Fog of war and time cloud Vimy’s original message
Toronto sculptor Walter Allward’s magnificent Vimy Memorial is an ode to peace, reflecting the predominant Canadian sentiment in the decades after the First World War. The disastrous war killed some 60,000 Canadians, scarring countless others in body and spirit.
Allward originally planned that one of the Rodin-inspired figures adorning his mournful masterpiece would show a “Defender” stomping on a pickelhaube, a definitively German military helmet. Then he changed his mind. The suggestion was too militaristic.
The Defender is breaking his sword. The biblical reference is clear. “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares.” Allward described his monument as “a sermon against the futility of war.”
When the memorial was finally completed, thousands of Canadian “pilgrims” (religious symbolism abounds) attended the 1936 unveiling ceremony. They listened to “The Peace Hymn.” They heard “Guns,” a poem by Geoffrey O’Hara — “Crush out the hated curse of war.”
Canada’s first Silver Cross mother was an important participant at the ceremony. And Charlotte Susan Wood said something that mirrored the spirit of those years. “I just can’t figure out why our boys had to go through that,” she told King Edward VIII.
Aworking class mother from Winnipeg, Wood lost five sons to Britain’s imperial wars. The youngest, Percy, was killed at Vimy Ridge. He was 17 years old.
Why is it, then, that peace and questioning war have been largely airbrushed from commemorations surrounding Canada’s Vimy 100 commemorations?
They’ve been replaced by two themes that have mythologized Vimy beyond the tactical victory in the inconclusive Battle of Arras.
One is traditional militarist-patriotic understanding. Death-so-noble. Bravery. Heroism. The drum-and-bugle tone is clear. “We honour their valour,” offers a Canada Post ad featuring the Vimy Memorial. “We salute the brave Canadians.” Such narratives are common enough in war commemoration, always contested terrain. Just as Canadians struggled with loss and grief in the years after the Great War, some embraced militarist remembrance. A 1921 Armistice ball in Calgary featured an arch fashioned from bayonets and machine guns.
Another Great War interpretation emerged to dominate the Vimy story in the latter part of the last century. Pierre Berton’s 1986 ripping yarn, Vimy, helped set the stage. Ever the Anglo-Canadian nationalist, Berton had it that most of the soldiers were rugged sons of the Canadian frontier. But at least half were Britishborn.
The Legion sells ball caps emblazoned with “Vimy: Birth of a Nation.” The Vimy Foundation is going a step further with pricey, full page newspaper ads declaring April 9, 1917 “The day CANADA became a nation.” It was, we’re told, “Canada’s coming-of-age on the world stage.”
Historian Ian McKay and I have coined a term for such fanciful claims. “Vimyism” asserts that soldiers from across Canada, unified by ideals of self-sacrifice, worked together to take the ridge. And, in their unity, these men of long ago today provide Canada with memories of a longlasting source of national inspiration.
Except that when I visited the Vimy Memorial I counted the name Tayor carved more than 40 times into the limestone, among the thousands of Canadian missing. But there was only a single Tremblay, one of Quebec’s most common names. The simplistic Vimyist narrative ignores the way that the war ripped Canada apart, dividing French and English. The birth of which nation?
Quebecers may well remember what Vimyist mythology ignores. The battle was not primarily a Canadian, but a British victory, under British leadership, using largely British tactics, with a Britishborn army.
“Public rememberings of the Battle of Vimy Ridge need to be stripped of their nationalistic parochialism,” suggests Canadian War Museum historian Nic Clarke, suggesting a wider understanding of the war and Canadian identity.
Yet Vimyism has become the Official Story, promoted by government and martial nationalists in English Canada. From Don Cherry’s crude home-team boosterism to Gov. Gen. David Johnston’s dotty claim that Vimy constituted the birth of the nation because the Canadians were not subordinate to the British on that sleet-swept hill.
Other views persist. Montreal playwright David Fennario’s working class Verdun community was decimated by the war. Introducing his 2014 iconoclastic drama “Motherhouse,” he offers a distinctly anti-Vimyist interpretation. Let’s keep it in mind as the terrible battle’s centenary approaches.
“More and more as we observe the hundredth anniversary of the First World War, we come across films, novels, and plays that condole or celebrate that war as something honourable, rather than critique and condemn it as one of the worst crimes ever committed against humanity.”
Lest we forget.
The simplistic Vimyist narrative ignores the way that the war ripped Canada apart, dividing French and English. The birth of which nation?