The Response Linden

The memorial this linden stands beside was built for one war and unveiled three months before the next one began. King George VI pulled the cover off it in May 1939, in front of a crowd of 100,000. The monument has a formal name, The Response, and it shows twenty-two bronze figures hauling a field gun and its team through a granite arch, soldiers and nurses and airmen pressed together in the gap. In 2000 the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was set into the ground in front of it, holding a Canadian recovered from a cemetery near Vimy Ridge whose name was never established. The tree is the quiet part of all that. It stands at the memorial end of Confederation Square, a small-leaved lime with the dense rounded crown the species makes when nobody interferes with it, and it is the only thing in that square that changes with the season while the bronze does not. Every 11 November the national ceremony fills the ground beneath it. For the rest of the year it shades office workers eating lunch on the steps of the busiest traffic island in the country. When it was planted, nobody wrote down. The capital's register of remarkable trees names the tree and gives it no date, and no other source has anything to say about this particular one. If you know its age, tell us.