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Queen to attend Canadian memorial

GUY DIXON

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

October 28, 2008 at 3:29 AM EDT

The Queen will attend the unveiling of a temporary, transatlantic, Canadian war memorial titled Vigil 1914-1918 in London next week. The solemn work will not only commemorate the 68,000 Canadian soldiers who died in the First World War by projecting their names, but will also symbolize their silent return home.

Next Tuesday evening at 5 o'clock, the names of Canadians killed in the war will start being projected onto Canada House in Trafalgar Square.

The names will appear one by one for eight seconds each throughout the evening and on subsequent nights until Nov. 11 (Remembrance Day) at sunrise.

After it appears in London, each name will then be projected in various cities across Canada, appearing at the same local time in each location. So, a name projected at 9 p.m. London time, will then be projected at 9 p.m. AT at Halifax's St. Paul's Anglican Church and inside Alumni Hall at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, then 9 p.m. ET on Ottawa's National War Memorial and outside the east tower of Toronto's City Hall, and so on in a westward progression. So far, Edmonton is the most westerly participating city.

"A name walks back from Europe and walks across the country and then it disappears - as if we pull them back," said Toronto actor and theatre director R.H. Thomson, who co-created the project with lighting designer Martin Conboy.

"We say, Come back. The man stands up in London, and he returns. We will do it only at night, which is another part of the poetic idea - that these guys are in the night now."

The memorial's website, http://www.1914-1918.ca, lists the names of those commemorated and when each will be projected, local time. A network of funders and especially donated time has been set up to make the vigil possible, including a $340,000 contribution from the Department of Veterans Affairs for the projection at the War Memorial. In London, it was the efforts of Canada House and the Canadian High Commission to stage the event. In Toronto, much of the work was done through city hall.

"I went to city hall and they said, 'Yeah, we want to do that. We don't have any money, but yes!' And so they throw staff time at it," Thomson said.

Thomson and Conboy created a similar memorial last year with the Vimy Vigil, to commemorate Canadians killed 90 years earlier at the 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge. The names of more than 3,500 soldiers were projected onto the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

Given the positive reaction of families, Thomson wanted to continue the project. He recalls, for instance, how one family in Peterborough, Ont., looked up when a relative's name would be projected, then put the kids in the car and stood in front of the memorial in the middle of the night to see the name appear.

"And they wrote me afterwards a letter I'll never forget. [The family saw] the War Memorial given to their family, so to speak, that it actually belongs to that name. I'll never forget it," Thomson said. "The living history book is closing. And both Martin and I are determined that we don't just walk by."

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