BERGEN OP ZOOM, Netherlands — “It’s like a double emotion.”
Andre Rousseau, the former Royal Canadian Navy commando from tiny Laminerve, Que., summed up the gut wallop that greets Canadian veterans every time they return to Europe’s battlefields.
Rousseau, 85 and a veteran of the vicious Second World War battle that drove Nazi Germany out of the Netherlands, was one of a clutch of Canadian vets soaking in the joy of reunion and the pain of loss Thursday at a commemoration of the 65th anniversary of Holland’s liberation.
It was a day that had even Prime Minister Stephen Harper, heading a Canadian delegation receiving Dutch gratitude, seemingly on the edge of tears.
“Too much. It’s hard to take,” Rousseau, furrowing his thick white brows and dropping an octave, said of his very first return to the Netherlands five years ago. “You know, things you want to forget come back — and they’re not good memories.”
For Ken Rowland, making his first visit to the grave site of a man he called his brother, the powerful memories were all too evident.
“There he is right there, that’s him right there!” Rowland, 85, said tremulously as he found the bone-white headstone of William Roscoe.
The stone marks just one of 968 Canadians buried at the Bergen op Zoom War Cemetery near the Belgium-Dutch border, one of 16 such Commonwealth war cemeteries scattered across the verdant countryside. In all, some 7,600 Canadians died in Holland out of a force of more than 175,000.
Roscoe was 24 when he was killed by machine-gun fire in October 1944, four years after he and Rowland had enlisted together.
“We were friends all the way through, all the way through the war, until he was killed,” said Rowland, who was accompanied by his daughter.
Jan Pieter Balkenende, Holland’s prime minister, summoned the memory of a 17-year-old private from Vancouver who gave his life in 1944 during the battle that opened the port of Antwerp.
Balkenende called it the “grimmest, fiercest, most savage battle fought by the Canadian army in the Second World War.”
Canadian students visiting the Netherlands, he said, “will feel the eternal gratitude of the Dutch people for the bravery of the Canadian soldiers.”
“It essential that we pass on the torch of history to the next generation.”
Harper, speaking a day after Holland celebrated the 65th anniversary of its May 5, 1945, liberation, picked up on that theme in one of the most lyrical speeches of his prime ministership.
“When the living come to salute the dead, our words speak loudest to those whose lives still lay ahead,” said Harper, accompanied by birdsong, a cool breeze and brilliant sunshine.
“In this age-old act of remembrance, we gather not to call out a requiem — for those for whom we speak are not here . . . .
“We have come together to greet comrades while yet we may to declare to new generations that — in such a place as this — you may understand how our land, Canada, gives birth to greatness.”
Later Thursday at a news conference with Balkenende, Harper appeared near tears when he spoke of the veterans.
“What always strikes you the most these days when you do these commemorations, particularly of World War II, is really how time is marching on in terms of that generation,” he said.
“It’s wonderful that we still see so many who are able to make it, but there are fewer and fewer with us. So these are precious days.”
The prime minister will have an official lunch Friday with Holland’s Queen Beatrix, who was harboured as an 11-year-old princess with her family in Ottawa during the war.
Harper’s week-long tour then moves on to Zagreb and Berlin.