‘We haven’t learned a thing, have we?’
VIMY ‘PRIDE’ CAN NEVER DIMINISH THE PAIN
Willie McGregor was sitting in a tent, sipping on bottled water and peeling an orange. It was going to be a long day, the 94-year-old Albertan said, as the hot April sun beat down on Vimy. The last time McGregor was in France was June 1944. He landed on the beaches of Normandy — as an army medic — and saw things that no person should ever see.
“There are times when I’ll think about the war every night,” McGregor says. “I was asked after I came back if I wanted to work in a hospital and I said, ‘No, I’ve seen enough blood.’
“I went into farming. I have had a good life.”
On Sunday, McGregor was here, at Vimy, positioned in the shade near the soaring Canadian Memorial. “It is an honour,” he said. The 25,000 other Canadians who came, many wearing red and white, would agree. A 21gun salute was fired, replica biplanes flew past, bagpipes played, a minute of silence was observed. Prime ministers, presidents and future kings gave speeches. Justin Trudeau elicited roars from the crowd, speaking of “the burden they bore, the country they made;” the Prince of Wales intoned, “this was Canada at its best;” while François Hollande said the “message of Vimy was to stand united.”
But Vimy, at its core: is for the Canadian people, a memorial to 3,598 farmers, city boys and fishermen, killed taking a ridge that no other nation could take. The land is a gift from France, paid for in Canadian blood. Walter Allward’s soaring monument exudes an aura of permanence.
In northern France and nearby Belgium, the war — even 100 years after Vimy — is not viewed at a distance, but up close. People hear that you are a Canadian and some smile with surprise. Every village has a cenotaph. Every other field, it seems, a cemetery.
“THEY DID NOT WAVER. THIS WAS CANADA AT ITS BEST. THE CANADIANS AT VIMY EMBODIED THE TRUE NORTH, STRONG AND FREE.” — PRINCE CHARLES SPEAKING AT THE VIMY MEMORIAL CEREMONY
Kurt DeBacker was born in Ypres, Belgium, the site of the world’s first gas attack, a town pulverized during four years of fighting, a place full of Canadian ghosts.
“I grew up in the world’s largest graveyard,” DeBacker says.
When DeBacker was a kid — he is 46 now — his mother would tell him to watch out for the rusty bits in the garden, shrapnel pieces that he and his pals dug up by the bucket and traded in at the museum for Snickers bars. He was 13 when his school principal appeared at the class door and asked his friend, Laurent, to step outside.
“Laurent didn’t return to school for two weeks,” DeBacker says. “His father was a sugar beet farmer. He plowed over an old shell and was killed when it exploded.
“My friends, we grew up playing in the Commonwealth cemeteries — we were respectful of them — but the grass there was always so soft and green.”
That grass was once mud. Deep and thick, and full of the dead, about 50 per cent of whom were never identified. What sometimes gets forgotten in the memory wars — in the tribal custom of honouring our dead — is that the Germans were boys, too. With moms and dads and brothers and sisters and stories and dreams that died in the mud. In this land of bones, it is hard to find a place more lonesome than a German cemetery.
“I went to a German cemetery and it was very emotional for me,” says Heike Hemlin, a German-born public servant who moved to Canada 25 years ago. Hemlin grew up in a culture of silence, when being German meant being ashamed of what your grandparents and great-grandparents had done. “We were the bad guys,” she says.
Commonwealth cemeteries are full of light, colourful flowers, manicured grass and white marble headstones. German crosses are black. The men are buried in mass graves. There are no flowers. Germany rents the land — in perpetuity, relying on groups of schoolchildren and volunteer donations to maintain their burial sites. It is punishment, everlasting, for starting the war, and it is part of the tragedy of it.
The pain is everywhere: John Kelsall’s father, Sam, fought at Vimy. Sam would often tell the story of a farm boy in his unit from Saskatchewan. When a hand grenade landed in a trench full of men, the boy pounced it — sacrificing himself for his friends.
“My father would tell that story with tears in his eyes,” Kelsall says.
Peter Robinson’s great-grandfather, Pte. Edward J. Clement, survived Vimy, but was killed three months later near Arras. His widow, Elizabeth, lived for another seven decades.
“I saw what his death caused,” Robinson says. “Sadness, anger, financial strain — not least because the politicians of the day were so indifferent to the widows’ plight.”
Six days ago, Gen. (ret.) Rick Hillier addressed a crowd of Vimy pilgrims on a boat gliding up the Seine River and told them how, if they were proud of being Canadian now — if their hearts beat red — that their hearts would be bursting come Sunday, April 9th. There is pride, indeed, great big chests full of it, being here, on this day, and listening to stories about our greatgreat-grandparents’ generation, dying, living, fighting like lions to the everlasting gratitude of the French.
But pride, perhaps, isn’t the correct word at Vimy, with its soaring monument, and with the politicians on-hand to give speeches on the 100th anniversary of an event where nothing needed to be said.
Words can’t capture the magnitude of the place. Look east, away from the monument, over the Douai Plain, and what you see is beauty: farmers’ fields, rich and green in the April afternoon light. Walk around the base of the monument, however, and the meaning of Vimy is clear. It is carved into the stone — 11,285 names of the Canadians who died in France and whose bodies were never found.
“We haven’t learned a thing, have we?” Willie McGregor said, his voice full of wonder. “I think of this world, and it is still a terrible mess.”