Vimy (39 page)

The Great War was much more a
Canadian
war than was the Second. The sacrifices were greater. More than sixty thousand Canadians were killed between 1914 and 1918. In the Second War, in spite of a huge increase in population, the number of dead was only forty-one thousand. And the chances of getting killed were much greater in that earlier war, where one man died for every eleven who enlisted. In the Second War the odds were only one in twenty-six. The symbols differed, too. If the symbol of the First War for Canadians was the Vimy victory, that of the Second, surely, was the Dieppe débâcle.

The Great War was a searing experience, one that all Canadians were determined to mark and remember. In every city, town, and hamlet monuments went up, flanked, usually by captured German guns, the evidence of victory. Even in Dawson in the far-off Yukon, an Egyptian obelisk was raised to commemorate the war dead, and two German field pieces were trundled all the way from the battlefields of Flanders across an ocean and a continent to be set up in a little park in a ghost town not far from the Arctic Circle. The park is rank with weeds today, the field guns have been taken away, but the granite monument still stands, tilted slightly by the permafrost, to remind natives and tourists alike that Canada had fought as an equal partner with Great Britain.

These Great War monuments make a statement that the memorial stadiums and memorial hockey rinks of the later conflict do not. Carved in the granite or marble of the plinth are the familiar slogans: “Lest We Forget”, “Is It Nothing to You?” “Their Names Will Live Forever”, and the more plaintive “They Did Not Die in Vain,” all suggestive of the gnawing suspicion that the Great War
had
been fought in vain and that the men who died would soon be forgotten. But there is a more subtle message: the very presence of the cenotaph with its bronze plaque and its flanking guns reminds the viewer that Canada finally played its part on the international scene, not as a vassal, but as a partner.
See these guns! We captured them. We helped win the war!
To thousands of Canadians, raised on the myths of 1917, that was what the word “Vimy” meant.

The outpouring of best-selling anti-war novels from Britain, the United States, France, and Germany had no real counterpart in Canada. There were a few such books, of course, but they had little impact. Our imperishable contribution to the international literature of war was neither cynical nor disillusioned: It was John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” with its challenge to “take up the quarrel with the foe” that every schoolchild memorized.

Certainly there was a revulsion toward war and a naïve belief that it could (or should) never happen again; everyone raised in those days remembers it. Yet this was tempered in Canada by the elation that was always felt when the word “Vimy” came up. You might attack the war and all its horrors, but you would not attack Vimy. Vimy stood for more than a battle won; it also stood for Canadian ingenuity, Canadian dash and daring, Canadian enterprise – phrases that have long gone out of fashion in the endless discussions about the Canadian character and the Canadian stereotype.

The men who fought at Vimy weren’t bland or boring. The techniques that won the battle were innovative. The Canadians who went over the top, knocking out machine-gun nests and sweeping the trenches of enemy gunners, had a certain
élan
. These were the same men who burned down the movie tent at Valcartier, rioted aboard the
Sardinia
, and when Sam Hughes kept them waiting at Salisbury Plain, responded with jeers and catcalls and then, to a man, walked off the parade-ground. The men of Vimy do not seem to fit in with Northrop Frye’s description of the Canadian “instinct to seek a conventional or commonplace expression of an idea.”

Have we lost some of this
élan
? Does it require a battlefield or a hockey rink to bring it to the surface? Something has happened to us in the decades since Vimy. The early years of the century leading up to the Great War were yeasty, adventurous times, in which more than a million newcomers performed the daring act of leaving their roots behind to find a place in a new world. The country in those years brimmed with the optimism implicit in its Prime Minister’s remark about the century belonging to Canada. That enthusiasm spilled over into the trenches of Artois. A remarkable number of the men who brought new ideas to the Vimy battlefield and fought with such grace and aplomb were the same adventurers who had poured into the pioneer West in the first decade of the century, determined to be unfettered by Old Country traditions.

The loosening of Imperial ties, which began in Canada with immigrant influx into the West, was accelerated by the Great War in general and by the Vimy experience in particular. The Canadian soldiers could not help comparing their own officers with stiff-necked British counterparts and noticing how the family feeling in the Canadian Corps contrasted with the social divisions in the British.

