Foreign wars and Canadian sacrifice
In an era of globalization, we’re probably not supposed to look on battles in distant lands as “foreign wars.” But they are.
They’re foreign because they involve struggles for territories and dominance in regions in which Canada has no vital national interest.
Throughout our history as a peaceable nation, Canada has been involved in just three such wars — South Africa, Korea and Afghanistan.
I exclude the two world wars, as these struggles were so paramount that their outcome was vital to the welfare of all Canadians. Even 1914-18 — despite the interpretations of historical revisionists — put this country’s future at risk.
Korea falls into much the same category as Vietnam. It was a civil war in which the Chinese intervened only when American forces reached their border and threatened to cross the Yalu river.
Few Canadians know much about the South African, or Boer war, in which Canada had a minor role between 1899 and 1902. That has not stopped the Alberta writer, Fred Stenson, from producing a novel of classic proportions.
The Great Karoo (Doubleday Canada 2008) is the story of a collection of Alberta cowboys who volunteer for the Canadian Mounted Rifles. It was a squad made up of officers from the Royal Northwest Mounted Police and ranchhands from pin points on the map like Pincher Creek.
Stenson’s story of how these young men — and their horses — dealt with the extreme conditions they encountered, and the stupidity and callousness of their British officers, makes for an engrossing book.
Stenson’s description of the South African desert, the Great Karoo, and the hills and river valleys of the Dutch republics, the Orange Free State and the Transavaal, is evocative of the intimacy and color of Isak Dinesen’s classic work, Out of Africa.
It also brings to mind many parallels with our involvement in Afghanistan, despite the obvious differences of history, geography and ideology.
The struggle in South Africa was waged between two colonizing people, the Dutch-blood Afrikaaners and the English who had followed Cecil Rhodes’ call to plant the flag of the British Empire everywhere in Africa.
A distant relative of mine, Harry Argyle, went to South Africa to work in the gold mines. In a letter home, he wrote:
I don’t like the Dutch and I did not come out to fight, but if there’s a war and the English want volunteers I’ll have a cut in.
Fred Stenson’s characters arrive in South Africa anxious to fight the Boers. They worry that the war may be almost over. They find out differently after marching through the Great Karoo. His fighting scenes are dramatic and graphic.
Stenson’s protagonist, Frank Adams, “threw himself flat. It did not take long for bullets to rip the grass around him. He crawled like a mad thing, worming forward, clawing with his elbows. He was looking for a nice stout stone, and there were none. All he could find was a scatter of smaller rocks that he pulled in and piled as fast as his hands could move.”
Adams, along with his buddies, soon finds he is fighting a different war than the one he’d been promised. At home, after the war, they struggle to return to their old lives.
Running through Stenson’s narrative is the tension caused by the Indian blood of several Mounted recruits, including Adams. Black Africans, by contrast, have little to say in The Great Karoo, just as they had little to say under the white man’s rule.
The parallel between South Africa and Afghanistan is in the frustrations Stenson’s characters experience, and the doubts that Canadians feel about our involvement in that Islamic land.
Canadian soldiers, filled with all the idealistic intentions inherited from a legacy of peacekeeping, go into this 21st century war in a land not dissimilar from the dry hills of the Great Karoo. They regard themselves as protectors of an abused population. Large numbers in that population view them as invaders.
This week, the body of the 119th Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan was brought home. Twenty-year-old Alexandre Peloquin had written home shortly before his death. “Will you be proud of me if I die,” he asked a friend. “Just tell me … if you’ll remember.”
