Honour Vimy memory, not its myth
As we commemorate 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, we must be very careful.
It is certainly important to honour the soldiers who fought there, both those who died and those who survived and suffered with terrible, indelible memories of scenes that few others could comprehend, and who were treated so shabbily in the decades that followed.
To honour them in the truest way, we must not glorify what happened there, for the truth of Vimy was far from glorious, despite decades of deliberate mythmaking that has lacquered over the horrors of Vimy and the wider Western Front with a century’s worth of misguided romanticism and blind nationalism.
Vimy was certainly not the place where Canada became a nation. The taking of Vimy Ridge was mainly through the efforts of the British, led by Brits and using British and French strategies.
Contrary to the mythology, it was not the turning point of the war. It was a tragic and inconclusive battle.
The Canadians who survived it came home disillusioned and in many cases disgusted by the contrast between the high idealism that sold Canadians and their allies on the justness of the war, and the reality of the fighting itself, so pointless, so cynical and so cruel.
The regrettable tragedy of Vimy has been out there in the open all along, in novels written by Canadian veterans, in letters to the editor and other signed statements by former combatants whose letters home during the war had been so heartbreakingly sunny and optimistic, to avoid the censors’ redactions.
The tragedy is on view in the battle photos that shocked a nation when The Toronto Star and others published pages of them in 1934, complete with blunt headlines and captions that describe “the tragic and irrefutable arguments against war.”
Sculptor and architect Walter Allward loaded Canada’s Vimy memorial in France with symbols of bereavement, pacifism and anti-militarism, including the breaking of a sword. If anything, the monument is — in Allward’s own words — “a sermon against war.”
But by the time it was unveiled in 1936 — after 11 years of work — drums were beating for the Second World War and the tone was starting to change.
The conversion continued during Canada’s Centennial year in 1967, when Canada’s feverish yet still wobbly nationalism had good use for a heroic, patriotic legend of Vimy as the crucible of Canada, facts be damned.
Those facts show, again quite plainly, that the war itself, particularly the conscription crisis, was pulling Canada apart at its English-French seams, quite the opposite of the image we are invited to accept today. New Canadians from countries that became Canada’s enemies in the First World War were interned here in camps, and certainly did not see it as a nationbuilding experience.
By the 1980s, Pierre Berton and others were polishing Vimy into a post card from France that showed Canadians saving the day that others had lost, winning a battle that changed the outcome of the war and finally earning, through tenacity and grit, a seat at the international grown-ups’ table.
These efforts to change the narrative worked well, and today, many Canadians feel proud of an event that has been misrepresented. Canadians continue to tell themselves, especially this year, that Vimy was a great nation-building experience.
There’s always a risk, especially when the government tells us to celebrate something, that we get drawn into an unthinking nationalism. I’d like us to be able to respect those who went through the war, have solicitude for their suffering and honour what they experienced, yet also come to the same conclusion that many of them reached: let’s never do this again.
Jamie Swift and I, in researching our new book, The Vimy Trap, found that even the most conservative of Canada’s mainstream politicians of the 1920s and early 1930s, including wartime Prime Minister Robert Borden and Arthur Meighen, the father of wartime conscription, were later repelled by what had happened.
The centenary of the battle, coinciding with Canada’s 150th birthday, is a good time to remember sacrifice and misery, to reject war and violence and affirm our commitment to peace.
Canada is more than strong enough not to have to rely on a myth to prop up its selfimage.
Ian McKay holds the L.R. Wilson Chair in Canadian History at McMaster University and is the coauthor of The Vimy Trap, with Jamie Swift. Professor McKay will be lecturing on ‘What’s Wrong with Vimy Ridge’ at an event sponsored by the McMaster Alumni Association at the David Braley Health Sciences Auditorium on 11 April at 7 p.m.