Rickation: The War Museum

I’m on Rickation, a much-needed solo jaunt to Ottawa to hang out, see sights, and play a lot of video games (I brought my entire desktop.)  On this morning’s agenda was the Canadian War Museum, reconstructed in 2005.

As seen from Vimy Place

The museum is housed on an immense building – the picture does it no justice – that is hunkered down over a chunk of land near the Ottawa River,  just west of downtown.  It’s very grey and imposing, and its appearance changes depending on the angle it’s viewed from.  From one viewpoint it sort of looks like the prow of a battleship, from another like a concrete fortress looming over a trenchline.  If that was the architect’s intent they certainly succeeded.

I had to walk through a sort-of-picket-line to get in; evidently, the workers are on strike.  They weren’t blocking anyone, though, and I talked with them a bit about their issues before going on in.  The central atrium is huge, mostly empty space; you could fit a decent sized skating rink into the empty space between the souvenir shop and the ticket counter.  The woman at the ticket counter informed me that the museum, which is normally $12 for general admission, was free to anyone who was serving or had ever served in the Canadian armed services.  I dutifully recited my service number and walked on in.

The War Museum has come under file on several occasions for not portraying war exactly the way certain groups want it portrayed; veterans were very upset a few years ago when one plaque noted that the Allied bombing offensive of World War II killed 600,000 German civilians but di not substantially reduce German industrial output.  That the statement is, in fact, quite true is irrelevant to some; it was perceived as an insult to veterans and so some people had an absolute shit.  They changed it to something exceptionally lame and politicized (or had in 2007.)

I was very pleased to discover that the War Museum was not, in fact, the pussied-out peacekeeping shrine to political correctness some have made it out to me, but was in fact a pretty damned good museum.  It was informative, interactive (insofar as was possible with a lot of the workers on strike) and struck an appropriate tone, definitely cheering on Canada’s war efforts while being honest about the horrors of war and the wrongs Canadians have committed.

Still, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected.  But the problem wasn’t the museum; it was me. 

The way the main part of the museum works is that you sort of wind through a maze of displays that carry you, chronologically, through Canada’s military history.  You can do it out of order but you’d have to do so on purpose; if you go with the flow, you start with aboriginal warfare and proceed through the Seven Years’ War, the rebellions, the Boer War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and so on right up to today.  The exhibits are really quite impressive and I’d post a few pictures if I hadn’t left the camera in the car.  Nothing about the museum shies away from the reality and violence of war; on exhibit is an old German Stug.III, a turretless tank, which was obviously destroyed by a direct hit in the front right, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to know what happened to the men inside.  The exhibits are very comprehensive, understandable, and touch on almost every imaginable aspect of war.  They do address stuff that Canadians might find uncomfortable, such as the internment of Japanese-Canadians, or the fact that Canada deployed nuclear weapons for almost 20 years (a fact few Canadians know.)  And good for them.

But the further I got, I found the more depressed I was.

When I was a little boy I found war exciting and awesome.  I watched war movies with my Dad and made model airplanes and played war with my friends.  The fact that both my grandfathers had fought in World War II was impossibly cool to me.  I read and studied the war on my own, learned mounds of information about it. 

I don’t have that romance for war anymore, and it was really driven home by the war museum.  Part of it is the seeming endlessness of it.  As I walked through the displays, going from the Plains of Abraham to the Somme to the Gothic Line and on and on, it all started to feel the same.  The weapons change and the uniforms change, but the story is invariably the same; politicians act stupidly, men leave their families, and people are slaughtered.  The more recent the war, the greater the number of victims who’re civilians.  The rifles got fancier, smaller, and lighter, but they all made bullet holes in people that looked the same.  The artillery got ritzier but it’s all for blowing people up.   All the changes were in the direction of making it easier to kill even greater numbers of people, until finally you got to nuclear weapons, which enable us to kill everyone in a matter of minutes.  All the civilian displays were iterations of the same themes; sadness, loss, rationing, worrying over men in foreign lands.  The medals were all the same, trinkets of little intrinsic value given to whichever men didn’t shit their pants and shriek with terror.  The Nazi memorabilia made me sick to my stomach.  By the time I got near the end I wanted nothing more than to just get the hell out and not think about war.

Maybe it’s just that I’m older and I understand the horror and pointlessness of it all.  It might also be that I have a family now, a wife and a little girl, and so the impact of war is more frightening to a man who understands what there is to lose.  Either way, I came out really hating war.  I walked in to the gift shop and right back out again thinking it was kind of gross to sell souvenirs about war.

Of course, maybe that’s what they were going for, huh?

But there was one thing that made me feel a lot better, right towards the end of the exhibits; a chunk of the Berlin Wall.  It was about six feet wide and still bore graffiti from the day it was torn down, including a Soviet hammer and sickle with the red circle-and-line-through it indicating that some German in 1989 knew what the Wall’s demise meant for the Soviet Union.  I found that moldy piece of concrete very pleasing indeed, because, of course, what is symbolizes is peace.  The fall of the Berlin Wall meant the reunification of a people, the liberation of 20,000,000 horribly oppressed East Germans, and much of humanity taking a big step back from the brink of what could have been at least an awful conventional war and likely would have escalated into full scale nuclear war.  Everything about that day was what was good about NOT having a war – peace, brotherhood, nations coming to understandings instead of blows. 

I put my hand on the wall and stood there for quite a few minutes, lost in thought, and reflected that I wished we’d managed to stop a few more wars that way rather than by fighting them out.  Then I left the museum (after my quick trip in and out of the gift shop.)

I think it will be a long time before I go back.