"Remembrance Day is not about us — it’s about them"

I found these great drawings by Alex Colville here, on a website called Courage Remembered which is very much worth exploring.

And here is Leonard Cohen reading In Flanders Fields:

I remember reading something once about how you only really die when your descendants no longer remember your name.
In that sense, I guess most of Canada's World War One war dead really are gone now. The direct descendants of our World War Two veterans are old now too, like me. Our children do still remember that their paternal grandfather was a bomber pilot in the RCAF, and their maternal grandmother was a Navy petty officer, and their great aunt was a war nurse in Italy. But Canada's next generation will not remember their names.
So it goes.
At least we will always have November 11 to remember the millions of Canadians who served their country and the 118,000 Canadians who died in war in the last 140 years.

Here are some comments about Remembrance Day:

To mark Remembrance week for the first time a poppy flag was raised on Parliament Hill. This week we honour and express gratitude to all veterans. Today is Indigenous Veterans Day, a moment to reflect on the unique challenges and contributions of First Nations, Métis & Inuit veterans. #LestWeForget

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— Anita Vandenbeld (@anitavandenbeld.bsky.social) November 8, 2025 at 12:59 PM

What a story!

Now here’s a story… about a man whose aim was true — and whose legacy runs even deeper than his marksmanship. He was born on the shores of Georgian Bay, an Ojibwe boy named Binaaswi — the wind that blows off. That wind would one day carry his name across the battlefields of Europe.

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— 🇨🇦🍁True Canadian 🍁🇨🇦 (@canadian-capt.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 9:04 PM

When the Great War called, Francis Pegahmagabow answered. From the trenches of Ypres to the fields of Passchendaele, he moved like a shadow. Scout. Sniper. Saviour. He captured hundreds, saved countless comrades, and stood unshaken under fire.

— 🇨🇦🍁True Canadian 🍁🇨🇦 (@canadian-capt.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 9:04 PM

He came home with three decorations for bravery — the most of any Indigenous soldier in Canadian history. When the fighting ended, most men tried to forget the war. Francis couldn’t — not because of what he’d seen, but because of what he still saw at home.

— 🇨🇦🍁True Canadian 🍁🇨🇦 (@canadian-capt.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 9:04 PM

The country he fought for denied Indigenous veterans the land, benefits, and respect given to others. So he picked up a new weapon: His voice. He became Chief of the Wasauksing First Nation. He fought for treaty rights, for self-determination, for his people’s dignity.

— 🇨🇦🍁True Canadian 🍁🇨🇦 (@canadian-capt.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 9:04 PM

He spoke before governments that refused to hear him — and when they tried to silence him, he spoke louder. He reminded Canada that loyalty runs both ways. He never stopped serving, never stopped believing the country could do better — because it was his country too.

— 🇨🇦🍁True Canadian 🍁🇨🇦 (@canadian-capt.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 9:04 PM

He spoke before governments that refused to hear him — and when they tried to silence him, he spoke louder. He reminded Canada that loyalty runs both ways. He never stopped serving, never stopped believing the country could do better — because it was his country too.

— 🇨🇦🍁True Canadian 🍁🇨🇦 (@canadian-capt.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 9:04 PM

And there were other wars, too:

In Montreal today, I walked through Dorchester Square, enjoying its feast for lovers of historical monuments. Simply on aesthetic grounds, this is one of my favourites in all of Canada. Remarkably, it’s a monument to Canadian soldiers who fought and died in the Boer War, a conflict soon overshadowed by the First World War, then forgotten. But that fact underscores one reason why I love monuments like these: They speak to the time and place of the people who erected them. When the monument becomes anachronistic its value is not lost, it simply shifts from expressing the views of the surrounding community to expressing the history of those views.

- Dan Gardner

Read on Substack

Not forgotten:

Irvin Radatzke, a World War 2 veteran, was gonna be spending Remembrance Day alone in hospital, but when fellow veterans heard, they said hell no, not on our watch. They will also celebrate his upcoming 100th birthday. www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/ar...

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— Bon Hanson (@bonhanson.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 12:24 PM

Tomorrow is 11 Nov - Remembrance Day. I wear a poppy to honour all soldiers, but especially my great-grandfather John Austin Hadfield, and his younger brother Vic who was killed in the hell of Passchendaele, in Flanders Fields, where poppies grow. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Flan...

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— Chris Hadfield (@cmdr-hadfield.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 11:13 AM

In the Canadian war cemetery at Ravenna in Italy there are so many Canadian and Sikh graves. The Sikhs were side by side with the Canadians in the brutal battles through Italy. They have served with valour in our armed forces.

