Till the end of time…

I believe, having little proof to the contrary, that I was born with a lucky horseshoe and that it no doubt must have been located on some comfortable, albeit hidden, part of my anatomy. First off, I am a Canadian who never had to go to war; I grew up in a smallish town; I had a rather calm, somewhat uninteresting adolescence; I had parents who didn’t divorce (each other, that is.)

I had a brief flirtation with peacetime soldiering, the Reserves in my hometown, and the Signal Corps in Kingston. Some of it was satisfying; some of it not so much.

It is quite probable that I lacked some of the component parts to succeed at a regimented life. Still, I learned quite a lot about what I believe about war and peace from my military dabbling.

Subsequently, I was a participant in the great cultural revolution of the late sixties. I lived communally. I let my thinning brown hair grow a bit. I have forgotten some of my lesser moments, so I must have been there. I emerged pretty much unscathed, though others may have a different opinion.

I was thinking about my rather bucolic early formative years as I watched Till the End of Time a few days ago. Made in 1946 by Edward Dmytryk, it tells the story of three returning veterans of WW2. It also renders a powerful story of a war widow also adjusting to a post war America.

Dymtryk, Canadian born but American raised, was an excellent director and directed some of my favorite classics including his award winning Crossfire and two excellent Dick Powell films, Murder, My Sweet and Cornered. He was also blacklisted shortly after Crossfire and in short order moved to England to salvage his career.

As Remembrance Day approaches, I am, as always, drawn to films that try and depict how soldiers and civilians readjust. For me, two films, Till the End of Time and the more well known, The Best Years of Our Lives, also a 1946 production, offer a sense of the complexity of what young men and women who lose a measure of their lives fighting in wars, face as they try to rediscover themselves.

Though I will remember the awful toll of the dead on Remembrance Day, I much prefer to consider the silence and the sorrow and the re-emergence of those who returned, who had to patch interrupted lives back together.

I also hope that those who cannot find an alternative to war, those who vote for war, who send troops to theatres of conflict and who, in doing so, escalate and perpetuate war and destruction, work just a little bit harder to bring about a less pointless and repetitive outcome.