Canada should attend to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
National Post, 16 November 2025
When often the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is unattended, it's as if he is both gone and forgotten
Canada’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, prominent this past Remembrance Day at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, is only 25 years old. The remains of an unknown soldier from the Great War were placed there on May 28, 2000; King Charles III laid a wreath on his recent visit, the day before the anniversary.
The repatriation of the remains, taken from near Vimy, France, and burial at the cenotaph, was one of the ceremonial highlights of the millennium year in Ottawa. There was a lying-in-state in the rotunda of Parliament, a horse-drawn carriage, and re-interment at the cenotaph with full military honours.
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Honouring the war dead is as ancient as war. Honours for the unknown soldier are more recent, a development after the Great War, given that the scale of the losses was so previously unimaginable. The Canadian Vimy memorial contains the names of 11,285 soldiers who died in France and whose graves are unknown. More than 66,000 Canadians gave their lives in World War I.
Exactly two years after the armistice — on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1920 — the Unknown Warrior was buried at the west end of the nave of Westminster Abbey. King George V himself attended as the remains of an unknown British soldier from France were processed through the city toward the abbey.
The custom is that no one walks over the tomb, so all grand processions at the abbey require a diversion around the grave. Coronations and royal weddings are no exception.
That same November day in France, the Tombe du Soldat Inconnu was established at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris — a much grander monument than in London.
Other countries followed. The following year, 1921, Rome’s resting place of the Unknown Soldier was set into the enormous monument of Victor Emmanuel, a complex so massive it is possible to overlook that the tomb and its perpetual honour guard are even there. On the other hand, most of Rome seems to pass by each day, so it could not be more prominent in the life of the Eternal City.
Whereas the Roman tomb is set beneath the “altar of the fatherland,” adorned by a pagan goddess, the Westminster Abbey tomb is an explicitly Christian remembrance, adorned with biblical verses.
The concept of honouring unknown saints is an ancient one in Christianity, biblically referred to as the “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) and the “great multitude which no man could number” (Revelation 7:9). The feast of All Saints (Nov. 1) honours them not long before Remembrance Day, which is something of a military application of that millennial Christian practice. The unknown soldier stands in, analogously, for all the unknown saints.
Poland’s tomb of the unknown soldier is in Warsaw’s central square. It was there that St. John Paul the Great celebrated Holy Mass on the first day of his first return visit to his homeland as pope. He preached the greatest sermon of his life that day, and it marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. He lifted up the figure of the unknown soldier with great rhetorical power, both patriotic and pious.
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