George Hambley was one who took these attitudes back to Canada. On the Friday after the battle, when Hambley and his fellow gunners were on the crest of the ridge, an Imperial officer happened along with a group of British soldiers. He’d lost his way, but as Hambley put it, “he was a Lord or a Duke or something and when he found out we were only privates he wouldn’t talk to us.” He was a mile off his course and on the wrong road. It was too dark for him to read his map. But he refused any help from the Canadians who tried to steer him on his way. Hambley noted: “The way he snorted at us as ‘Canaeyedians’ showed extreme contempt for us as colonial troops.” Off he went, disdaining Hambley’s attempts to set him right, and promptly marched his men right into the German lines. Hambley heard the sound of machine-gun fire and later learned that the entire group was either killed or captured.

It was not just the private soldiers who brought these attitudes back to Canada. Canadian officers who were to become social and political leaders and opinion makers in the next generation had also noted the British and French military traditions that clung to rigid formulas and outworn concepts, placing seniority over merit, confusing merit with social class, discouraging innovation and thwarting criticism. Vimy was a classroom for future politicians (J.L. Ralston, Leslie Frost, Douglas Abbott), future jurists (James McRuer, J. Keiller MacKay), future opinion makers (Conn Smythe, Gregory Clark), and a host of future generals from Harry Crerar and E.L.M. Burns to Andy McNaughton himself. It was not that any of these men had ceased to venerate the British connection-most were staunchly pro-British-but they simply had no further reason to believe the British were their superiors. Canada no longer considered herself a colonial vassal of Great Britain. And, of course, she had never considered herself a colonial vassal of the United States.

3

The men of Vimy who survived the war returned to Canada to take up lives disrupted by the conflict. Some, such as Lewis Buck, whose brother Bill was killed two months before the Armistice, suffered nightmares for months afterwards. Working in the field with a team of horses one day, Buck heard a loud noise he couldn’t identify. He thought it was a shell and instinctively threw himself on the ground.
My God!
he thought,
I may never get over this
. But in the end he did. So did Bill Breckenridge, who spent three months in hospital back in Canada, suffering from shell shock. He too recovered, to become a sales manager for Pittsburgh Paints in Sherbrooke. But he could never talk about the war without emotion.

Others, like Gad Neale, felt lost in civilian life. The army had been mother and father to him. In the 46th Battalion he had found his niche. Among his comrades he was an identifiable person. There was always a friend to turn to, somebody to pick him up when he fell. Neale was still not old enough to vote when the war ended. He had faced the cold, the mud, the lice, the rats, and the Germans. Yet civilian life held more terror for him than any of these. His mother was dead, his comrades were scattered, the rest of his family was still in England. He was alone. But he didn’t go back to England. He remained a Canadian and, in the end, made a life for himself, first as a farmer, later as a ship’s master, and then as a real estate broker.

The veterans were dovetailed into every branch of Canadian society in the peacetime years, many of them in key positions in industry and politics. Claude Williams went back to medical school and became a successful doctor. Corporal Curll, the hero of the Nova Scotia Highlanders, became an executive of the Royal Bank. His captain, Harvey Crowell, founded his own accounting firm in Halifax. David Moir, the machine gunner, became an executive of Imperial Oil. Andrew McCrindle joined the actuarial department of Sun Life. William Pecover went back to teaching. George Hambley became a United Church minister in Manitoba. Gus Sivertz helped start a newspaper in Vancouver. Jack Quinnell went to college, worked for Ford, went into the construction business, and served as a staff sergeant in the Engineers in the Second World War.

Victor Odlum took up his newspaper publishing again and later became a distinguished member of Canadian legations. Cy Peck won the Victoria Cross in 1918, served in the B.C. Legislature and the Parliament of Canada, and became aide-de-camp to his old general, Julian Byng, at Rideau Hall. Andrew Macphail returned to McGill as Professor of Medical History and pursued a long career in both medicine and literature. Duncan Eberts Macintyre had several careers-from furniture manufacturer to real estate developer. Energetic to the end, he died of a heart attack at the age of eighty-nine after chopping a week’s supply of firewood.

