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Reprinted here is a
remarkable tribute written by Irishman Kevin Myers about Canada's record of quiet valour in
wartime. This article appeared in the April 21, 2002 edition
of the Sunday Telegraph, one of Britain's largest circulation newspapers and in Canada's National Post
on April 26, 2002.
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A Salute to a Brave and Modest Nation
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LONDON - Until the deaths last week of four Canadian
soldiers accidentally killed by a U.S. warplane in
Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country
had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the
region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as
the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice,
just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.
It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the
selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers,
and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly
ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the
edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for
a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue
her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when
the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada,
the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously
cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.
That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North
American continent with the United States, and for being a
selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much
of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different
directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had
an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured
that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.
Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of
freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any
democracy. Almost 10% of Canada's entire population of seven
million people served in the armed forces during the First
World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories
of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most
capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.
Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright
neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed
into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the
"British." The Second World War provided a re-run.
The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and
ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat
attack.
More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the
Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went
ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the
third-largest navy and the fourth-largest air force in the
world.
The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference
as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war
was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an
American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States
had clearly not participated -- a touching scrupulousness
which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any
notion of a separate Canadian identity.
So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving
in Hollywood keep their nationality -- unless, that is, they
are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald
Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison,
David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular
perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British.
It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian
ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is
as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom
Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.
Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the
achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the
world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say
of themselves -- and are unheard by anyone else -- that 1% of
the world's population has provided 10% of the world's
peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half
century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth -- in 39
missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping
duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.
Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the
popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in
Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two
Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in
disgrace -- a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for
which, naturally, the Canadians received no international
credit.
So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and
selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in
Afghanistan?
Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does
honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being
thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun.
It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be
proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost.
This week, four more grieving Canadian families knew that
cost all too tragically well.
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Kevin Myers is an Irish
journalist and commentator, who currently writes for the Irish
Independent. He is a former contributor to The
Irish Times newspaper, where he wrote the An Irishman's
Diary column several times weekly. Until 2005,
he also wrote for the Sunday
Telegraph in the UK.
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