FOR-Int-0027-Stock Lone Primate/Flickr/Creative Commons

This Tuesday will mark the 95th anniversary of Canada's entry into the First World War. It is time now to begin planning how the nation will commemorate the 100th.

It might seem an easy question. Canadians already observe Remembrance Day on Nov. 11. Schools summon the young to assemblies to listen to veterans speak, towns bedeck their monuments and memorials.

Yet I wonder whether anyone really regards these ceremonials as successful. Canadians have worked at least as hard to forget the 1914 war as to remember it.

French Canada's resentment of conscription; the horrible toll in dead and maimed; the seeming pointlessness of a war so quickly followed by an even more terrible global conflict: These were terrible traumas for those who lived through them. Better not to dwell on them.

But as Canadians turned their back on painful events, they also denied themselves some of their nation's greatest achievements.

It was Canadians who spearheaded the great battles that broke the back of the German army, starting on Aug. 9, 1918, the "black day of the German army," in the phrase of its acting commander-in-chief, Erich von Ludendorff.

It's often said that the war was fought incompetently. So it was--at the start. What else would you expect from profoundly civilian democracies without much military tradition?

But they learned fast. By 1918, the armies of the Western allies were fighting an effective and decisive war. They adopted new technologies (like the warplane) and techniques faster and more intelligently than their German enemies. And by 1918, the Canadian army had proved itself man-for-man, unit-for-unit, the best fighting force on the western front: the "shock army of the British empire," as it has aptly been called.

Morally, too, the First World War has more to recommend it than is usually remembered. German war aims were extreme, as the historian Franz Fischer painstakingly demonstrated in the 1960s: the reconstruction of Europe under an aggressive, autocratic regime. As the American historian Larry Zuckerman shows in his scholarly 2004 book, The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I, Germany's methods of economic exploitation in the first war pioneered the methods used upon all of Europe in the second.

Over the past two decades, dedicated historians have revolutionized our understanding of the accomplishments of the Western Allies in 1914-18. The popular understanding, however, is still stuck back in the "Oh What a Lovely War" polemics of the 1960s. If Canada is to know its own proud history, educators must emancipate the Canadian memory from these self-betraying falsehoods.

Education should be the goal of Canada's First World War centennial. Something more is called for than a wreath-laying at a cenotaph, more than speeches by politicians and generals. Between Aug. 4, 1914, and Nov. 11, 1918, scarcely a day can have passed when a Canadian did not lay down his life for his country. In that spirit, Canadians should start planning now to mark every single day of the Great War centennial with some kind of event, somewhere in the country or on the continent of Europe.

Some days will call for something large and grand: the centennial of the horrific slaughter of the Newfoundland regiment, on July 1, 2016; the centennial of the victory at Vimy Ridge in 2017; the centennials of the great battles of the final hundred days of the war in 2018. Others will be smaller and more local. But no day should go unmarked. Every day should be planned in this spirit: What would the Canadian who died on this day a century ago wish his descendents to know about him and his sacrifice?

Canada's last big national commemoration, the Millennium, was a sorry disappointment, a patronage extravaganza by the Chretien government. This next centennial should be different and better, a centennial with a purpose and a message. Those years of war forged Canada as a nation, as Canadians did much, much more than their share to save the world from a very grim future. Canada honoured the veterans of that fight during their lifetimes. The last of those men has passed. Now it is time for Canada to honour itself, as a people. Such honouring occurs too seldom in Canada. There will never be a better opportunity than in the days beginning five summers from now.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.