Vimy (38 page)

The snow was so heavy that some men lost their sense of direction. When Allen Hart, a private with the Winnipeggers, reached the top of the ridge, he didn’t know which way to go. To him the battle had taken on an unearthly aspect. Encased in a cocoon of sound and in the white mantle of the blizzard, he could see in the gun flashes the ghostly shapes of men falling around him. It did not occur to him that these men were hit. He simply thought they’d fallen into a shell hole or lost their bearings, as he had. Like so many others during these days of battle, he had no clear picture of what was going on. Later that same morning he found himself on the far side of the ridge, all alone, with no idea of how he’d got there. Over to his left he spotted some troops. These were Japanese Canadians from the reserve battalion-the 47th from British Columbia. It added to the weirdness of the occasion-the Orientals squatting on their haunches, grinning because the fight was over and they were still alive, and the soft snow still falling, mercifully concealing the ghastly carnage of war.

AFTERMATH

I suppose you’re all feeling pretty fine about the war news these days. There’s an absolutely different atmosphere about the war out here than there was a year ago. Everyone is in wonderful spirits. I can’t see now what the Germans have to gain by holding out much longer.… A German officer, Prussian Guard, who was taken prisoner in the scrap said that the defeat at Vimy Ridge was one of the hardest blows that the Germans had received in the war.…

Lieutenant Irving Findley
,
7th Brigade trench mortars
,
to his father, April 21, 1917

AFTERMATH

1

Gad Terence Neale stood on the top of Vimy Ridge gazing down at the scene below and felt a surge of unexpected emotion. His overall feeling was one of exhilarating freedom. It was, he thought, rather like climbing over a neighbour’s fence and looking into a yard that had been hidden from you all your life. Until a couple of days before, this had been forbidden territory; like the others in the corps, he had had no idea of what it was like on the far side of the ridge, only an overwhelming curiosity. Now he was able to look down on a rainbow world. In the woods below, the shattered trees were coming into leaf. Beneath them, daffodils, forget-me-nots, violets, primroses, and bluebells were bursting into flower. In the distance the fields were turning emerald green. This sudden relief from the monochrome of mud seemed unreal-almost as unreal as the suddenness of the victory the Canadians had achieved.

Neale was an Englishman, born in Watford, a market town in Hertfordshire. Bored by his work as a postal clerk, he had come to Canada in April of 1914. Having no skills or training he’d been advised to find work on a farm, and so had gone to northern Saskatchewan. There he got a job with his own kind, among the survivors of the Barr colony of English immigrants who’d arrived a decade before. A year later, at the age of seventeen, he’d gone to Lloydminster and enlisted. Now, at nineteen, he’d survived his first battle.

Young Private Neale could scarcely be called a Canadian. His five brothers were serving in British units. He himself had spent fewer than eighteen months in Canada, largely among recently arrived English. But now, standing on Vimy’s crest, he could no longer think of himself as English. He was part of a corps of young Canadians who had accomplished the impossible and done it with flair and dispatch. After the monotony of the trenches, Vimy had given Gad Neale new hope. For the first time he and his fellows had punched a hole in the four-hundred-mile line of German trenches. The British hadn’t done it; the French hadn’t done it;
they
had done it-the Canadians.

The world applauded. Robert Borden, who was in London at the time, was ecstatic: “… all newspapers ringing with praise of Canadians,” he scribbled in his diary. “CANADIANS SWEEP VIMY RIDGE,” cried the
Morning Post
. The rest of the press was just as enthusiastic. The
Nottingham Guardian
, in a long editorial entitled “Canadian Valour,”wrote that the battle “will stand out as an imperishable addition to the glory of the gallant colonials.” Philip Gibbs, the best-known correspondent of the war, hailed it as “the Canadians’ greatest day in the war since the capture of Courcelette.” Only the good grey
Times
refused to devote a leader to the victory or mention the Dominion troops in its initial coverage of the Battle of Arras, an oversight that Borden thought disgraceful.

The American papers were, if anything, more generous. The New York
Tribune
, in an editorial entitled “Well Done, Canada,” wrote that “every American will feel a thrill of admiration and a touch of honest envy at the achievement of the Canadian troops.… No praise of the Canadian achievement can be excessive. Canada has sent across the sea an army greater than Napoleon ever commanded in the field.” The
New York Times
wrote that the battle would be “in Canada’s history, one of the great days, a day of glory to furnish inspiration to her sons for generations.”

