Lest We Forget is a popular phrase that we trot out every Remembrance Day, but have we lost sight of its true meaning? Doubtless many of you, dear readers, will argue that Lest We Forget compels us to remember those brave soldiers who died “so that we may be free”.  It was the argument Don Cherry made last year that resulted in his removal from Hockey Night in Canada when he chastised immigrants for not wearing poppies. “You people that come here… you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that… These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada, these guys paid the biggest price.”

Many people agreed with Cherry, repeating the traditional phrase, Lest We Forget, insisting we remember the soldiers who died so that we may be free.  But is this true? Is this the thing which we are not supposed to forget? Perhaps there are other lessons from war that we should be urged not to forget.

The symbol of the poppy comes to us from World War One. Many soldiers indeed paid the biggest price during WWI, but for what? To say that WWI was about “our freedom” goes contrary to what many soldiers involved in the war themselves had to say about it. Unlike World War Two, in which we have our triumph over the tyranny of Hitler to cling to, WWI was a war of Imperial ambitions, which in its day, faced formidable opposition in the form of anti-war activism, especially led by socialist organizers.

During WWI, in nearby Trail BC, labour activist, coal miner and ‘smelter man’ Albert “Ginger” Goodwin, was a loud anti-war voice in the East Kootenay. It was a time of conscription and Goodwin was originally found to be unfit for service in the war due to black lung. However he was magically reclassified as “fit for duty” after leading a strike in 1917 in Trail, in an attempt to obtain an 8 hour workday for smelter tradesmen. Goodwin appealed his reclassification and was vocally opposed to the idea that any man should fight in WWI, saying “War is simply part of the process of Capitalism. Big financial interests are playing the game. They’ll reap the victory, no matter how the war ends.” Goodwin was later found in Cumberland BC dead from a gunshot wound, the circumstances of his death still surrounded by controversy.

Those who saw service at the front lines also despised the war and challenged the propaganda which had brought them there in the first place. An anonymous German soldier who deserted the German army during the first year of the war and smuggled himself aboard a ship to America, later printed his diary in a German-American newspaper. This work, A German Deserter’s War Experience is available online, and it describes not only the horrors of war, but the anger of the common man turned soldier at the ruling class who valued his life so little. The author shares a rallying cry made by one of his comrades at the front: “When you get home again do not forget what this capitalist massacre has taught you. Those prisoners are proletarians, are our brethren, and what we are doing here in the interest of that gang of capitalist crooks is a crime against our own body; it is murdering our own brothers!” 

The German soldiers were not the only ones who protested the authority of their ruling class masters. More than one million French soldiers had been killed in fighting by early 1917, out of a population of twenty million French males of all ages. These horrific losses and repeated “suicide attacks” led to a kind of mutiny on the front lines in France, with soldiers rejecting orders to attack. These actions, which affected 43% of the infantry divisions in the French army were all but unknown to the public until 1967, with further records only being released in 2017. Many historians have argued that these mutinies can be studied as labour strikes.

It is a painful irony how readily people repeat the phrase Lest We Forget when most seem to have completely forgotten what exactly WWI especially, was fought over. The ruling classes of Britain, France and Germany were not concerned with the freedom of the working class peoples of their nations, they sought only to enrich themselves while using young men as cannon fodder.

This year I hope we can remember the work of anti-war activists who tirelessly oppose all wars, lest we forget that war is hell, lest we forget that someone is always making money in a war, lest we forget the words of the anonymous German soldier:

“I daresay, of every one of us, we discovered that very little was left of the overflowing enthusiasm and patriotism that had seized so many during the first days of the war. Most of the soldiers made no attempt to conceal the feeling that we poor devils had absolutely nothing to gain in this war, that we had only to lose our lives.”

A couple years ago I started a podcast reading “A German Deserter’s War Experience” which I unfortunately was unable to keep up with, but you can check out the first two episodes here