Remembrance Day has become very personal this year, not just because of the mad and tragic murders of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, but also because in the small suburb of Montreal I live in, Montreal West, we have built our own avenue of heroes.
It’s the result of an inspired suggestion from a local doctor and builds on what the even more inspired New Brunswick town of St. George did last year.
This November, almost every lamppost and telephone pole along our main drag, Westminster Avenue, bears a placard with a photo and personal details of a young local man who died in the Second World War. There are 33 of them. There could have been 50. That’s the number of names on our town cenotaph for 1939-45, an awful toll for a place whose wartime population was less than 3,500. But our town historian has not yet found them all.
The photos are in black-and-white and show each man in his uniform. The personal details are basic: the branch of service they were in; the local school they attended or a word about where in town they worked; and, most eloquently of all, their dates of birth and death. Most were 19 or 20 or 21 years old, about the same age as my own two sons, for whom I wish and pray long, full lives, as these boys’ parents did, too.
Some of the placards include the man’s local address and when it does, and homeowners were willing, a placard also stands in the front yard of the house where the young man grew up. We’re one of Montreal’s oldest suburbs and many of the houses date from the First World War and just after.
The effect of seeing a young serviceman’s image returned to his childhood home is very powerful.
Across the street from us is a small park, about a hundred yards square, and on the other side of the park is the home of Francis Bernard Croke, who was a flight sergeant in the Royal Canadian Air Force. His picture shows him smiling and relaxed in uniform, standing in front of a mono-prop plane whose type I’m afraid I don’t know. (Where was the picture taken? Was it his plane? Was he in training or already posted at his base? What was his assignment? Was he shot down in this or a similar plane? How did he die?)
Croke’s dates are 1919 to 1942. A Google search reveals he was lost Aug. 22, 1942. His name is on a panel at the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey, England, along with those of 20,000 other airmen who were also lost over Europe and have no known graves. You can only imagine the grief and sadness in his home in the months and years following.
It is an eerie feeling to think that as a young lad Francis Bernard (or did he go by “Frank” or “Bernie”?) played in the park just across the street, the park we look out on from the front porch of a summer evening to watch children play, the park in which, year-round, I walk the dog before bed. Now as I walk, I wonder if Master Croke had a dog? What breed? What name? He must have had a bike. Did he play baseball or football in the field where now stands the aging Legion Rink, built after the war to honour those who died?
There’s a cement wading pool just across from us. We know from photographs it existed in the 1920s and ’30s. It’s now a spray pool, wading having been deemed unsafe by the playground police. But between the wars, kids must have played in it, splashing each other after school let out. The local elementary school, just off the corner of the park, opened in 1921, so it would have been almost brand new when young Francis Bernard went there.
We all understand in our minds that those who sacrificed for us were flesh-and-blood human beings. But this year in our town, we understand it in our guts.
These young men, gone 70 years now, will walk among us as long as we have memory.
William Watson teaches economics at McGill University in Montreal.