In this there was truth. The war had been dragging on for more than two and a half years. In battle after battle hopes had been raised only to be dashed. Vimy was a limited victory, to be sure. But it was a decisive one, its topography easily understood by civilians. All through the war a ridge of land had barred the way; the Canadians had captured that ridge with blinding speed. The British to the south had done well too, on the first day, but they had not all reached their objectives, and as the days wore on, the Battle of Arras ground to another disappointing halt. The Nivelle offensive to the south failed, dooming its over-optimistic commander to obscurity. But Vimy Ridge remained in Allied hands; the Germans never regained it; indeed, they did not even try. So the ridge became a physical symbol, marking a turning point in the war for the troops in France and the people back home. It was “the grandest day the Corps ever had,” in the words of Arthur Currie, who was almost immediately appointed to succeed Byng as Corps commander – to the fury of Garnet Hughes, who badly wanted the job.

For those who fought at Vimy, from Private Gad Neale to Fighting Frank Worthington, a future general, the brief, explosive battle was a turning point of a different kind. It turned both men, and thousands of others, into Canadians. Until this point the Old Country immigrants, new to Canada, had thought of themselves as British. Worthington, a Scottish-born soldier of fortune, had spent only nine days in Canada when he enlisted in 1917 in the 73rd Battalion. “I never felt like a Canadian until Vimy,” he was to say. “After that I was a Canadian all the way.”

In the days before Vimy, the Canadian Expeditionary Force had poked fun at themselves, in the Canadian fashion:

We are Sam Hughes’s army
Twenty thousand men are we
.
We cannot fight, we cannot march
,
What bloody use are we?

Now that rueful attitude was replaced by something quite different.

“They said in Lethbridge … we were a bunch of booze fighters but we showed them today what we could do,” one private soldier in the Canadian Scottish remarked to his platoon officer, Cyril Jones, after the battle.

Claude Williams wrote home that “the Canadian has lived down his reputation as a ‘rag-tag’ army and is now considered the best in the B.E.F. The Imperials think a great deal of the ‘Byng Boys’. One feels proud to be a Canadian out here now.”

Letters like that one plus the newspaper hyperbole conveyed a new spirit. A few days after the battle, Clifford Wells had time to post his mother “the most thrilling letter I have ever written you.… I hope you will find it the same. The greatest victory of the war has been gained, and I had a small part in it.”

Byng wrote home to his wife that “the Canucks … are just bursting with bonhomie and grinning from ear to ear.” The discipline and training had told and some went out of their way to thank the general for it. They had shown the sceptical French that the job could be done. Everybody liked the anecdote told by a young gunnery officer from the 25th Battery who, returning from England on Easter Monday, got the news in a café at Houdain that the ridge had been taken. A group of French officers at a nearby table who heard shook their heads. “C’est impossible,” one declared. Then he was told that the Canadians had done the job. “Ah! Les Canadiens!” he responded. “C’est possible!” Or so the story went.

Vimy convinced the Canadians that they were the finest troops on the Western Front. By naming them assault troops in the battles that followed, the High Command confirmed that belief. (The honour was not always appreciated by the private soldiers who found themselves exposed in the vanguard.) Ed Russenholt, the Lewis gun sergeant who’d been with the 44th in the attack on April 10, recovering from wounds a year later in an English hospital found an enormous difference in the soldiers who came to visit him on leave. They had, he noted, a pride, a confidence, and a professionalism that hadn’t existed in the early days. Russenholt came to believe, with thousands of others, that the Canadian nationality was born on that chill Monday in 1917.

This was no longer a corps of amateurs. Indeed, it was one of the most professional units on the Western Front, for the French and the British had already sacrificed the flower of their armies at Ypres, Verdun, and the Somme. As Byng wrote, “the good old Canucks behaved like real, disciplined soldiers” at Vimy.

In losing their amateur status, the Canadians also lost their innocence. Gone was the naïve enthusiasm, the carefree indiscipline that had marked the earlier years. The war was no longer a lark, no longer an adventure, but something to be endured by men who knew their job.

