Vimy monument’s story brilliantly told

Photos depict sacrifice in great detail

In a few months, I shall be walking on the sacred ground of Vimy Ridge at last. Reading this powerful book by Jacqueline Hucker and Julian Smith, with its wonderful photos, confirmed my plan to spend the last days of my French vacation on this site that is so important to our nation.

It would be difficult to find authors more qualified to write the first major publication about Vimy Ridge and the memorial that stands there above the French countryside. Jacqueline Hucker was the historian who served on the international team that restored the monument from 2004 to 2007, a team which was led by Julian Smith, a noted Canadian conservation architect. They have produced a beautiful book, designed by Alison R. Hall.

They are fully of the mind of Walter Allward, who won the competition to design a monument for the site, where the four divisions of the Canadian Corps went over the top together for the first time, in a four-day battle that dislodged the German army from a stronghold in Northeastern France and, they write, “served to reinforce Canada’s awakening sense of independence and nationhood.”

Allward was determined that Canada’s first national war memorial would not glorify the military accomplishment of Vimy, great though it was, but the loss of life and the sacrifice made for our country — 3,598 deaths, twice as many wounded, one of the highest casualty rates of the entire war and, military historian Tim Cook says, the most intense and costliest victory in Canadian military history.

“The idea of a noble sacrifice for a just cause was a theme that informed many First World War memorials,” the authors write.

“Although later it became a common theme, it, nonetheless, introduced a radically new understanding of the role of the public war memorial as a commemorative expression of a democratic society.

“In essence, it acknowledges for the first time that it was the common soldier who fought and won the war.”

The twin pylons at Vimy represent Canada and France, Allward said. His plan included many statues carved from the same white Croatian marble as the rest of the monument, notably the giant figure of Canada Bereft gazing down from between the pylons at the empty tomb below, mourning her dead.

The empty tomb reminds us of the thousands of soldiers whose bodies were never found or not identified. But they are not forgotten at Vimy. On its walls are engraved the names of 11,285 missing Canadians who died in France, an incredible listing that carves into our minds the human cost of war. These names were sandblasted on to the walls and then refined by hand.

According to Hucker and Smith, master stone carver Luigi Rigamonti was brought from Italy to carve the Canada Bereft figure, which, they say, is “the essence of the monument, Allward’s own anguished response to the carnage.” So fine was Rigamonti’s work that he was convinced to oversee the carving of all the figures: The Defenders at either end, identified by Allward as the Breaking of the Sword and the Sympathy of Canadians for the Helpless, the Spirit of Sacrifice and the Passing of the Torch, and, on the columns, figures representing the ideals of Truth, Faith, Justice, Charity, Knowledge and Peace.

On site, it would be impossible to see most of these statues close up, so the photos in this book are particularly welcome. They also illustrate the beauty of the setting: The pine forest planted there, the grassed shell holes, the peaceful French countryside of today.

Canadians feared for the safety of their memorial during the Second World War and, when stories circulated that it had been destroyed, Adolf Hitler stood on the site to show they were not true. But the caring about Vimy passed, the monument deteriorated, the site was remodelled and only in the 21st century was it brought back to its original glory.

The story of how this came about, details of the original competition and Allward’s dream of the dead marching through the forest to help the living in the battle that inspired his design, the strong support of the Canadian and French governments — it is all here in this splendid book, and in the cathedral on Vimy Ridge that commemorates our dead and the country they loved and fought for. VIMY: CANADA’S MEMORIAL TO A GENERATION By Jacqueline Hucker and Julian Smith Sanderling Press, $25