New Hamburg remembers: ‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today’

The New Hamburg Legion Colour Party leads the Remembrance Day Parade from the New Hamburg Cenotaph towards the New Hamburg Community Centre for the annual Remembrance Day ceremony. Galen Simmons photo

Galen Simmons, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Residents of New Hamburg and the surrounding Wilmot Township gathered first at the New Hamburg Cenotaph and then at the New Hamburg Community Centre Nov. 11 to pay tribute and show their respect to those who have lost their lives in service to our country.

The New Hamburg Remembrance Day ceremony began at the town cenotaph where the New Hamburg Legion Branch 532 Colour Party was joined by members of the New Hamburg  concert band, local politicians and dignitaries, the Royal Canadian Air Cadets 822 Tudor Squadron and members of the public to pay tribute to the names of the township’s war dead from the first and second world wars and the Korean Conflict.

The Remembrance Day parade then marched through downtown toward the town’s community centre, where a full Remembrance Day ceremony took place. The ceremony featured performances of “O’ Canada” and traditional hymns by the New Hamburg Concert Band, the singing of anthems including “In Flanders’ Fields” and “How Can I Keep From Singing” by Waterloo-Oxford District Secondary School’s Appassionata choir, the reading of scripture and the names of the township’s war dead, and greetings from township Mayor Natasha Salonen.

“Each year on Nov. 11, we come together, not merely to remember but to bear witness to courage, to sacrifice and to the enduring spirit of those who gave all to our country,” Salonen said. “Yet remembrance is not bound by a single day; it lives in our daily surroundings, from our cenotaphs to our remembrance gardens and the streets that we walk.”

Salonen spoke about two local veterans, for which two local streets are named – McFadyen Street in Baden and Bier Crescent in New Hamburg. Salonen told the stories of Cpl. Henry Lorne McFadyen, who served as a stretcher bearer with the 18th Battalion in France during the First World War and was killed in action at the Battle of Passchendaele on Nov. 10, 1917, as well as Capt. Nile Bier, who served with the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps in Sicily, Italy during the Second World War as a lieutenant, and was also killed in action in the summer of 1944.

“These men and countless others were ordinary Canadians called to extraordinary acts of service,” Salonen said. “Their names live on in our streets, but more importantly, their legacies live in the spirit of duty, courage and selflessness that binds our community together.”

As is tradition, Chaplain Rev. Bob Thaler also spoke at this year’s Remembrance Day ceremony, reflecting on the quote by English classicist and poet John Maxwell Edmonds, “When you go home, tell them of us and say, ‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today.’ ”

“June 6, 1944, D-Day, the Allies broke through the Atlantic Wall; 150,000 Allied troops landed on the Normandy beaches,” Thaler said. “Fourteen-thousand Canadians landed on Juno Beach. From offshore, the guns of ships pounded the enemy. From overhead, planes dropped their bombs and paratroopers. On the beaches, the landing crafts came ashore, the doors opened, the men scrambled out in the crosshairs of machine guns and barraging bombers. Some drowned in the water, weighed down by their equipment; some died even before leaving their landing craft. But those men slowly made their way up those beaches past the seawall and the gun emplacements, past the machine guns and the mortars, on into the town and out into the countryside.

“ … This was their today they lived through. This was their today they gave to you; that day of bloody water and sands, machine guns and mortars, the fear and the courage, the drowning and the dying. This was the day they gave you for your tomorrows. Be grateful. We are grateful.”

And while we are grateful for the sacrifices made by those who fought on Juno Beach and those who fight on our behalf in all conflicts past and present, Thaler said the men and women who made those sacrifices do so to protect our way of life.

“Life is about laundry and the first day of school, going to the doctor and a second crop of hay. They went up those beaches to breach the Atlantic Wall, to breach the wall of tyranny and the terror, the threat that had befallen on them and the ones they loved. They went up those beaches to push back the darkness that had covered the small things, the day-to-day things, the things that matter. They went up that beach because fascism threatened to extinguish peace and freedom.

“On Remembrance Day, we talk about that peace and freedom they secured for us. It’s because we are free, because we’re at peace, we can live these everyday things that matter: walking the dog, welcoming that new neighbour from India who moved in next door, going to the food bank, giving to the food bank. More than that, it is in these small things (the soldiers) wrote about (in letters to home), in the day-to-day of their lives, that peace and freedom well up.”

The New Hamburg Remembrance Day ceremony concluded with the laying of wreaths by local politicians, Legion members, the cadets, representatives from Waterloo Region emergency services, service clubs, local businesses and more. The New Hamburg Legion hosted a luncheon next door afterwards.