Vimy (40 page)

“I wonder,” he thought, “what she would have said about it twenty years ago?”

The memorial itself was fenced off by a barricade, but the Moulds could easily examine nineteen of the twenty carved figures that adorned the massive structure – none of them warlike effigies. One was swathed in a Union Jack and would shortly be unveiled by the King himself, the uncrowned Edward VIII, soon to be embroiled in a constitutional struggle over the problem of his mistress, Wallis Simpson.

By 1:15 that afternoon a contingent from England had swelled the gathering to eight thousand Canadians. Behind them, thousands more French citizens were waiting for the King. These included a scattering of young men and women seeking their Canadian fathers. A little apart from the Canadian veterans in their khaki berets was a sadder group-some twenty-five hundred war widows in blue berets. Eleven old soldiers blinded in the war occupied a special position.

At last the King arrived, flaxen-haired and boyish, medals glittering on his morning coat. Bands played. Officials bobbed and weaved. Crowds cheered as the King walked slowly through the lines, stopping to talk to a medal winner here, a one-armed man there. As he moved, the emotion grew, and Jack Mould noticed that the entire crowd began to vibrate, like grain caught in the wind. There were speeches and a flypast by the air force and the soft notes of “The Flowers of the Forest” echoing mournfully down the slopes. Then, just as the King stepped onto the rostrum, the sun came out as it had on that day so long ago when the victorious troops surged across the crest.

Jack Mould looked down on the throngs clustered on the grass of the ridge, with the yellow cornfields and the red-roofed villages shimmering in the sunlight. It seemed impossible that just nineteen years before this whole area had been a muddy, pitted desert. He looked about him – at the blind men and the armless men and the one-legged men, all listening to the soft English voice of their ruler, speaking of death and dedication, sacrifice and immortality, and “a feat of arms that history will long remember and Canadians can never forget.” And he wondered what the blind men thought of it all.

Down came the flag, revealing a marble sculpture of a mourning mother. The barricade vanished and the crowd swarmed over the monument, searching for the names of friends and relatives carved on the wall of the plinth. The rows of names seemed endless-more than eleven thousand. This was all that was left of all those Canadian war dead whose bodies had not been recovered from the mud and who would never sleep beneath the crosses, row on row, in Flanders fields.

All that afternoon, the living milled about, making their communion with the dead. At six, the buses took them back to Arras. Like the battle itself, the pilgrimage had been a masterpiece of organization, due in good part to the abilities of the officer-in-charge, Lieutenant-Colonel D.E. Macintyre, D.S.O., M.C., the former Brigade Major of the 7th, who knew Vimy as well as he knew his own street.

The tour continued on through the battlefields of France and then across the Channel, where at the Royal garden party at Buckingham Palace some of the pilgrims – souvenir hunters to the last-pocketed the Royal spoons. Jack Mould, looking up at a fourth-storey window in the palace, saw Queen Mary gazing down on the crowd. He noted that she was not amused.

5

The Vimy Memorial would survive the Second War but not the weather. The biting wind still howls across the ridge, bringing with it gusts of rain and sleet. In April, when the flowers blossom in Paris, it is still chillingly cold on the steps that sweep up to Hill 145.

Like the memories of that other war, the memorial itself is fading a little. The weather has cracked the imperishable marble; this, after all, is not the sunny Adriatic. In 1984, with the quarries of Yugoslavia opened once again after a long hiatus, work of restoration began. It was needed. Some of the engraved names of the missing, whose only memorial was the vast wall of the plinth, were themselves missing-obliterated by the elements.

Each year half a million tourists visit the Vimy Memorial, although only a few are Canadians. The old crater line on the 3rd Division front still exists, after a fashion. A section of the trenches and a short length of the Grange Subway have been preserved and kept open for a generation with no real knowledge of static warfare. The visitors gasp at the closeness of the Canadian and German trenches. You could easily toss a football between them.

But this lovely little park, with its winding pathways, its greensward, its pines and maples, its asphalt roads, and its gleaming memorial, bears little resemblance to the dark slag heap of 1917. There is no feeling here of death or devastation, no sense of horror or of loss or of senseless human waste. The subway and the trenches are bone dry, and so are the great craters in which men once drowned-carpeted now with their blankets of grass. The trenches are as neat as the lawns, their sides plumb-bob vertical. The sandbags are as regular as bricks and on closer inspection turn out to be concrete counterfeits.

It is difficult for a student of the battle to orient himself here, for the slopes of the ridge are now clothed in forest, so that the crest is hard to find and the angle of ascent hard to assess. The Pimple, on private property, has vanished into the woods.

The archaeology of the battle remains hidden: two tons of ammonal lie beneath the lip of the Grange Crater and another seven and a half tons under the Broadmarsh. Human fragments, bones, bully beef tins, old bottles, wire, pit props, equipment, bombs, and shell fragments are all concealed by a soft covering of grass and foliage. A few artifacts have been gathered up and cemented into the walls of the subway for tourists to examine, but these scarcely convey the bewildering turbulence of Vimy.

One spectacle remains, however, and the effect is devastating. Beneath the pines and maples now rising from the slopes of the ridge and covering almost every square foot of the two hundred and fifty acres of the park lies one reminder of the battlefield that cannot be erased or glossed over. The slopes are green now with grass and not glistening with mud, but the panorama is still startling. Every bit of the terrain has been pounded out of shape into thousands upon thousands of pits and hummocks. Wherever one walks, wherever one looks, these myriad depressions, forming a kind of gigantic egg-carton effect, are there to remind the visitor that the flower of Canadian youth once passed this way to death and glory.

