Ted Barris

The three of them seemed buried in preparations – arranging the wreath, adjusting their berets, straightening their blazers and ties – and they didn’t notice me approaching with my cellphone camera. Then, suddenly as they stepped to the curb beneath the Menin Gate, a shaft of sunlight caught them.

“Look here guys,” I called out.

Almost in perfect symmetry, the three men – Bill Stewart, Al Thomas and Paul Moffatt – all snapped to attention the way they’ve done thousands of times before. And I clicked the photograph of the three retired firefighters in their parade uniforms, ready to join one of the most poignant Great War commemorations in Europe.

Every evening just before 8 o’clock the local police cordon off the eastern entrance to the town of Ieper, Belgium. Everything comes to a full stop there. As it does, people gather – often so plentifully there’s no room to move for hundreds of feet in either direction. Minutes later, buglers from the Ieper fire brigade arrive. They march under the massive archway that is the Menin Gate and perform the Last Post, then stand dead still for two minutes of silence. No one moves or speaks throughout the presentation.

This ceremony – repeated every night since July 24, 1927 (when the gate memorial opened) except during Nazi occupation in the Second World War – pays tribute to soldiers of the British Commonwealth who were killed defending the city against invading German armies in the First World War.

The names of 54,896 Allied soldiers, for whom there are no known graves, are inscribed on the Gate’s expansive commemorative walls.

As part of this night’s ceremony, the three firefighters from Canada join the procession of servicewomen and men invited to troop wreaths across the roadway beneath the gate to a cenotaph. Firefighters Stewart, Thomas and Moffatt, march proudly to their destination, lay the wreath together, step back, salute and resume their positions for the final playing of Reveille.

“As I waited to place the wreath,” Paul Moffatt told me later, “I looked up at the long lists and thought about the last resting places of so many men, and I was overcome.”

The three Canadian firefighters have an even more tangible connection to this moment, I learned. They are members of Operation Never Forgotten, an organization born during the COVID pandemic to ensure that civilian firefighters who joined Canadian expeditionary forces during two World Wars, the Korean War and other military deployments with NATO and the United Nations are documented and remembered.

Firefighters Stewart, Thomas and Moffatt have now assembled diaries, correspondence, photographs and (in some cases) located the final resting places of 500 or more Canadian service people.

I have long thought we give much appropriate attention to the service and sacrifice of Canadians in global conflicts of the first half of the 20th century, but rarely to those who served in Canadian armed forces (CAF) since 1945. I know from listening to many who completed tours of duty in Korea, Cyprus, Gaza, Golan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia and Afghanistan (to name a few), that the so-called postwar veterans have little or no voice in the great commemorations each year on June 6 (D-Day), May 8 (VE Day), and Nov. 11 (Remembrance Day).

For me, placing one’s peacetime responsibilities aside to serve in international peace-making or peacekeeping operations required no less commitment than service abroad did in 1914-1918 or 1939-1945. And yet those latter-day veterans never seem to get the attention or gratitude they deserve.

Among the three Operation Never Forgotten firefighters from the GTA, two are postwar Canadian vets who never complain, but are rarely in the limelight. Bill Stewart, at 16, joined the armed services in a student program in 1966. He trained in the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps and served in armored reconnaissance, leaving CAF only to serve in the RCMP and with the Toronto Firefighters.

Al Thomas devoted 16 years to CAF in both the Royal Regiment of Canada and the Algonquin Regiment; he became an aircraft maintenance engineer for the RCAF and on our recent tour of battlefields in France and Belgium he showed our group how the Never Forgotten group has stepped up.

We stopped at a tiny Commonwealth War Graves cemetery near Haucourt, France, where a former Canadian firefighter Frank Caskie was buried in September 1918, in the last days of the Great War. The three GTA firefighters planted a flag with battle honours of their fallen and offered a rationale for their efforts. “We do this for their legacy,” Al Thomas said.

Between the lines, I think he was also asking that his own service and that of his post-1945 veteran comrades also be recognized, their voices heard.