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— Charlie Angus (@charlieangus104.bsky.social) November 5, 2025 at 9:16 AM

Tonight is the night of lights at Field of Crosses, on Memorial Drive. "Lanterns are placed in front of the 3,620 crosses and burn from sunset until sunrise Remembrance Day." www.fieldofcrosses.com/event-details/ #Calgary #RemembranceDay #LestWeForget #Canada

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— cm 🇨🇦 (@cmcalgary.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 2:39 PM

A good comment from Black Cloud Six:

As Canada and the rest of the Commonwealth take a moment to remember the hundreds of thousands of soldiers lost in the conflicts we have participated in, I think it’s important to be reminded of something else. No matter what Veterans Affairs and the Royal Canadian Legion tell you, Remembrance Day is not for veterans, to honour veterans or to commemorate our service. It is for the fallen. It is a sombre day to reflect on the immense sacrifice made by Canadians who, almost universally, volunteered to serve on foreign battlefields and who never returned home. Canada created a Veterans’ Week — just before Remembrance Day — for vets to share their stories and as an adjunct to November 11. But now, “honouring veterans” has encroached on what should be a hallowed day for reflection. It doesn’t help that November 11th is Veterans Day in the United States, and that Canadians seem to have adopted American attitudes towards veterans in the wake of the September 11th attacks and our involvement in the war in Afghanistan. This holds that veterans are “heroes,” and that their service — any kind of service — should be “honoured.” Most veterans chafe at being called heroes, especially after Veterans Affairs dramatically expanded its definition of “veteran” to include those with very little service. It’s one thing to be given an entire week in recognition — with discounts and special licence plates aplenty — but it’s quite another to be called a hero and to co-opt a day that rightfully, and legally, belongs to the fallen. Remembrance Day is not about us — it’s about them.

- Black Cloud Six

Read on Substack

Finally, here is a piece that is very moving, but also chilling - this is, I think, what Black Cloud Six is talking about. 

It is a column about the statue of Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Matsievksyi, capturing the last 12 seconds of his life, as it stands on the grounds of the Kyiv Fortress. Matsievskyi was executed on camera by Russian soldiers in December 2022, and the video was posted on social media.

Melissa Martin / Winnipeg Free Press

Undaunted defiance amid raw remembrance
...At the edge of that complex, on a patch of unkempt grass just past a guarded gate, a soldier stands in a plastic box. He looks at you, but does not move. Does not breathe. There is no breath in him.
...In March 2023, a 12-second video surfaced on Telegram, evidently posted by Russian fighters. It shows a Ukrainian soldier, unarmed, standing in a shallow trench. His hands hang empty beside him; a cigarette dangles from his lips. He gazes at his captors a bit sidelong, over his right shoulder, without any hint of a flinch.
The Russian troops ask the man a question. He takes the cigarette in his fingers and exhales a waft of smoke.
“Slava Ukraini,” he says, “glory to Ukraine,” and then the Russian rifles chatter and he falls to the ground dead.
Behind the camera, one of his killers hisses at the corpse, in Russian: “Die, bitch.”
The casual cruelty of the execution, the pride apparent in making and sharing the video, juxtaposed with the man’s quietly defiant last words: these shattered Ukrainians’ hearts, made the then-unknown man a hero and, for just a brief window of time, grabbed global headlines and shocked the world....
The sculpture, created by artists Oleh Tsos and Albina Safronova and unveiled in late 2023 with Matsievskyi’s mother and wife in attendance, is uncanny. Made of silicone and plastic, designed with the aid of digital scans, it is not just lifelike but deeply unsettling in its realism; it captures him as he was in the last 12 seconds of his life, exactly.
The cigarette perched between his lips; the delicate blue threads of his veins; the war-weary folds of his face. His expression: exhausted, resigned to his fate, though not defeated. Even the ground under the sculpture’s feet isn’t the raggedy green grass of the Kyiv Fortress, but the leaf-strewn dirt of the forest where Matsievskyi was executed.
The verisimilitude is eerie. When you walk past the sculpture its eyes seem to follow you, gazing unblinking into your own. When I visited, I could not look at it — at him? — for long, discomfited by the sense of falling into a valley between life and not-life.
I could not shake the sense those eyes were telling me something.
...In the sculpture’s fidelity to life, the creators were offering not just a tribute to Matsievskyi’s quiet act of bravery but a much more challenging statement. The figure’s gaze, seized from the moment of a final breath and lifted out of the reach of death, demands that we see him not first as a hero, but simply as a man.
Just a man. An electrician from Nizhyn, near Kyiv, with tired eyes and a slightly bowed head. A man who could have lived — should have lived — an anonymous life in peace.
A man who was not, when he lived, any larger than life, but simply went to defend his country and died what, but for that video, would have been an unknown and invisible death.
His last words, he spoke only for himself. He could not have known the world would see them.
And through his frozen gaze, preserved precisely and forever, the viewer is required to see not only that humanity, but also to confront the circumstances that propelled it from average life to heroic legend. It’s a gaze that stands as a condemnation of a collective global failure to action: of lessons not learned, promises not kept, professed values not honoured.
...And on Tuesday, when Canada pauses to honour those who fought and perished in wars of the past, when we lay wreaths and adjust poppies and hear the cannon blasts, let us try to think of our fallen like this. Not only names, not only dignified photos and polished inscriptions.
They were just men, just women. Just people, their lives among millions of threads snipped by the grinding force of history and war, but still woven into the same tapestry as our own.
They did not go to their rest knowing what their sacrifice meant; they did not live to see how their chapter of history would end.
And if we could have seen their eyes in their last moments, what would those eyes have said?
We will never know for certain. But for the memory of those of the past, and for our hope in those who will come after, we must at least try to imagine.
There may never come a day when there are no wars to snip living threads. But lest we forget the dream that it will, let us remember those to whom it happened.

Lest we forget.