"As Harper bombs away in Syria and Iraq, thinking this morning of the late "reluctant soldier" turned pacifist Eldon Comfort, who passed away at 102 on June 3. A memorial service for the much-loved Eldon Comfort will be held Saturday, July 4, 11 am at Cummer Avenue United Church (53 Cummer Avenue) in North York. All are welcome. A tribute to Eldon is here:"

Remembering Eldon Comfort

Self-described "reluctant soldier" turned pacifist became a pillar of Toronto's peace and social justice movements

 

When veterans of a certain age pass on, the Harper government tends to pull out of reserve boilerplate statements combining prayers for loved ones with rallying cries for militarism.

 

One former World War II soldier unlikely to wind up receiving Conservative government mention, however, is Eldon Comfort, who passed away June 3 in North York at 102 years of age.

A self-described “reluctant soldier” who served as a lieutenant in the Canadian Signal Corps from 1942-45, Comfort found himself a pacifist by war’s end after witnessing the sheer size of war graveyards in France and meeting captured German soldiers after VE Day in 1945.

He recalled the moment he became a pacifist for Historica Canada's The Memory Project: “Our unit was stationed up in Wilhelmshaven. The Germans had been disarmed and a lot of them were still in prison enclosures. To see those young men, boys really, behind barbed wire, dispirited, bedraggled, hungry, disorganized, of course, and I thought to myself, 'Surely, these guys aren’t my enemy.' I was a reluctant soldier in the beginning myself and I couldn’t help but wonder how many of those youngsters had been reluctant soldiers themselves…When I talked to high school students when I came home, I used to tell them, the question they should be asking is not, ‘Who is my enemy, but who is my brother and sister?’”

READ MORE: https://nowtoronto.com/news/in-memoriam/remembe/