Keeble McFarlane

The day dawned cold and wet, with snow and sleet blasting across the countryside as almost 30,000 soldiers huddled in trenches, tunnels and caverns carved from the chalky rock under a ridge which dominated the area. They were awaiting word to vacate their dark and dank but safe surroundings for the frightful world of thick mud, thunderous artillery barrages, flying metal, barbed-wire barricades and machine-gun bullets from an unseen opponent. It was Easter, 1917, and although those young men didn't know it, they were about to change the history of their young nation by securing respect and recognition for it among the family of nations, far beyond its size and influence. That nation is Canada, which on Monday will observe the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, an event which historians say marks its emergence into full independence. The prime minister, Stephen Harper, along with the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin of France, will commemorate the battle along with about 20,000 other people at a ceremony. They will also re-dedicate an impressive memorial after a CAN $20-million restoration.

At 5:30 am on April 9, 1917, almost 1000 Allied field guns opened fire on a six-kilometre stretch of the ridge, and elements of the four divisions which made up the Canadian Corps poured out of their hiding places to storm the high ground. They used a new technique they had rehearsed exhaustively over the previous weeks in which they advanced very close behind the falling shells, knowing that the Germans would be taking cover and couldn't shoot at them. The Canadians, led by a British general, Julian Byng, and his Canadian deputy, Arthur Currie, had trained using mock-ups of the target area. Currie had been horrified at the cavalier attitude of the British officer corps towards the infantry, and introduced the revolutionary concept of devolving some of the decision-making to front-line soldiers.
For one thing, everyone was issued a map of the area they were attacking, and each knew exactly what he had to do in the assault. Aeroplanes were also used to good effect to spot enemy emplacements and relay their locations to the gunners behind the lines.

Vimy is a long, flat-topped hill about 175 kilometres north of Paris, and had been a German stronghold since early in the war. They had successfully repulsed assaults by British and French forces at a great cost in lives. In early 1917 the war had bogged down with both sides trading artillery shells and the lives of thousands of young men, and nothing much to show for it. The allies felt they needed something to break the logjam, and decided to mount a new attack on Vimy, assigning the now-united Canadian force to the task. Well, the new tactics, tight training and high morale of the Canadians worked, and within five days they were in control of the ridge. It wasn't a cheap operation, though - more than 10,000 casualties, including almost 3,600 dead. And while this operation was successful, the Arras offensive, of which it was a part, was not. The Germans continued to hold their positions and the position remained static for another year and a half.

But the Vimy capture was the first important advance the allies had made in almost two years, and it was recognised. The king actually travelled to the area and knighted Currie right there. The other allies, including the newly engaged Americans, took notice, and Currie was put in charge of the Canadian contingent. From that point on, until the armistice in November 1918, the Canadian soldiers enjoyed considerable success, and their contribution won their country a seat at the peace talks in Paris in 1919 and in the League of Nations which came later.

Today, 90 years after those momentous events, nature has largely reclaimed the area. But the countryside is still pock-marked with shell-holes, and you don't have to dig too deeply into the ground to come across artifacts of the deadly clashes - shards of barbed wire here, spent shell-cases there; an old helmet, some machine-gun bullets, even unexploded mortar bombs or artillery shells capable of exacting the same deadly results they did almost a century ago. On the highest point of the ridge is a memorial which took three times as long to design and build as the war lasted. A sculptor from Toronto, Walter Allward, won a contest to design the monument, which has 20 statues depicting various aspects of the conflict. The largest is of a woman weeping over the loss of so many of the young nation's sons.
Nearby are the graves of thousands of fallen soldiers, and some 11,000 names are carved into the monument, which is made of limestone, and which has suffered the ravages of that modern scourge, acid rain. In recent years artisans have restored the monument to the glory it displayed when Edward VIII declared it open on July 26, 1936.

Several Canadian writers and historians point to Vimy as the event which cemented their country's coming of age. Canada was barely 50 years as a unified nation and entered the war as a British colony of eight million people, many of whom were recent immigrants from the Mother Country. It emerged from the conflict with a seat at many tables of power, and continued to do so through the Second World War and the Cold War, punching well above its weight class, as many commentators have noted.

In that same history-changing event, Australia and New Zealand also came of age in an operation quite different in outcome from the Canadian victory at Vimy. On April 25, 1915, troops from the faraway Pacific colonies - the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, or ANZAC - came ashore at a place called Gallipoli in Turkey with the intention of occupying Constantinople along with British and French troops. On that first day, enemy fire dispatched 2000 ANZAC soldiers and after eight months, almost 11,500 were killed. It was total disaster, and yet, ANZAC Day is an important event on the calendar of both nations, which commemorate the valiant manner in which the ANZAC boys conducted themselves. Two years later, in the pivotal Battle of the Somme on the western front, 45,000 Australians were to lose their lives, yet most Australians hardly remember the Somme.

The Polish national anthem contains the phrase "Jeszce Polska niez gine?a", which translates as "Poland is not yet lost", and the rallying cry of the Czechs is "Czeski národ neskoná", which means essentially the same thing. It's not only the Slavs, it seems, who consider winning as "not losing", and regard the way you fight as more important than the outcome of that fighting. But it all leaves unanswered the question - why does a country have to define itself by fighting and killing people?

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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