ARMISTICE DAY

By

META SCHOOLEY LAWS

             Two minutes silence pervades the whole civilized world this morning; two minutes cessation of the busy whirl of life-for contemplation –of what? Of the greatest boon for which the weary world may hope-Peace-greatest? Yes, for peace is a love in activity.

             How seldom has peace reigned over all the earth. Perhaps never, since, to hear the Angel’s song:

Unwilling kings obeyed, and sheathed the battle blade,

And called their bloody legions from the field.

In silent awe they wait, and close the warrior’s gate.

Nor know to Whom, their homage thus they yield.

Even today, the clash of arms breaks the silence that we feign would maintain.

Peace-what is it?

             Is it simply a negative quantity? Does it merely mean cessation from war? Is it because we hold that to be the meaning of the word that we celebrate today as Armistice Day rather than Peace Day?

             Because an armistice is only a cessation of hostilities, and often agreed upon and maintained in order that opposing forces may prepare for more vigorous onslaught.

             Is that all the meaning of the day? God forbid.

             Yet, all we dare hope for is to prolong the armistice from day to day, from year to year-while the nations learn that peace is as virile, as powerful as is war. That with the same ardor that we, calling ourselves followers of the Prince of Peace, bend our energies toward the preparation for war and its prosecution.

             The Great War whose toll of life and property was so enormous that we continue year after year to celebrate its close, opened the eyes of the world, nor only to the horror but to the futility, in large measure, of all the heroism and sacrifice and sorrow.

             It was fought as “a war to end wars,” yet the combined force of the League of Nations has, again and again, been strained to the utmost to prevent another cataclysm-and has been thus far powerless to prevent war.

             Yet the increasing influence which that great league possesses, gives to us a brighter ray of hope as we celebrate today.

             But of Peace, for which we all yearn, is to be realized there must be direct effort made to attain it.

             As a nation, we must educate ourselves in the pursuit of peace.

             Suppose that, with the same singleness of purpose, governments should direct the wealth of the nations and the energies of their people, for even one year to developing the arts of peace, as was expended in those awful years, 1914-1918-what benefits would accrue. How poverty and distress would disappear before the progress of Peace and her train!

             But alas! Every nerve is strained in the effort to rebuild war’s devastation, and the Arts of Peace, the industrial life of the world lies crippled under the feet of the God of War-the insatiable pitiless god to whom we have sacrificed our best.

             But from the hearths of the desolated homes, dearer and more defined is rising the demand that wars shall cease.

             More and more forcefully and logically the men and women are working for Peace.

             They are discovering that a peaceful attitude of mind on the part of the nation has not been cultivated, for the people are the nation: the boys and girls of today, the citizens of tomorrow.

             Our histories pass over with a paragraph or two at best, the great legislators, philanthropists, inventors, and all their ilk, and devote page after page to the great military heroes of the nation.     

             What has made Britain great? War or commerce? Does the Anglo-Saxon race occupy the van of civilization because of prowess in war, or because of its great scientific discoveries, revolutionizing as it has the industrial life of the world.

             Do the textbooks of Ontario sufficiently emphasize the social and industrial leaders and their work?

             Did the War of 1812-15, a war whose supposed cause has really never been settled-did that war play the prominent part in building this country that the relative number of chapters devoted to it, in comparison with all other happenings in our history, would indicate?

             The battlefield of Ridgeway is marked that future Canadians may know of the sacrifice made there, and it is well.

             Is the site of the first pioneer home in Bertie Township so marked? And yet, who shall measure the heroism, the sacrifice which not for a day, but for a life time, those men and women, the builders of the country, yes, of the nation, endured.

             So, on this Armistice Day let us, while we give to those who sacrificed so much during the war, the close of which we celebrate, all the honor due them. But if our thoughts are led more and more exclusively to the pursuit of the peace for which they struggled, their sacrifice may not have been made vainly.

             “If ye break faith with us who die,

             We shall not sleep,

             Though poppies blow

             In Flander’s Field.”

The Welland Tribune and Telegraph

11 November 1926