We will remember them, but who are "we"?

LONDON -- Harry Patch, Britain's last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation.

Patch, who died Saturday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as "mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood."

Mr Patch was the last fighting soldier of any nation in that conflict, and with his passing the Great War (WW1) will soon pass almost into myth.

I was asked last Remembrance Day to give a speech as a veteran to a local high school. I accepted rather reluctantly, not because it's not worth doing (quite the opposite) but because I can't put my experiences in the same league as the men who fought in the World Wars. This being said, I was all they had so I stepped up.

A key point I tried to make to the kids was that the veterans of the mass-army wars of the 20th Century are nearly gone. That is pretty parochial I suppose, as there are lots of survivors of the Iran-Iraq war, loads of American soldiers who saw a lot of shit in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the wars for the soul of Western Civilization are the ones that really got our attention.

Time will tell if those of us who served in the GWoT in it's various guises will be accorded any sort of equivalence for what we were trying to do but I'm guessing not. There are several reasons for that.

First is that it's not the epic struggle that were the World Wars. Korea was on that scale, at least locally, and even that first successful example of the Cold War strategy of "containment" (remember Communism?) never caught the public the same way.

Second, and not really separate from the first, is the sense of sacrifice. Right now, Canada's Army is at war, but the country (and even the other branches of the CF) is not. There is no rationing, no conscription, no "We Want YOU" posters everywhere, and bluntly, not enough soldiers are dying. This is war reduced to personal, not national, tragedy and it directly effects hardly anyone.

Third, it's the lack of a sense in the public of an existential threat to our way of life. Part of that problem is that few people give much thought to what exactly is "our" way of life, and our Diversity agenda has a lot to do with that. Beer companies are about the only thing I can think of offhand that present a "Canadian" identity, but the "I am Canadian" spots etc. aren't the sort of thing that will draw the youth of the country to the colours to defend it. Osama Bin Laden is no Kaiser Bill (except that they're in all likelihood just as dead), and not a lot of people are concerned about the jackbooted tread of Islamic zealots stomping over our precious institutions.

What we have now is "The Long War", which will never be one to end all others. I don't know that Remembrance Day will mean much to most people in 20 years when the last of the WW2 vets has passed away. I guess that it'll be left to people like me, but I can't imagine the King, PM, etc. will make much of an address when the last of us passes away.

That's for the best, as it would mean that there was never again the mass slaughter of the WWs, but I hope that people won't completely forget those generations when they're no longer around to speak for themselves. They did a lot for us and suffered terribly for it.