VIMY OAKS A LIVING LEGACY

After more than a century, oak trees are again growing on the French battlefield near Vimy Ridge. How this has come to be is a uniquely Canadian story spanning the decades and the country’s breadth. It begins with Leslie Miller. Growing up on an Ontario farm, his goal was always to be a teacher. He loved people and was gifted in languages, eventually mastering English, French, German, Spanish, Greek and Hebrew.

His first teaching job was in Weyburn in southeastern Saskatchewan. Had the First World War not intervened, W.O. Mitchell, author of the beloved Who Has Seen the Wind would likely have been his student. But the war was sparked on July 28, 1914 with the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir of the Austro Hungarian empire.

Although a world away, Miller’s life along with those of the nearly 620,000 Canadian men and women who enlisted was dramatically altered. The young teacher signed on as a private in the 24th Border Horse that October. By December, he was in Winnipeg as a member of the Signal Corps assigned to the 32nd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which had only been formed a month earlier. His language abilities made him a prime candidate for decoding messages intercepted from the Germans.

Terrible storms kept the battalion stuck in Winnipeg until February and it wasn’t until April 22, 1915 that they arrived in Shorncliffe, England. Ominously, it was the eve of the first gas attack in Ypres, directed against Canadian and French forces.

Miller was deployed to France near the Belgian border six months later and on Easter Monday in 1917, the 26-year-old was engaged in the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

It was brutal. At its end, 3,598 Canadians were dead and more than 7,000 were wounded — the casualties are equal to the current populations of Nelson, B.C. or Weyburn.

“People today have no real sense of that,” Vimy Foundation executive director Jeremy Diamond said earlier this week. “We were a country of eight million when we went to war and 600,000 served. Today, if the same percentage enlisted, it would mean three million people.”

Miller’s war diary is mostly filled with stories about people he met. But he also wrote about those terrible days at Vimy.

“I was out over the top carrying wounded and I was up as far as Thelus village. It was utterly destroyed by our shellfire,” Miller wrote.

He had climbed the ruined tower of the Abbey at Mont Saint Eloi — “It was by far the worst sight I have ever seen.”

Giant oaks and almost every other living thing were decimated.

But as he walked the battlefield, Miller found a half buried oak tree and gathered acorns that he mailed in a canister to his family in Ontario — a hopeful souvenir from a field of death.

For health reasons, Miller was never able to return to teaching. Instead, he went back to the family farm near Scarborough where he planted the acorns along with sugar maples, black walnut and other hardwoods on 24 acres given to him by his father.

By the time Miller died at age 84 in 1970, his Vimy acorns had grown into towering trees. But what he couldn’t have foreseen is that their progeny would eventually be returned to the battlefield to replace the ones that had never returned.

From the 10 surviving oaks on the land now home to the Scarborough Chinese Baptist Church, a non-profit called Vimy Oaks Legacy, has been growing trees from cuttings and acorns and providing them as living memorials across Canada.

But to mark the Vimy battle, 100 of those saplings are now growing at Centennial Park close to the Vimy memorial in France, which was officially opened Friday.

Although they’re already nearly two metres tall, they won’t even begin producing acorns for at least 40 years and they won’t reach full maturity for 80 to 120 years.

Miller’s oaks are the centrepiece of the four-acre park.

Except for the people of British Columbia, it might not have happened.

As the park’s major sponsor, British Columbia provided $360,000 of the $1.3 million needed to clear the site of unexploded ordinances and turn it into a place of quiet reflection. It was a decision made by former finance minister Mike de Jong and borne out of his family’s own experience with war.

His parents survived the Nazi occupation of Holland during the Second World War.

They rarely talked about it and no war movies were ever allowed in de Jong ’s Fraser Valley home.

De Jong ’s father was one of the teenage boys who helped get downed Allied airmen to the coast so they could get on boats back to England.

One night, armed with a pistol, the 15-year-old was rowing an airman across the river when the Nazi searchlights blazed. The airman threw him down and out of sight, then rowed like mad to the other side.

For three long days, the pair hid in the woods. Had they been found, de Jong ’s father would likely have been shot immediately; the airman would have been sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.

When his mother’s village was liberated in 1945, she and her 11 siblings hadn’t had anything to eat for three weeks. A Canadian soldier nursed them back to health.

“The notion of what these troops — young men and young women — did at a very early stage of their lives really does affect me knowing how war impacted my family, my immediate family. I find it very emotional and difficult to talk about,” de Jong said.

“You have to get beyond the row upon row of headstones to realize that each is a story cut short ... Then, it all becomes very real and the fear is that in this country there is a diminishing realization how terrible that was.”

More than 1.7 million Canadians served in the First and Second World Wars. Another 26,791 served in Korea.

In the two world wars, more than 110,000 Canadians were killed; 516 died in Korea.

Since then, 159 Canadians have died as peacekeepers and peacemakers in Afghanistan and 23 lost their lives in Bosnia.

All of those lives cut short. All of those loved ones left behind. And then there are the hundreds of thousands of wounded whose lives were forever changed.

As time passes, their stories and our connections to them grow fainter. But for the next century and more, the Vimy oaks will be living reminders of lives forever changed by war, lest we forget. dbramham@postmedia.com Vimy Oaks Legacy provides trees to Canadian organizations and individuals for a donation of $1,000. The Vimy Foundation is a Canadian charity that promotes awareness of Canada’s First World War legacy and is responsible for the upkeep of Centennial Park in France.

You have to get beyond the row upon row of headstones to realize that each is a story cut short.