Student shares personal connection to First World War
As a winner of the Vimy Foundation’s Beaverbrook Vimy Prize, Duchess Park secondary student Ariadne Douglas was among 16 students from Canada, the United Kingdom and France to travel to England, France and Belgium this past August.
The award allowed her to study the interwoven history of Canada, France and Great Britain during the First and Second World Wars. And during her time overseas, she attended lectures at Oxford, visited Essex Farm in Belgium where John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields, the Canadian National Vimy Memorial and other key sites in France and Belgium.
The Canadian Corps entered the Battle of Passchendaele on Oct. 26, 2017, and the first objectives were captured the following day. By Nov. 10, the last remaining German forces had been pushed from the ridge and the offensive was called off and victory declared. Passchendaele cost the Canadian Corps 16,404 casualties; many of the wounded left on the battlefield drowned in the mud and water before they could be rescued.
As part of the 2017 program, Douglas researched and wrote a tribute to Alexander Decoteau, a soldier who fell at Passchendaele; her Great Uncle Bill McCabe also fought at Passchendaele, and survived.
Here is both that tribute and her thoughts and impressions from her visit to Juno Beach on the Normandy coast in France. It was where Canadian troops landed on D-Day, June 6, 1944, a turning point in the Second World War.