National Post (National Edition)
VIMY 100: THE HISTORIC TIES THAT BIND,
MAKING THE TREK KEEPS IT REAL FOR RELATIVES OF THE FALLEN
History buffs grow especially animated when they learn the identity of Cathy Moore’s famous, long dead relative, which can be a “weird” experience, Moore confesses, since her connection to Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian first division at Vimy, and one of the brains behind the victorious assault on the impregnable ridge — is one of distance. Sir Arthur died in 1933. And many, many years later, Cathy Moore, his great-granddaughter, was born, a birth that had nothing to do with the general’s place in history, but has secured his legacy to Moore nonetheless.
“There is a pride associated with his story,” Moore says. “He was a self-made guy, and we were taught our entire lives that you can be whatever you want to be.”
Moore first got to know the general in middle school in Montreal, when he started appearing in her textbooks. Sparking an interest that precipitated her reading the voluminous newspapers clippings her great-grandmother, Lucy, kept about him, plus two oversized books full of condolences the family received from all corners of Canada — and beyond — when he died. Many of the notes are handwritten. Many are from strangers and many more from friends, including Lady Byng (of hockey trophy fame), as well as another correspondent who saw in Currie the very embodiment of “Canadian-ness.”
Moore and her mother, Marylyn, will be at Vimy on Sunday for the 100th anniversary. It is a trip they had to make.
“There is a real feeling of wanting to be there,” Marylyn says. “To feel that horror, and to remember the victory. War affects everybody. It affected my Dad, who was sent away to boarding school while his Dad was off in his military career, and it affected me — by not meeting my Dad (Garner Currie), who was in World War II — until I was four.
“These are very defining things in a life.”
After the Great War ended the pilgrims came, by the thousands, from all over Europe. Grieving mothers, wives, fathers, aunts, uncles and siblings, walking the scarred French countryside, searching for the place their son or husband had fallen — and for a grave to weep over — if one existed. The French countryside was awash in grief.
The Canadian pilgrims came later. Not out of any unwillingness to go back, but because actually getting to France — in the age before direct flights — was too costly and time consuming. The first mass Canadian pilgrimage coincided with the unveiling of the Vimy monument in 1936. It involved close to 7,000 vets and scores of mothers, whose sons had been lost. The men drank and sang and wept. The mothers formed a circle and held hands.
In time, the Vimy generation died off. But pilgrims still walk the land.
John Kelsall had never been to Vimy before this week. Then, suddenly, there he was on Wednesday, at age 82, alongside his two grown boys, Johnnie and Rob. John is a big man, and as he moved up the path toward the soaring Canadian memorial, which looks to the East, he grew quiet.
His dad, Sam, fought at Vimy, and he talked about it afterwards, right up until the day he died in 1985.
“He was just a boy when he was here,” John says. “Moving up this ridge, lugging his machine gun in the mud and the rain and the snow, and with men moaning and dying all around.
“Can you imagine that? It must have been hell.”
The road to the monument passes a pine forest planted by Canadians, and cordoned by an electric fence. Intermittently placed red signs read: “Danger: No Entry. Undetonated Explosives.”
The war seems real here, at Vimy. It is not in a textbook, it is in an actual place. And the stories of this place were once the stories of the living. Some are heroic. Some mundane. Some haunting.
Some turn us into pilgrims.
Mike Butler is a retired banker. He loves the Montreal Canadiens — the Rocket was his favourite player as a kid. His grandfather, Joseph Stanley McCoy, was killed near Vimy. McCoy was 27 when he enlisted. He loved a girl named Elise. The couple dated for a time, got married and got pregnant, just as McCoy was shipping out to Europe. He was killed on August 24, 1917, never having met his daughter, Rosamund.
“My grandparents were probably together as a married couple for six weeks,” Butler says.
McCoy is buried in a small graveyard in the village of Villers-au-Bois. Elise never remarried afterwards, and seldom spoke of her dead husband. It wasn’t until after his grandmother and mother had died that an aunt told Butler a story he could hold onto. Elise was staying with her family in a grand home in Ingersoll, Ontario, when an army truck rolled up the long driveway in the fall of 1917. A soldier got out and asked to speak with her. She went “cold,” her sister recalled. Turning away from the news, disappearing upstairs, retreating into a silence that would stay with her for the rest of her life.
Butler has visited his grandfather’s grave twice before. Butler is making the pilgrimage to Vimy now, because, he says, these are “not people you forget.” He has brought a gold watch and chain with him. It belonged to his grandfather. It is initialled J.S.M. It keeps perfect time.
Joseph Stanley McCoy’s 71-year-old grandson winds it every day.