Every November 11, our nation pauses for two minutes of collective quiet. Our moment of silence wherever we are is our moment of respectful observance.  We stand before granite cenotaphs, listen to the mournful bugle of The Last Post, and lower our heads in remembrance of the men and women who gave everything in service of our country and the Commonwealth. We also pause mid-task at work, stop and stand quietly in grocery stores or shopping malls, pausing and waiting patiently, respectfully in queues.

For many families, service is not an abstraction carved into distant stone or filed away in yellowed archives. It is an enduring, living dialogue—a practical discipline passed down from one generation to the next. In our own family ledger, that linkage is connected by two men separated by more than eight decades, both answering the call to duty and crisis, and both carrying the military rank of Major: my great-grandfather, Major Wilfred Ferrier Peterman, and my older brother, Major (Ret’d) Paul Specht.

Command in the Crucible: Courcelette, September 1916

To understand what service asked of Major Wilfred Ferrier Peterman, one must look directly into the mechanized horror of the Western Front during the autumn of 1916.

Serving as Second-in-Command of the 13th Battalion (Royal Highlanders of Canada), Canadian Expeditionary Force, Wilfred operated at the sharpest edge of the Somme offensive. The Battle of Courcelette had begun mid-month with the Canadian capture of the sugar refinery and ruined village streets, but holding that pulverized chalk under ceaseless German artillery bombardment required unimaginable resolve.

Command at the front in 1916 was not conducted from châteaux miles behind the lines. It meant hunkering in forward, shallow earthworks—organizing runner communications when telephone wires were severed by shellfire, managing supply routes through hip-deep mud, and steadying young men pushed beyond the limits of human endurance.

In late September, while forward headquarters operated out of a dugout in the shattered ruins of Courcelette, an enemy artillery shell scored a catastrophic direct hit. In an instant, the blast claimed the lives of the Commanding Officer, Lieut.-Col. Victor Buchanan, Major Peterman, and members of their headquarters staff. Wilfred never saw the end of the Great War, nor the country that grew out of its sacrifice. His name remains etched into the history of the 13th Battalion—a testament to field leadership that stood firm until the very end.

The serendipitous connections that come with marriage

My lovely wife Gail’s family have answered the call as well, with a grandfather on the ground in France about the time that my great-grandfather was at Courcelette.  Her paternal grandfather was shot, repatriated for recuperation, then returned to active duty at the front. When he was shot again, he mustered out.  As the Second World War became a reality, he became a warden during the Blitz.  He was part of the cadre who served as the primary civil defence link on the Home Front, enforcing blackouts, guiding civilians to shelters, and managing local emergencies. Gail’s maternal grandfather was with the merchant marine, sailing with the convoys out of Halifax that supplied the United Kingdom during WWII.  The crossing put him in the water of the North Atlantic twice, surviving two U-boat attacks that sank two ships he sailed on.  My brother-in-law’s father was an RAF pilot and a member of the Goldfish Club.

The Builder’s Mindset: A Cold War Military Engineer

History did not close that chapter; it handed it forward. Decades later, my older brother, Paul Specht, put on the uniform of the Canadian Armed Forces as an officer with the Canadian Military Engineers.

Military engineering is fundamentally about the imposition of order upon chaos. Where combat arms may hold ground, engineers make survival and maneuver possible—bridging rivers, clearing minefields, constructing defensible infrastructure, securing clean water, and ensuring power in austere environments.

Paul’s service took him across key theatres of the late Cold War. Posted to Canadian Forces Base Lahr in West Germany, he worked on NATO’s central defensive rampart, maintaining mission readiness and critical tactical infrastructure when Europe lived beneath the daily tension of potential escalation. Later, deployed with the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), he served along the tense Buffer Zone—the Green Line—where military discipline meant holding a quiet, vigilant perimeter to keep historic adversaries apart and preserve fragile civilian safety.

When Paul retired from active duty with the Canadian Forces’ Decoration (CD), he transitioned his engineering background into civilian asset and facility management—overseeing university physical plants and later managing major municipal infrastructure assets for the City of Edmonton. It was the natural continuation of an engineer’s ethos: keeping the complex, unseen bones of a community upright and operational.

The Frontline of Home: Red Cross and Civic Stewardship

Retirement, however, never meant stepping away from duty. In modern Canada, our frontlines rarely resemble the barbed wire of 1916 or the patrolled borders of 1980s Europe. Today, our sudden emergencies arrive at home: raging seasonal wildfires, flash flooding, and severe municipal crises that displace hundreds of families overnight.

Volunteering as a team lead with the local Disaster Management or PDAT (Personal Disaster Assistance) team of the Canadian Red Cross responding to individual apartment or house fires, Paul stepped right back into logistical crisis response.

Paul has also been deployed with the Red Cross’s Emergency Response Team to support major wildfire/flood evacuations in BC, Nova Scotia (Hurricane Fiona) and multiple events where Albertans evacuated to Edmonton.

When catastrophic wildfires threaten northern and central communities, forcing families to evacuate with only minutes to pack their cars, Paul is part of the command structure that meets them. Setting up an emergency reception center in a municipal arena—coordinating hundreds of cots, organizing hot meals, arranging hygiene kits, tracking vulnerable individuals, and establishing order amidst profound shock—relies on the exact operational instincts honed over decades in uniform. It requires calm logistics, clear chain-of-command execution, and, above all, deep human empathy for people who have just watched everything they own go up in smoke.

That same sense of quiet civic guardianship extends into his local community here in St. Albert, where he serves on the St. Albert Policing Committee, providing vital civilian oversight and ensuring community safety priorities reflect the needs of local residents.

The Through-Line of Service

When I stand in silence this Remembrance Day, I do not picture a generic soldier.

I picture Major Wilfred Peterman in the damp, deafening dark of a Courcelette dugout, working against impossible odds to protect the men under his charge. And I picture Major Paul Specht in a high-visibility Red Cross vest inside an evacuation hall, speaking calmly to an exhausted family who has nowhere else to go.

The nature of conflict changes, technologies evolve, and generations pass, but the core calling remains unchanged. Service is the deliberate choice to step toward danger, disorder, and distress while everyone else is forced to run from it. We remember the fallen so their courage is never forgotten, and we honour those who continue to serve—in uniform and in high-vis vests—because they show us that the torch of stewardship is still very much alive.