To the editor:
A former soldier read, and liked, a poem for peace I’d sent to a veterans’ organization working hard for peace.
He phoned me, and with time, we became good friends. He’d often invite my wife and me to visit him and he liked nothing better than if he could tell us about events of the war he’d been in.
At Christmas, he and I went to a veterans’ hospital in Manitoba to visit and hand out Christmas goodies.
I know war, no matter how adventurous and how right it may seem to one side or the other, or to both, is horrible, brutish and fiendish.
One day I told my soldier friend, Joe (not his real name), “you didn’t have to join the military.”
He said, “I had to.”
I said, “No, you didn’t have to. You could have taken prison or even death.”
Then he said, “The honour.”
I knew very well what he meant. His country was at war, and as soon as he joined up, he was a regular guy doing his duty. His parents, church, friends, young ladies, children, and all looked up to him and admired him.
Besides, young men fear being called cowards more than they fear the enemy and especially so when they’re still far from the front with all of its agony, gore, and death. So, even though, as he told me, he had always been against the war, off to war he went. He was one of the fortunate ones – he survived.
By the way, my friend, “Joe,” had fought in Hitler’s army, the Wehrmacht.
“Joe” was a regular guy; he fully thought he was just doing his duty; our boys were regular guys, too.
Instead of killing one another in war, we should listen to the voice of Nicholas Peters, a soldier buried in an Allied graveyard in Germany, pleading with us to go a different way. Here is what appears on his tombstone:
SHOW US YOUR LIGHT, O GOD,
THAT WE MAY FIGHT
FOR PEACE WITH PEACE
AND NOT WITH WAR.
Stan Penner
Landmark, Manitoba
