“We cannot but feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest.”
– Sigmund Freud, 1915.

When Freud wrote the above lines he was grappling with what was then considered humanity’s most catastrophic and violent achievement. By his estimate, the outbreak of World War I in Europe was more than an historical crisis describable in the rational language of cause and effect; the Great War was not simply the inevitable result of a breakdown in the peaceful political process.

Rather, Freud’s frank and dark discussion of war’s horror sought evidence of an even more fundamental human failing: the violent triumph of the most primal aggressions, which tore a hole in civilization itself.

While Freud died of cancer three weeks into the Second World War, one can only imagine what he would have written had he witnessed the repetition of such events on an even grander, and more horrific scale.

Even closer to home, we might pause and ask ourselves how the eight living Canadian veterans of the First World War continue to come to terms with their living memory of nearly a century of wars. Have they not heard the world utter the talismanic phrase “Lest We forget”­­­-year after year, generation after generation? Have they not been made to witness the material breech of this verbal compact with the past? Have they not watched the roster naming the dead grow?

Today, on November 11 2004, 86 years after the Armstice of 1918, it is the collected failings of civilization that we must ultimately remember. This year marks the 85th anniversary of Remembrance Day in Canada. In 85 years it has been made to accrue the atrocities of the Second World War, as well as those of Korea, so that all told the human cost of this century is incommensurate to the names we give to each conflict. It is a cost, moreover, which exceeds our existing framework of a national, or even Allied day of remembrance.

Between the inscriptions numbering those Canadians who gave their life in service; within the painful and familiar silence that marks a veteran’s speech as s/he recounts the experience of war: it is here, in what is not freely told or shown, that one detects a human continuity from one war to the next.

It is here that one begins to sense that remembering names alone is not enough.