All quiet at the cenotaph today, but we still remember

The lone piper at his post skirling a proud but mournful ode to the dead is one of the most powerful images of Remembrance Day.

There won’t be a piper at the Peterborough Cenotaph today. The statues of winged Valour stretching out her arm to vanquish Barbarism won’t be ringed by crowds honouring the dead of too many wars.

The year of COVID is different than any we can remember.

Changes forced by efforts to contain the pandemic have altered all public ceremonies, Remembrance Day included.

There will be no two minutes of silence among a crowd at Confederation Park and the cenotaph, a crowd that had seen veterans complete their annual march through downtown streets and gather in the park.

Today was expected to be an unusually fair November day, warm and mainly sunny. The crowd would have been larger than some years, but the turnout is always strong.

Cool and blustery weather has not kept people from recognizing the sacrifices armed men and women made for this country.

The pandemic won’t blunt that shared obligation either, nor the readiness to acknowledge it. We are certain the moment of silence will be honoured across the city at offices that are still working, schools that are dealing with the complications of functioning around social distancing requirements and in the privacy of homes that have become workplaces, classrooms and sanctuaries.

It is tempting to equate the pandemic with a war, but that is not the case.

There have been great costs from the onset of the coronavirus. To date more than 10,000 Canadians have died. Many more are or were gravely ill.

War images are most often used to describe those who are actively dealing with the results of the pandemic — health care staff in particular, but everyone who has been working to provide services, teachers, retail clerks, truck drivers and more are said to be on the front lines.

As valuable as their service is, this is not wartime. The costs are great and sometimes deadly but not what Canada and the world faced in war, particularly the First and Second World Wars.

The closest parallel between those days and these is that we wish never to seem them repeated.

The point is often made during Remembrance Day services that they honour the dead and their great sacrifice, but not the wars that made those sacrifices necessary.

Agnes MacPhail, Canada’s first female member of Parliament, a pioneer in the fight for social justice and a staunch pacifist, lived through both world wars and had her own compelling definition of service to the nation.

“Patriotism is not dying for one’s country, it is living for one’s country. And for humanity. This is not as romantic, but it is better.”

Any notion of the romance of war is largely discredited by now, which is a sign of progress.

But the sacrifices of war must be remembered and honoured.

As it is in these words, which won’t be heard at the cenotaph this year:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn; At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, We will remember them.