The Calgary Herald (Alberta)
November 10, 2006 Friday
Final Edition
Ancestral ties of the Great War
by John Weissenberger and George Koch, For The Calgary Herald
When tomorrow we remember the sacrifice in Canada’s wars, the names
Vimy Ridge, Ypres and Passchendaele will be mentioned.
The slaughter of the now almost century-past Great War still evokes
emotion — the muddy trenches that served to fill fields with tight
rows of white headstones or grim ossuaries holding anonymous fallen.
Many Canadians have family ties to the young men who fought and died
there.
The family stories passed around in Canadian homes may not all have
to do with Flanders fields, however. For the conflict was the First
World War. If you lost an ancestor, it could well have happened in an
even more distant land.
If you’re of east Asian origin, you may have ancestors among the more
than one million British Indian troops who fought. These colonial
soldiers were sent to the Middle East, to Africa and to the Western
Front. More than 40,000 were killed, to Canada’s 57,000.
In contrast to the relentless, industrial-scale slaughter in Europe,
the exotic East Africa campaign fascinated audiences. The British
used thousands of Indian troops to chase the small but resourceful
German force, made up largely of locals. Fighting continued until the
Germans received belated word of the Armistice from an English
prisoner.
When the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) entered the war as a German
ally, it triggered almost four years of fighting ranging from the
Suez Canal to Britain’s conquest of Jerusalem. A similar campaign
took place in Mesopotamia — now Iraq. Canadians of Middle Eastern
origin may have had family fighting with or against the Turks.
The Turks suffered 250,000 killed in the war, while inflicting
massive casualties on others, including Armenians. A few years ago, a
Canadian filmmaker chronicled aspects of the Armenian genocide in the
film Ararat.
Numerous Canadians likely have ancestors among the almost 700,000
Italian dead of the Great War. This figure is 40,000 greater than
Britain’s losses, which ripped the guts out of a whole generation of
young men. Most of the Italians were slaughtered in 12 battles along
the Isonzo River, near today’s border with Slovenia.
Italy also saw some of the only alpine fighting in the war, with
barbed war strung along precipitous rock ridges and huge bunker
networks carved into glaciers. The Austrians once blasted away an
entire mountainside, collapsing it onto the Italian trenches.
Glaciers to this day disgorge detritus from the war, plus the
occasional body.
Michael Ignatieff’s grandfather was the Russian czar’s minister of
education, concerned about the fate of a different "nation." The
Russian "steamroller" was meant to crush the Germans and
Austro-Hungarians but, after more than two years of war and almost
1.5 million men killed, the czar’s empire was sliding toward
revolution. Inadequate equipment, primitive logistics and clumsy
leadership sealed her fate.
One of our grandfathers, as an Austrian infantryman, tried his best
to speed the demise of Ignatieff the elder’s regime. His story
reflects the complexity of eastern Europe’s ethnic mix. Some members
of the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire were less than enthused
about getting killed for the Habsburg emperor. German-speaking
regiments were interspersed along the front to shore up their less
enthusiastic comrades.
During the Russian attack on Lutsk in Ukraine in 1916, the Czech
regiments on either side of grandfather W.’s position gladly threw
down their arms and crossed over. Instead of receiving a bayonet to
the midriff, grandpa W. spent 18 leisurely months in pleasant
captivity in the Caucasus, making his way home during Russia’s
revolution. Meanwhile, the Czechs were formed into a kind of foreign
legion and dragged into the Russian civil war. Scores of idealistic
Bohemians perished in the wastes of Siberia fighting Trotsky’s Red
Army.
If your family is Serb or Romanian, your relatives might have fought
"alongside" Canada in distant corners of the war. But if you’re
Polish or Ukrainian, they could as easily have been fighting with
Canada’s past enemy, or even on both sides of the conflict.
Nor did the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, truly stop the war.
Brutal ethnic cleansing of minority Greeks and Turks in each obverse
country occurred years later, ending only after a huge population
swap. There are probably Canadians whose ancestors were among them.
As we admire the newly restored Canadian memorial at Vimy, we are
reminded of those who paid with their lives in battles that helped
forge our nation. We should also remember those with nothing to mark
their final resting place — in the wilds of Africa, the wastes of
Iraq or the forests of Siberia.
John Weissenberger is a Calgary geologist. George Koch is a Calgary
writer. More of their writing can be read at the weblog: drjandmrk.com
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