Was it worth it? Was it worth the cold and the lice, the rats and the mud? Was it worth the long hours standing stiffly in the trenches, praying that no sniper’s bullet would find its mark? Was it worth it to crawl out into No Man’s Land with a bag of bombs, seeking to mangle the men in the opposite trench before they mangled you? Was it worth that tense, chilly wait on the Easter Monday morning so long ago, when the world finally exploded and the enemy was driven from the heights at a cost in lives and limbs the High Command and the press described as “minimal?”

There was a time, less cynical, more ingenuous, when most Canadians were led to believe that the answer was
yes
. Nations must justify mass killings, if only to support the feelings of the bereaved and the sanity of the survivors. In Canada, long after the original excuses were found wanting-the Great War, after all, was clearly
not
a war to end wars-a second justification lingered on. Because of Vimy, we told ourselves, Canada came of age; because of Vimy, our country found its manhood.

But was
that
worth it? Was it worth the loss of thousands of limbs and eyes and the deaths of five thousand young Canadians at Vimy to provide a young and growing nation with a proud and enduring myth?

Now that the Vimy fever has cooled, a new generation sees the Great War for what it was. Many still visit the ridge to see where their fathers and grandfathers fought and died. Like Sergeant Gordon Rafuse of Berwick, Nova Scotia, they go back for sentimental reasons and without illusions. Rafiise’s father was one of those who manned the big guns of the 7th Canadian Siege Battery on that April morning when the earth trembled and the wall of sound blotted out all human speech. Gordon Rafuse wanted his children to understand something about that particular moment in history and to see the spot where their grandfather had fought with the Canadian Corps.

They camped near Souchez, directly across the field from where his father’s battery was dug in. The elder Rafuse had talked only rarely of the war, but his son remembered that he sometimes started up in the dark of the night, crying out aloud at the memory of past ordeals. It was ironic, as Rafuse later discovered, that he had had another relative at Vimy, a German lieutenant, Carl Rehfuss – his father’s twelfth cousin-trying his best to return the Canadian fire from the opposite side of the ridge.

A few months later Gordon Rafuse, who was stationed at the time in Germany, sought out his distant cousin at Kiel-am-Rhine and the two men sat down to discuss the war-the forty-five-year-old Canadian and the eighty-two-year-old German who had been his father’s enemy, both members of a clan that had sent out one of its branches to help found the town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, more than two centuries before. Neither had any stomach for the kind of war that had seen the Rehfuss descendants pitted against each other. It was, they agreed “a terrible waste of human life brought on by greedy people and tolerated for too long by silent majorities.”

Was it worth it? The answer, of course, is
no
.

*
Author’s italics.

APPENDIX ONE
British Army Formations in the Great War

An
ARMY
was commanded by a full
General or a Lieutenant-General
.

It was made up of two or more
CORPS
commanded by a
Lieutenant-General
.

A
CORPS
contained several
DIVISIONS
, each commanded by a
Major-General
.

A
DIVISION
had three
BRIGADES
, each commanded by a Brigadier-General.

A
BRIGADE
comprised four
BATTALIONS
, each commanded by a Lieutenant-Colonel.

A
BATTALION
contained four COMPANIES, each commanded by a Major or a Captain.

A
COMPANY
was made up of four PLATOONS, each commanded by a
Lieutenant
(or
subaltern
).

APPENDIX TWO
The Canadian Battalions at Vimy

At the start of the Great War, Sam Hughes scrapped the traditional regimental designations and substituted numbers for almost all battalions except the Canadian Mounted Rifles. The existing militia battalions on active service continued to use both their original titles and their new numbers, for example, the 72nd Battalion (Seaforth Highlanders of Canada). Brand new battalions were formed on a regional basis. Thus recruits from the Kootenay district of British Columbia found themselves allocated to the 54th Battalion, while Calgarians were sent to the 50th, a circumstance that contributed to the
esprit
of the soldiers, who fought side by side with their friends and neighbours.

1st
DIVISION (Right of the Line):
Arthur Currie, C.O.
2nd Brigade (Right)

  Right: 5th Battalion (Saskatchewan)

  Centre: 7th Battalion (British Columbia)

  Left: 10th Battalion (Calgary)

  In reserve: 8th Battalion (“The Little Black Devils,” Winnipeg)

3rd Brigade (Left)

  Right: 15th Battalion (48th Highlanders)

  Centre: 14th Battalion (Royal Montreal Regiment)

  Left : 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish, British Columbia)

  In reserve: 13th Battalion (5th Royal Highlanders)

1st Brigade (In Reserve)

  Right: 1st Battalion (Western Ontario)

  Centre: 3rd Battalion (Royal Regiment of Canada, Toronto)

  Left: 4th Battalion (Western Ontario)

  In reserve: 2nd Battalion (Eastern Ontario)

2ND DIVISION:
Henry Burstall, C.O.
4th Brigade (Right)

  Right: 18th Battalion (London, Ontario)

  Left: 19th Battalion (Central Ontario)

In reserve:

  Right: 20th Battalion (Central Ontario)

    Left: 21st Battalion (Eastern Ontario)

5th Brigade (Left)

  Right: 24th Battalion (Victoria Rifles, Montreal)

  Left: 26th Battalion (New Brunswick)

  In reserve:

    Right: 22nd Battalion (Canadien Français, “The Van Doos”)

    Left: 25th Battalion (Nova Scotia Rifles)

6th Brigade (In Reserve)

  Right: 31st Battalion (Alberta)

  Centre: 28th Battalion (North West)

  Left: 29th Battalion (“Tobin’s Tigers,” Vancouver)

  In reserve: 27th Battalion (City of Winnipeg)