Memory

 This painting is titled War: Canadian Soldiers In Afghanistan, by Douglas Laing, from the experiences of his son, who fought as part of what was called Operation Medusa.

Here we have a copy of a journal by a veteran of that war. Master Corporal Paul Franklin would lose both of his legs after an attack. He sketched his own condition into the page.

I've always liked this photograph of an interaction between an Afghan child and a Canadian soldier. The Canadian mission to the country is a decade in the past, and the country has fallen back into the hands of the very people we went to fight in the first place. A dark world for that child to have ended up in.

As the mission ended and military forces returned home, the dead and injured of that war loomed over them.

The formal galleries of the museum end with this display. 

The Royal Canadian Legion Hall of Honour is beyond, and concerns itself with how we've remembered the dead of our wars, from time immemorial to the present.

At the heart of the room is a model of the National War Memorial.

Also here is a stained glass window which once was in the Dutch consulate in Montreal. Now it finds its home here.

The Museum has two focal points in its architectural design. This is one of them. Regeneration Hall is the name of the space within the large spiked structure seen from the outside. The window directly looks towards Parliament Hill, a deliberate choice by the architect, Raymond Moriyama. Within are the plaster casts of the Vimy Memorial. A harpist was playing down below, and a recorded sound resonates through the space. It is the sound of wind, recorded when the place was under construction, and haunting in its way. Moriyama wanted the sound recorded and preserved in here, played in a loop.

Behind me and on the wall is this dramatic painting. Sacrifice was painted by Charles Sims around the end of World War One.