Bob's blog on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge
Our boys did good over there

Monday April 9th of 2007 was the 90th anniversary of the World War One battle of Vimy Ridge. I’ve been there. It was in 1989, and I recall vividly seeing the twin spires of the memorial visible as I drove through the French countryside looking for the town of Arras, near the battle site. As the sun was getting low in the spring sky, it bathed the memorial in its golden light. It was a breathtaking moment, a “wow” experience in my first visit to France.

The Vimy Memorial dominates the hilltop overlooking the Douai Plain in northern France.

As a Canadian, visiting Vimy was one of my main goals in France. After finding a hotel in Arras, I drove up the hill toward the monument. It was evening, the sun was slowly setting, and in the eternal quiet of Vimy Ridge, I had the site completely to myself. To walk among the headstones in the immaculately-tended Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries is to allow the souls of the departed soldiers to join your consciousness.

I remember being drawn to think of Canada, as if to share the world I had come from with the souls of the soldiers who had left my country – and their lives – behind on the journey to France to fight for what was then called “King and Country.” It was as if the boys wanted to know what it was like in the Canada I left, what difference their sacrifices had made, and what it felt like to be able to grow up, and grow older, in the Canada they left behind forever. The voices and thoughts of the spirits of my grand­father’s generation that one feels standing among the headstones at Vimy is a warm welcome, a kinship I think is reserved for Canadian visitors, for as the French caretaker told me a little later, “Not too many Canadians come here.”

Mississauga connection

The next day, my visit to the trenches in the front line coincided with the visit of the year by a living Vimy veteran. This was 1989, and the elderly gentlemen, whose name I can no longer recall, was from Mississauga. He had fought in the battle that cold and snowy April 9th of 1917. The guides walked us below ground. We saw some of the early excavations of the extensive subterranean tunnel network that enabled the Canadian corps not only to assemble in relative safety, but to conceal enough of their plans and movements from the enemy to launch the successful attack.

The guide asked him about the tunnels. He said, “I really never spent much time down here. The officers did, and if you were wounded, they often took you down here. But the rest of us lived up above, in the trenches, night and day, rain or shine.” Now, the restoration of some of that tunnel work has progressed, if what I saw on TV is any indication.

Over the top of the trenches and into battle at Vimy Ridge on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917.

The restored trench lines were constructed by filling sandbags with cement. The bags themselves have disintegrated with time and weather, but the concrete sandbags remain. Though the space in what was then “no-man’s land” is now grassed-over and clear, it was then strewn with the effluvia of battle: barbed wire, debris, dead soldiers and their equipment, shell holes, and mud, mud and more mud.

The first thing that struck this late 20th-Century visitor is how close together the trench lines were. Our now-late Vimy veteran from Mississauga said that when the Canadians began to replace the departing British, the Germans hung a banner that said “Welcome Canadians” from their lines, as much as to say that they knew what we were up to, who we were and that they were ready. At one point in the line, I picked up a stone, and standing just behind the Canadian trenches on the surface (where I would have been picked off by a sniper in seconds during the battle), I easily threw the stone from just behind the Canadian trench into the German trench opposite. Any decent softball player could do likewise. That war was fought up close and personal.

Our boys did good over there 90 years ago. And a Canadian of any age connects with his or her past, and our history, is a deep, personal and profoundly emotional way just to stand among the headstones and hear the whisper of the breeze in the leaves of the silent forests growing over the landscape of shell craters, all still visible from the Great War. To be among the teenagers and 20-somethings, born mostly in the 1880s and 1890s, and dead mostly before the age of 25, many in their teens, is to connect with a day that truly shaped Canadian nationhood. At the age that many Canadian kids pass into adulthood when they receive their undergrad degree, many of those kids passed into adulthood when they rode down from the Ridge as victorious veterans.

Many would fight and die another day in places like Passchendale. But in the aftermath of this day, they were the Canadian corps, and they had beaten the best the Germans had, taking a position the French, British and the Germans themselves had thought impregnable. Many of the battlefield innovations in tactics, combined arms and communications pioneered for Vimy Ridge persist to this day.

On Church Street in Streetsville, there’s a school named “Russell Langmaid.” I don’t know much about Russell Langmaid and his life, but I do know that he came from Streetsville, and served in World War One. And I hope more of the generation that would now be his great grandchildren will stand in awe of the monument to the sorrow of war that so dominates the Douai Plain near Arras at Vimy in northern France and let the history and pride of being Canadian, and the kinship of the souls of the boys who remain there, come into their consciousness as it did mine.