Canadians to stop and mark bloody legacy of Battle of Vimy Ridge
Vimy.
The word conjures images of blood and death. Of men caught in barbed wire and mowed down by machine-gun fire. Of the horror and senselessness of war.
But for many Canadians it also sparks a fierce sense of nationalism. It’s the moment, they say, when Canada was born – or at least came of age as a country.
On Sunday morning, millions of Canadians will stop for a moment to remember those lost during the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
Some will gather around the soaring white monument erected on the high point that thousands of Canadians – farmers, miners, teachers and lawyers – had fought and died to capture exactly 100 years ago.
They will stand with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other dignitaries, including Prince Charles and sons William and Harry, amid the mournful skirl of a lone bagpiper and a children’s choir singing “In Flanders Fields.” Millions more will listen to the two-hour ceremony on their radios or watch on their televisions, or bow their heads at similar events at local monuments inscribed with the names of the dead.
Many like Toronto businessman Drew Hamblin, who will spend Sunday at Vimy with his Soldiers practice marching at the WWI Canadian National Vimy Memorial in Givenchy-en-Gohelle, France. Commemoration ceremonies will take place Sunday at the memorial to honour Canadian soldiers who were killed or wounded during the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917.
father and two children, had grandfathers who told them about the rain and the cold and the rat-infested tunnels.
“I got to see how it affected my grandfather,” Hamblin said. “And he, in turn, passed it on to me. We were inseparable when I was a kid, and this is my way of honouring him and everyone who fought with him.”
Others have only sepia-toned photographs or letters and diaries to remember great uncles and distant cousins who were among the 10,500 Canadians killed or wounded during the four-day battle for the ridge.
And then there will be those
for whom the connection to Vimy will be more symbolic, a recognition of the individual sacrifices and what they did for Canada and the world.
There is a fierce debate over the actual importance of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
The battle marked the first time all four Canadian divisions fought together side-byside during the war, advancing together into the sleet and bullets and bombs on April 9, 1917: Easter Monday.
Not only did the Canadians succeed where the English and French had failed by capturing the strategically important
ridge from the Germans, they did it with several innovative approaches to warfare.
“It was important just as a symbol of bringing everyone together,” said Jeremy Diamond, president of the Vimy Foundation, the mission of which is to promote and preserve Canada’s First World War legacy. “There’s a sense of accomplishment of what we did.”
In 1936, as Canadians and many others around the world watched the Vimy monument’s unveiling, retired brigadier-general Alexander Ross famously intoned that the battle had marked “the birth of a nation.” On Sunday, Canadians at home and in France will mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. A look at some of the numbers involved:
■ 25,000: The number of Canadians expected to attend.
■ 12,000: The number of Canadian students in that group.
■ 100,000: Estimated audience in 1936, when the Vimy Memorial was first dedicated.
■ 6,200: The number of Canadians who crossed the Atlantic by ship to attend that ceremony.
■ 10,000: Canadian casualties from the attack on April 9, 1917.
■ 11,285: The number of Canadian soldiers lost in the First World War who had no known graves, but whose names are inscribed on the memorial.
■ 60,000: Number of Canadians killed in the war.
But it wasn’t the largest battle that the Canadians fought in the First World War. The Somme and Passchendaele were bloodier. And even those who fought there said it wasn’t the most important.
“We fought other battles where the moral and material results were greater and more far reaching than Vimy’s victory,” Canada’s greatest First World War general, Sir Arthur Curry, said in April 1922. “It did not call for the same degree of resource and initiative that were displayed in any of the three great battles of the last hundred days: Amiens, Arras, Cambrai.”