With all the recognition in recent days of the battle at Vimy Ridge in 1917, I have been thinking about my own trip to Vimy a few years ago.
I didn’t go because I had relatives who fought and died there. I didn’t go because I am a war historian. I went because it was Remembrance Day.
I was actually born on Nov 11. And I often like to travel to somewhere interesting around my birthday and have a nice dinner somewhere. But wherever I am on Nov. 11, I try to go to a Remembrance Day event. In 2008, Paris was the selected dinner destination.
Before we went, my pal Mike phoned me and said, “Since we’ll be in Paris, what if we went to Vimy for Nov 11 this year?” I phoned Veterans Affairs to find out what would be happening that day – they told me that the big celebration would be on the Sunday prior but there would be a small service at 11, led by the student interns who were working there (what a cool job that must be…).
So we flew to Paris and drove up to Arras on the 10th. Arras has been an important trading, financial and cultural centre in that part of Europe since medieval times. But in WWI it was only a few kilometers from the front line. We sat on a patio in the beautiful town square that evening and drank local beer and looked at the beautiful Flemish-Baroque style buildings – all looking like they were hundreds of years old and yet all mostly built or rebuilt after the end of WWI.
The next morning we drove to the Canadian National Vimy Memorial just outside the town. As we walked onto the site, we passed the marker that shows the area that France gave to Canada for the memorial – so we were temporarily back in Canada. The size and dramatic impact of the memorial is hard to describe – it’s big and sits on the brow of a hill, so you can see it from a good distance away. The names of dead soldiers carved into the sides (an afterthought not enthusiastically embraced by the artist) go on and on. I thought of each one being a person with parents and loved ones and children (and many were not more than children themselves) who would never see them again.
About 100 people gathered for the service. Mostly Canadian, I think – but a wide variety of ages.There were a few members of the military in uniform, a couple of individuals in civilian clothes but wearing the peacekeeping blue beret which we used to see on the news and regrettably see much less of today. The students handed out programs and special poppy pins and zipper pulls from Veterans Affairs (mine is always on my knapsack).
It was a traditional Canadian-style Remembrance Day service – the readings, the music, the two minutes of silence at 11 am exactly were familiar. The one major difference is that we sang, just as they did on this past April 9: God Save the Queen, O Canada and the Marsellaise. But it felt like it always felt – like a loss of so much of a generation’s youth, and respect and gratitude for so many people who didn’t hesitate to step up and serve when asked.
We walked through the cemeteries of the Canadian dead, trying to read as many names on the tombstones as we could. It seemed wrong to only look at a couple.
Most of the land around the monument, which was nothing but mud and trenches after the war, has grown grass or trees by now. Much of the land is off limits except for grazing sheep – they keep the grass short since it can’t be mowed (or walked on) due to concerns about unexploded ordnance in the ground.
After we left the Vimy area, we saw the sign for the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial, and of course we needed to stop there also. Again, I had no family members to commemorate, but with some Newfoundland heritage, I wanted to see the battle site, the trenches, the hill and the danger tree that keeps that terrible battle alive in the consciousness of Newfoundlanders. We walked through now grassy trenches and tried to imagine, on a beautiful warm sunny November day, what it would have been like to be there during the battle of the Somme, in the mud and cold and rats and constant barrage overhead.
As we drove back to Paris, we drove through small towns – each one had all the stores completely shuttered, memorial stones in cemeteries, people commemorating loved ones lost. It’s hard for me to imagine what they would have gone through – what it would be like to have a war literally fought in your backyard, your neighbourhood or town. Or what it is like today in many parts of the world where this is all still happening.
So I still go to Remembrance Day ceremonies wherever I am on Nov 11. But I sure think about them differently having spent that Nov 11 in northeastern France a few years ago.
by Christy DeMont
Information Technology
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