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...almost as much as much as my own, became part of my imagined sense of Canada's past. They both grew up in Verdun. Both were English Canadians. His father had served overseas as an artilleryman in Canada's Italian campaign. They married afterwards, and moved on to careers in engineering and local civic service as they played their parts in Canada's twinned booms of breadwinning and babies. But, like my own parents, bits and pieces of their past, from the 'no money' days in the 1930s to their search for security after demobilization, began to fit together like a scattered jigsaw puzzle forming part of my national picture, at least back then. For them, it had been a long road from Verdun. What was its major fork? The war, of course.
But memory, family stories too, are only partial, uneven, even fictional snapshots set against histories of locales, of regions, and certainly of countries at war. How do we approach intersections of memory and history? How do we reach conclusions about the meaning of this war from a study of the responses of its home front and overseas participants? My praise for Serge Durflinger's new book is for an inspiring account of Verdun's place in Canada's 'last good war.' I'm borrowing the phrase from Jack Granatstein's new illustrated history of Canada in the Second World War, a fine memory-prompter for those who survived the war and a good introduction to it for those viewing, for the first time, photographs of Canadians responding to the dark period that followed Hitler's invasions or the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Durflinger contributes to the 'good war' narrative. As a local case...
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