That attitude comes out strongly in the letters that Claude Williams was writing home that spring. Williams, who had once been so eager to get into action as a machine gunner that he was prepared to stow away on a ship to France, now wrote to a friend in Hamilton a month after the battle:

“… Although for me it is only about a year’s service in France, it seems as if I had been born out here and have never known anything but everlasting mud and perpetual shellfire. Now all of us feel ready for peace at the right time; the fire-eaters who, before experiencing heavy action only wanted to ‘get a poke’ at Fritz, have already simmered down and cannot ‘get their time’ soon enough.

“I think it is only natural. None of us have lost our nerve but the novelty has worn off and we have seen too much of the shady side of fighting to love it for the mere sake of adventure. When called upon, we are cheerfully ready to do anything we are told but do not feel the same wild enthusiasm as formerly. We are all steadied and sobered up.…”

At that point one of Williams’s closest friends was in hospital suffering from shell shock. A second was bedridden with shrapnel in his lung. A third had lost an eye. The remainder were suffering from hives, an allergy connected with imperfect diet but also with stress. The Claude Williams who wrote home from the blackened slopes of Vimy in the late spring of 1917 was a different man from the one who had arrived in France the previous October, eager to get in on what he called “the fun.”

2

It has become commonplace to say that Canada came of age at Vimy Ridge. For seventy years it has been said so often – in Parliament, at hundreds of Vimy dinners and in thousands of Remembrance Day addresses, in newspaper editorials, school texts, magazine articles, and more than a score of books about Vimy and Canada’s role in the Great War-that it is almost an article of faith. Thus it is difficult to untangle the reality from the rhetoric. Was Vimy the source of Canada’s awareness of itself as an independent nation or the product of it?

It is a historical fact that Canada entered the war as a junior partner of Great Britain and emerged as an equal, her status confirmed when she, with the other Dominions, was given her own vote at the League of Nations. But did this really spring from the victory at Vimy? Or was Vimy simply used as a convenient symbol, a piece of shorthand to stand for a more complicated historical process that, in the end, was probably inevitable?

Does it matter? What counts is that in the minds of Canadians Vimy took on a mythic quality in the post-war years, and Canada was short of myths. There is something a little desperate-a little wistful-in the commentaries of the twenties and the thirties and even later, in which Canadians assured one another over and over again that at Vimy, Canada had at last found its maturity.

No overall hero emerged from the Canadian Corps – no Wellington, no Cromwell, no Washington. Byng, who could have been one, was British. Currie, who should have been, was undermined by rumours. The real heroes were the masses of ordinary soldiers who fought and died in the belief they were making the world a better place, and their inventive leaders who stubbornly refused to follow the old rules of war. The single word
Vimy
stood for them all and helped to soften in Canada the bitterness of the post-war years. Canadians could grumble that Ypres, the Somme, and Pass-chendaele were bungled by the British. But Vimy! That was Canada’s, and nobody could take that victory away. In the years between the two World Wars, every schoolchild, every veteran’s son, every immigrant was made aware of it.

It is difficult now to conjure up the intensity of the Vimy fever that swept across the country in those two decades. After the first burst of publicity the impact of the battle was blunted everywhere but in Canada. It was, at best, a limited tactical victory. Canadians made much of the fact that the ridge remained as an anchor point to protect the British flanks for the rest of the war. But it’s hard to believe it greatly affected the outcome. Only in Canada is it called the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Elsewhere it’s part of the British Battles of Arras. Liddell Hart, in his definitive history of the Great War, gives it no more than a paragraph. The Americans quickly forgot it and today have never heard of it. But at home it became part of the cultural baggage that every loyal Canadian carried. The word popped out of innumerable broadcasts, interviews, and news stories. Anyone who had served at Vimy was described in the press not as a Great War veteran but as a Vimy veteran (and still is). The word, of course, was short enough to fit any headline, but there was more to it than that. Vimy dinners were held annually to mark the victory (and still are). Parks, schools, city streets bore the name. The sacred word was carved on a stone high up in the Ottawa Peace Tower. Some families even named a child Vimy. In the drumfire repetition of that word, that slogan, could be sensed the longing to tell the world and ourselves that we had passed through the fire and not been found wanting.