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
-Laurence Binyon
Remembrance Day to me, like many others, is a fairly solemn occasion. I always try to observe the moment of silence at 11:00 am, even if I am not at a cenotaph or ceremony. I never served, myself, but was a Royal Canadian Army Cadet for 5 years and have always had an interest in history, especially the military parts. My mom was in the RCN in the '60s (she was actually in uniform the day Kennedy was shot, and said it was one of the scariest days of her life, as no one knew what was going to happen), and my maternal grandfather served as a free Belgian in WW2, in the Belgian SAS battalion. I think of Grandpa a lot at this time of year, in part because of Remembrance Day, but also because his birth and death were in early December.
Grandpa and his brother, my great uncle Karel both left the farm close to Unity, Saskatchewan to sign up. I don't know a lot about it: Grandpa never liked to talk much about it, so most of what I know came from my mother. I don't know why they joined the Belgians as opposed to the Canadians and I probably never will as both men and their wives have been deceased for years. Grandpa developed some pretty strong opinions while in the service, this I DO know: he tended to dislike the Americans, thinking the Battle of the Bulge happened because "they were drunk, celebrating Christmas and Germans caught them with their pants down". He also gained a very pronouced dislike of the French, both European and Canadian versions, in large part because of their overall stubborness in clinging to the French language in operations, even most of the countries they were working with were predominantly English speaking (Grandpa was also Flemish Belgian, and their... disagreements with the French in Belgium go back centuries). Mom said Grandpa was offered a staff post if he wanted to stay in the military after the war, but he had "had enough of the g******ed French bulls***" and went to meet his Scottish war-bride and their infant daughter in Saskatchewan. A lot of this seems at odds with the soft spoken man, I knew and loved but I also heard some of the comments, like his opinion of parachutists from the Canadian Airborne Regiment dropping on the field at Commonwealth Stadium at the pregame or halftime of an Eskimo game ("stupid bloody thing to do, jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. We only did it because we had to!").
I never even knew the Belgian battalion of the SAS existed until a few years ago, when a historian made contact with some of Mom's cousins. looking for any old information/stories/memorabilia Grandpa or Uncle Karel might have left with us. Mom always said he was a "free Belgian paratrooper". I had heard of the SAS of course, initially in my cadet days, and more as the years went by and I read more, news and historical accounts, and was impressed that my grandfather had served in such a prestigious unit. I can't say that I was more impressed, because I had known for years that he was some type of airborne soldier.
Mom related some of the little Grandpa had told her and her brothers about the war mostly along the lines of: dropping into France and hiding beside a road while "half the German army rolled by, too scared too move to go to the bathroom". Mom also told my sister and I of one night when Grandpa and his brothers got into the vodka, and Uncle Karel and Grandpa talked in quiet voices of what they had seen when they had been present at one of the camps being liberated. Mom was never positive which one (she thought possibly Belsen Bergen but that was liberated by the Americans according to the records), and she said Grandpa never talked about it again, at least where his family heard.
The only other thing Mom said, was something I've heard from other veterans: Grandpa and Uncle Karel never thought of themselves as heroes, no matter what others said. To them, they only did what they had to do: the heroes never came home. I think of this a lot whenever discussions of military missions come up, and I am thankful, especially on Remembrance Day, that Grandpa and Uncle Karel did come home, even if Grandpa's life was still too short by my reckoning (he died on his 65th birthday, December 3, 1981).
