Vimy speaks to us still

Ayear ago, I saw the date on the calendar and the history buff in me got excited. “Guys,” I emailed my three sons, “next year is the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. We simply have to be there.” Easier said than done.

My sons are now 25, 23, and 19, and live in three different cities, in three different countries. Fortunately, they’re as mad for history as I am, so we resolved to figure it out. And we did. It all came together in Belgium and France this past weekend.

To prepare for the trip, I read Tim Cook’s excellent new book on Vimy. And my middle son Henry showed me an article in Canada’s History magazine. It was there that I learned of the Lomax family from Banff, Alta., who sent their three sons, George, John, and William, off to war. Tragically, all three perished. They were among the 60,000 Canadians (in a nation then of less than eight million people) who made the ultimate sacrifice.

“We might have won the war but we lost the family,” said Ed McDonald, the Lomax’s nephew. The three Lomax brothers also had a younger sister, “who carried the pain of their loss for the rest of her life.”

Their story resonates so much with me because it mirrors my own family situation: three sons and a daughter. How did she carry on after sustaining such tragedy? It’s unfathomable. Unlike today, where few of us are directly touched by Canada’s military efforts, no part of Canada was sheltered from the personal agony and loss of war 100 years ago.

As my sons and I travelled through Ypres, we visited one of the 1,000 cemeteries across Belgium and France which house the final resting places of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. It dawned on me that had we been living in Canada a century ago instead of today, I’d almost certainly have lost one, if not all of my sons. The ages on the headstones in Ypres were frightening — almost all were in their 20s, and too many more were teenagers. It was an appalling loss of an entire generation.

Our next stop was the Menin Gate, one of the most shocking war memorials we’d ever seen. The gate, in Ypres, was unveiled in 1927 and with the exception of when the Nazis occupied Belgium during the Second World War, it has featured the playing of The Last Post every night at eight. The names of an unimaginable 55,000 soldiers, killed during the war that was supposed to end all wars, are chiselled into the arch’s walls. Nearly 7,000 of those names belong to Canadians.

All of this was the lead up to one of the most meaningful days of our lives. On the highway from Ypres to Vimy, one can see the huge, tall pillars of Walter Allward’s memorial on the horizon from miles away. I had never seen “Mother Canada” before; it is a marvel to behold. British architect Sir Edward Lutyens said of it, “It will make a great impression for all time.” Sir Edward was so right. The monument is mammoth, and unlike so many war monuments, there is no glorification of war. The sadness of “Canada bereft” is heartbreaking.

Vimy remains one of Canada’s most spectacular, myth-making military victories, but it’s also the most horrendous battle in our history — nearly 3,600 dead and 7,000 were wounded over the four days. My sons were pleased with the speeches by Gov. Gen. David Johnston, Prince Charles, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who got an enormous ovation from a crowd of 25,000, overwhelmingly represented by high school students. The interest shown by young people to cross the ocean, and sit in the hot sun for seven hours before the ceremonies had even begun spoke well of their interest in history, and their increasing awareness of the sacrifices made by kids who back then wouldn’t have been much older than they are today.

My francophile sons were particularly impressed with French President Francois Hollande’s remarks. The Canadian representatives appropriately beseeched us to remember the sacrifices of our countrymen, but Hollande, they thought, made his plea particularly relevant to today when he urged the world to prevent Syria’s continuing use of poison gas, something the boys on the front lines understood all too well a century ago.

My daughter stayed home for this trip. She’s a bit young still for the intensity of all of this. But Zachary, Henry, and Teddy agreed it was a supremely meaningful experience. As we left Vimy we realized how fortunate we are to be living in the Canada of today.

Yes, we all know Vimy wasn’t strategically one of the most important battles of The Great War. And we appreciate the place it has in the maturation and myth-making of Canada. But this may be one of the rare occasions when I can speak for all of us in saying, we are so lucky to have been born in Canada in the latter half of the 20th century, and have a good chance to do something billions of others in this world can’t: live a normal, relatively peaceful life, absent the horrors of a battlefield, but never forgetting those who made the beauty of that normalcy possible. Lest we forget? We never will.