The quest for our fallen Vimy warriors
NEUVILLE-ST-VAAST, Fr an ce — A race is on to try to locate and identify the remains of 48 Canadian soldiers whose bodies were inadvertently buried and subsequently forgotten 97 years ago during the battle for Vimy Ridge.
There is urgency to the hunt: the potato field where the Canadians are believed to have fallen fighting the Germans is soon to be transformed into a building site for several small factories. It’s part of an effort to alleviate unemployment in a severely economically depressed part of northern France.
Norm Christie of Ottawa, author of more than 20 books on Canada’s warriors in Europe, is convinced that the bodies of soldiers of the 16th Battalion, 3rd Brigade, the 1st Canadian Army Division — usually called the Canadian Scottish Regiment — lie about 20 feet deep in rich soil a couple of kilometres from the famous ridge where it is often said Canada came of age as a nation.
“A Canadian Corps burial officer was to have arranged to have somebody bring them in, but for some reason they weren’t,” was what Christie concluded after poring over war graves records and official military accounts of the day. Some of those thought to be lying in the field were to have been taken to the nearby 9 Elms Cemetery.
“Their crosses are there, but their bodies aren’t,” said Christie, 58, who worked for years for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in England and France.
Examining a map with scribbled co-ordinates of the battle, which was never given a name, Christie pointed to a field near a major highway that runs next to Neuville-St-Vaast. Give or take 30 metres or so, he reckoned that this was probably where the soldiers, who were from British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario, lie.
“You figure this out by looking for statistical anomalies,” he said. “All graves are registered and these ones weren’t, so these soldiers were never accounted for” in several Canadian cemeteries in the vicinity, including one, known as Zivy Crater, about 500 metres away where 48 Canadians were buried together.
Christie runs personalized one-and-two-week battlefield tours of France and Belgium for those interested in the minutiae of where and how the Canadian Expeditionary Force fought. The goal at Neuville-St-Vaast is to locate the missing, have them identified through DNA analysis and then give them a proper military burial in a new cemetery, or in a Canadian cemetery in the vicinity.
When told where Christie’s research had led him, a farmer tilling the soil in an adjacent field said it was quite possible Canadians were buried in the area who had never been accounted for, although it was the first time he had heard of it.
“We find unexploded shells all the time because this was a very dangerous place back then, so why not bodies, too?” he said, adding: “It was terrible what the Canadians and Germans endured here.”
That fact can be seen in a military cemetery one kilometre away, where 44,000 German soldiers who fought at Vimy Ridge and in other battles are buried.
Christie was inspired by the literally groundbreaking research of a retired Australian teacher and amateur historian who noticed, in 2002, differences between the number of unknown Australian soldiers buried and the lists of the missing where a battle had taken place at Pheasant Wood in the summer of 1916. The mass grave of 250 Australians and Britons was discovered with the help of aerial reconnaissance in 2008. Two years later, Australia and Britain built the first new Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in half a century at Pheasant Wood.
The casualty figures from the First World War remain numbing to read today. From the Allied forces, more than 5.5 million died and nearly 13 million were wounded.
Casualty figures for the Canadians vary, but of 620,000 Canadians sent to Europe, about 61,000 were killed and nearly 172,000 were wounded. The bodies of as many as 10,000 of those Canadians were never accounted for. There are also 6,846 Canadians buried as “unknown soldiers” in Commonwealth cemeteries.
Christie thinks a dig to exhume the remains of Canadians near Neuville-St-Vaast would cost about $100,000. “It would entail a sub-surface examination using ultrasound and other types of underground radar to try to find enough gaps, if you like, to plot the underground strata here at about 20 feet,” he said. “That would give you a logical idea of where to start your dig.”
Before trying to locate and recover bodies, it is necessary to do a more thorough “paper search in archives,” he said. “But from what we have so far, it is pretty definite that there are at least 44 men ... buried here, all killed April 9, 1917. All the paperwork points to that.”
While those men were only a small part of the force of four Canadian divisions that attacked that day, recovering them is not only important to honour all those who fell 100 years ago, Christie said. This particular battlefield “is one of the most important in Canadian history” because it played a part “in the capture of Vimy Ridge,” he said.