Quebec 1759-2009
Posted February 15, 2009, 08:02 ET
Plans to stage a 250th anniversary reenactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham have been cancelled, after protests by separatists. In the 1759 Battle, Wolfe defeated Montcalm and won a continent for the British Empire.
Sore losers. Here in Virginia reenactors in blue are regularly whipped by Stonewall’s foot calvary, while to the north the boys in gray fall before a stone fence in Gettysburg.
There are even, somewhere, WWI reenactors, who live in miserable trenches; and in London, Ont. there is something called the Earl Haig Family Fun park. Go figure. Haig ordered 100,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers to their deaths at the Battle of the Somme.
We don’t dwell on our defeats. We remember Rorke’s Drift, but not Isandlwana earlier that day. At the French military museum, Les Invalides, Montcalm isn’t mentioned, and history stops at Quatre Bras, where on June 16, 1815 Napoleon defeated an Anglo-Dutch-German army. Something happened two days later, but it wasn’t worth mentioning.
And yet one shows nobility, even greatness of soul, in remembering defeats as well as victories. In remembering the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, we are struck by how both generals died gallantly. Was there a more stirring battle, anywhere? And we are to forget this? How petty, how small-minded to cover this up.
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