Thomson Knopf Canada
“He was one of the undiscovered dead.”
Award-winning Canadian actor R.H. Thomson is remembering a moment in the fields of Flanders, his emotions focused on a man he never knew — his great-uncle George who had died in this place a century before. His body was never found — like so many others who fought in the First World War and would never return home.
George was one of five great-uncles who enlisted. Two were killed in action. Of the three who survived, two ended the war with their lungs permanently damaged and would die before their time. These fallen warriors haunt the pages of Thomson's remarkable new book, By the Ghost Light, but they are more than wraithlike fragments from the past. They have a presence in these pages that is palpable.
In looking back on the carnage of the First World War and its aftermath, Thomson is conducting an exploration into how nations remember and honour their fallen war dead. His book carries a strong thread of personal memoir, at one point revisiting a childhood full of romantic notions about warfare and the excitement of playing with toy soldiers on the living room carpet. But childhood certainties and complacencies prove fragile in a volume that is also a journey of discovery, sometimes poignant and sometimes lacerating.
“The culture of war is very difficult to remember and therefore we have to talk about it,” Thomson tells Postmedia. He wants readers to understand that each of the fallen was an individual human being whose death could leave aftershocks for generations.
There's anger in these pages: for example, the wartime poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen will make painful intrusions, thorns suddenly sprouting from the soothing foliage of tradition and ritualized mourning. But Thomson can also be gentle in his indictment. On Nov. 11, the ceremonial aspect should not be all that matters — yet he understands the need for it.
“Remembrance Day is very honourable and it's utterly necessary. But it's basically set to a script that it was written in 1920.”
His own family history reflects that script but that's not enough, he's saying. Those who fought and died were not confined to good, old-fashioned Anglo- Saxon stock. “What about the Indo-canadians, the Chinese Canadians? Do they feel left out? Or maybe your family comes from the Punjab or Pakistan — 74,000 of those guys were killed in the First World War.”
By the Ghost Light is also a work of meditation. Millions of Canadians still have family links to the First World War, a point emphasized by Canadian historian Tim Cook who has hailed the book for its “searing exploration of how war haunts families, communities and countries.”
When he visited Flanders, the battleground where Great Uncle George died, Thomson says he felt a range of emotions. “It's haunting, it's very evocative.”
The reality of the many lives lost was undeniable, but so was the element of hucksterism that had crept into the processes of remembering the war dead. Thomson can be clear-eyed.
“You see the battlefield tours and the souvenirs and the army helmets made of chocolates being sold in stores. Part of what you experience is a very necessary and very good remembrance, and bravo to the Belgians for doing this — but on the other hand it is a revenue stream.”
But Thomson is drawn to a nation like Belgium because of the way it remembers its dead and because of its support for his ongoing “odyssey to find the names of the nine and a half million dead from the First World War.”
His great uncle, George Stratford, was one of the 68,000 names projected on a wall opposite the Flanders Field Museum, and that happened because of The World Remembers, an international project that has consumed Thomson's life in recent years. He has travelled to many places — London, Belgrade, Budapest to name a few — seeking fulfilment of its mandate — to give a name to each of the millions killed in the First World War. And he's now reached a count of more than four million.
“We have 23 countries involved now,” says Thomson who's now hoping to add Serbia, Bulgaria, Portugal and Greece to the list. “It can get very complicated — you always have to be aware of politics and history.”
And some countries, although anxious to oblige, simply have no complete records.
“Canada is lucky because we have the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, but other countries were not so mindful. Even the United States does not have a complete list of its (First) World War dead.”
In contrast, Belgium proved to be a shining beacon.
“The Belgians have said they will remember everyone killed on their soil — they don't draw a line between victors and vanquished.” Neither does Thomson.
In Toronto, his organization spent 28 nights projecting names of the fallen on an outdoor screen near the old city hall. One night a woman came up to thank him. “This is the first time I've ever felt included,” she said. Thomson asked why.
“I was born here, but my family came from Germany in 1947,” she replied. “So being German Canadians we just went quiet when Nov. 11 came around. But seeing the German names on that screen along with the Italians, the British, the Americans, the Australians, made me think that remembrance can be for everyone.”
For Thomson, now 76, this is what it's all about. More than 20 years ago he wrote a play, The Lost Boys: Letters From The Sons In Two Acts, 1914-1923. It was based on a treasure house of letters those five great-uncles had written home from the front. However that play was only the beginning. It would lead to The World Remembers and finally to a book about our relationship with the past and how we remember our war dead, framed within the life experience of one of Canada's greatest actors.
The book's title refers to a longlived theatrical tradition that sees a single lamp called the ghost light dimly illuminating the stage following a performance. It's there partly for safety reasons, partly because of superstition.
As an actor, Thomson sometimes will spend a few quiet minutes there at the end of an evening, knowing that an empty stage can be alive with echoes not just of what has just been performed but also of a distant past.
“Some theatres are living places, others are dead,” he says. “But many have a resonance that goes beyond the architecture.”
Thomson feels the same way about the 700 letters that his great-uncles sent home more than a century ago.
Although By the Ghost Light is wide-ranging in its exploration, those letters supply the essential spine. For that, he has to thank one of the book's great supporting characters, his great-aunt, Mayden Stratford, who devotedly preserved all these letters, meticulously filing them in five separate folders, one for each brother.
“I figure that if she had not done that, none of this might have happened,” Thomson says. “She became the story keeper of her generation.”
For Thomson, she represents a legacy that must be honoured and protected “before it can get away.”