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It is Remembrance Day this week, an important day I think. An occasion to remember and honour Canadians who have served in our armed forces in the past. An occasion to honour and think about those serving today. And an occasion to consider our own responsibilities towards those soldiers.

In our family, remembering and honouring Canadians who served starts with this man:

His name was John Reilly, my great-grandfather.

On October 9, 1915 he filled out his attestation papers. He reported that he was married (to Annie Reilly, my great-grandmother), lived in Granby, Quebec, and worked as a "tobacco worker." He was in fact a master craftsman, specializing in the now almost-lost art of preparing plug tobacco. The attestation papers fail to note that he was also the father of three children, and was the sole breadwinner in their household. He was born on May 9, 1875, and so was signing up to be an infantryman at age 40. A Canadian Army doctor who should have known better, and who signed his name illegibly on the form, certified him as fit for the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force.

He enlisted with the 73rd battalion Royal Highlanders of Canada, the Montreal Black Watch. He is wearing their uniform in that photo, including the famous Black Watch cap badge with its latin slogan Nemo me impune lacesset ("No-one attacks me with impunity", perhaps better translated as "mess with me at your peril"). His cap, badge and epaulettes have passed down in our family. I showed them to members of our local cub pack on Remembrance Day for a number of years.

He might have been responding to posters like this:

The Montreal Black Watch had a hard time of it in World War I. The regimental web page notes that during that conflict "11,954 officers and enlisted men fought in the three battalions of the Canadian Regiment, winning twenty-six battle honours. Of those who served, 2,163 were killed, 6,014 were wounded and 821 were decorated. Six of the decorated members were awarded the Victoria Cross." That is a 68 per cent casualty rate.

Not surprising, considering the unit's First World War battle honours, which include Ypres (1915 and 1917), Vimy (1917), Gravenstafel, Arleux, St. Julien, Scarpe (1917 and 1918), Festubert (1915), Hill 70, Mount Sorrel, Passchendaele, the Somme (1916), Amiens, Pozieres, Drocourt-Queant, Flers-Courcelette, the Hindenberg Line, Thiepval, Canal du Nord, Ancre Heights, Pursuit to Mons, Ancre (1916), and Arras (1917, 1918). In other words, most of the significant sanguinary nightmares fought on the western front by British forces.

John Reilly never said a word about his experiences in World War One, a silence that was respected in our family. I came to understand him a little better after filing an application to see his service record, which you can do for any relative who served in that war by application to the National Archives of Canada (you can find out how here).

There is a lot of interesting information in that file. For example, Annie Reilly received a $20 payment once a month between November, 1915, and March of 1917 to help her and her children during the absence of her husband, each cheque meticulously noted in a different hand on a tally sheet. And then on April 1, 1917, these payments were halted. There is also a hard-to-follow sheet calculating the family's "war service gratuity." The bottom line seems to be a final additional cheque for $119.

He was, the file revealed, discharged on August 14, 1917, for "medical unfitness due to neurasthenia." Neurasthenia was a common diagnosis in World War One. It has other names, like "shell shock."

There is a great deal of other detail in the file, but the bottom line is that he reported a crippling, growing list of symptoms (heart palpitations, trembling, dizziness) that forced him to fall out of route marches. In a series of reports from various medical boards, it is clear that it gradually dawned on the investigating medical personnel that they were dealing with an under-sized, over-aged father of three who had no business being in the infantry. And so the boards gradually and surreptitiously inflated his age on their reports (he is eventually reported as being 47 years old), and in due course they eased him onto a ship and back home.

He enlisted bravely in a unit that saw some of the toughest fighting on the western front. He had been running a one-chance-in-five of being killed and about a three-chances-in-five of being wounded -- long odds for a family man. He, his wife and his children were lucky his medical boards took pity on him and on them.

On Remembrance Day I also think about this man:

You can also see him here, third from the left, and here.

His name was Oscar Lamère, my grandfather. A native and resident of Quebec City, he was a captain in the Régiment de Lévis, apparently in the artillery. I say "apparently" because he too was not a big talker about his experiences in his war, and it is a little trickier to get your hands on service files from the Second World War (the details are here). However, my Remembrance Day vow this year is to start jumping through the prescribed hoops and in due course to take a look.

I associate the Second World War with the smell of mothballs, since my grandfather kept his helmet and his uniforms in his basement in an army trunk with a few of them thrown in. He let us play with the helmet, but we were not to touch his officer's uniform. Alas, little of his beloved equipment and uniform seems to have survived, but we have most of the brass badges in that first photo. Last year's Remembrance Day project was to give them a good shine, judging by the results for the first time in some 63 years.

If your family was in Canada with men and women of about the right age (or the wrong age, in cases like my great-grandfather), you probably have a relative who was in the Canadian Forces in wartime. In addition to remembering the service of my great-grandfather and grandfather this week, I'm writing this to report that the Government of Canada is gradually making it easier to learn about what they lived through.

Remembrance Day is a good time to vow to find out about their service -- and to keep that vow.

Last week I stood next to a group of firemen, police and soldiers standing at attention in downtown Toronto. They and many of we ordinary folk respectfully watched a parade of motorcycle police and limousines bear this man to his final resting place:

His name is Sapper Steven Marshall, and the circumstances of his death are reported here.

A Globe reader who identified himself as Jason Roy from Central Nova appended the following poem to that news report:

---

If you are able,

save them a place

inside of you

and save one backward glance

when you are leaving

for the places they can

no longer go.

Be not ashamed to say

you loved them,

though you may

or may not have always.

Take what they have left

and what they have taught you

with their dying

and keep it with your own.

And in that time

when men decide and feel safe

to call the war insane,

take one moment to embrace

those gentle heroes

you left behind.

Major Michael Davis O'Donnell

1 January 1970, Dak To, South Vietnam

Missing in action March 24, 1970 [Laos]

---

Here is a picture of Major O'Donnell:

You can read a bit more about him here.

His is a moving poem, in the tradition of John Alexander McCrae's Flander's Fields, familiar to every schoolchild where we live. But whereas McCrae's poem is certain about the justice of the cause he died in, O'Donnell, fighting in Vietnam, acknowledges that many back home "call the war insane." He urges them to look beyond the madness of that war and to remember the "gentle heroes" who fell in it.

We are, alas, in similar circumstances today. We are called on this week to look beyond another war many call insane, and to remember more gentle heroes.

After we have remembered them and honoured them and their families, we are then called on to consider what our duty is to their comrades still fighting.