Few veterans would forget the comradeship of the trenches; when the harsh conditions and the stress of battle faded, memories of those intense friendships remained. Interviewed in the decades that followed-generally on the Vimy anniversary-they were wont to remark that in spite of everything, the war was an experience they wouldn’t have wanted to miss because of the closeness, because of the comradeship. They tried to recapture some of that closeness and to keep the memory of Vimy green at Legion dinners, Armistice Day ceremonies, and in countless published memoirs. Gus Sivertz wrote a veterans’ column for the Vancouver
Sun
. Ed Russenholt became his battalion’s historian and wrote of its triumphs at Vimy for the Winnipeg press. Victor Wheeler spent fifteen years of his life assembling a mass of material about the 50th (Calgary) Battalion’s role in the war. It was not published until after his death.

Others-Will Bird was one-retained their connection with those days by returning to the site of the battlefield. In 1922 the French government had turned 250 acres in the area of Hill 145 over to Canada in perpetuity as a memorial park. The government’s response was remarkable in its spiritual and religious overtones. To Mackenzie King the site was “one of the world’s great altars.” To the Speaker of the House, Vimy was “hallowed ground.” To the Deputy Prime Minister, Ernest Lapointe, it was “sacred.” Vimy, in short, had become a Canadian shrine.

To mark this briefest of all battles, the Canadian government commissioned the most massive of all monuments. From a vast concrete plinth – forty thousand square feet in size – would rise twin spires of flawless Adriatic marble, each 226 feet high, symbols of Canada’s two founding races. There was nothing modest about this memorial; perched at the very crest of the highest point on the ridge-Hill 145-it would be seen for miles in every direction.

The stone for this sacred pile was identical with that which had withstood fifteen centuries of wear at Diocletian’s palace on the Dalmatian coast. Canada was intent on erecting a shrine that would stand, not for a thousand years, but as its architect, Walter All ward, declared,
for all time
.

The memorial would be as much a statement as a monument, a boast as well as a symbol – “the most beautiful work in the world,” in the words of the contractor. The hyperbole fitted. The Great Depression had begun. Money was tight. But nothing was going to halt the construction.
Look at us
, the monument would say.
We did what the British and the French couldn’t do and we’re proud of it
.

When Will Bird returned to the battlefield in 1930, the monument was under construction. Bird, who had missed the battle because of the mumps, was stunned to discover that the new park covered the very line he had occupied with the Black Watch. To him the effect was almost unbelievable. The trenches, saps, and posts that he knew so well had been preserved in concrete. Beyond them yawned the great craters. It was as if he had been transported back in time.

But it was the monument itself, rising just above the old lines, that caught Bird’s imagination. It had been under construction for four years; it had six more to go. When he described it for the readers of
Maclean’s
that year, he put his finger, perhaps unwittingly, on its subliminal purpose.

“Europe, when viewing the finished work,” he wrote, “will change her impressions of the Canadians as a people”
^*

4

Vimy fever reached its peak in 1936 in the most remarkable peacetime outpouring of national fervour the country had yet seen. At the height of the Depression more than 6,400 Canadians paid their way across the Atlantic to stand on Vimy Ridge to witness the unveiling of Walter Allward’s memorial. The journey, which required five ocean liners for them all, was properly called a pilgrimage. It took two years to organize.

John Mould and his wife were two of those pilgrims who crossed the ocean in July 1936. Like so many others, Mould was English born. He’d come to Canada in 1910, settled in St. Catharines, and got work as a sign painter. The war cost him his teeth and part of his hearing. Now, at forty-five, he was back on familiar soil.

The Moulds travelled to Arras and, on Sunday, July 29, boarded one of the hundred buses that formed a long procession on the road that led to the ridge – a road lined with French peasants, the medals jingling and flashing on the men’s black suits. There followed a three-hour wait in the section of the park designated “Canadian Pilgrims’ Assembly Grounds.” The Moulds sat on the edge of a large mine crater, furry now with grass, their legs dangling over the edge, and ate the box lunch they’d collected from the hotel at Arras. Then, with time to spare, they trudged up the slippery slope, still encumbered with wire and pocked by shell holes, toward Hill 145. Some of the women found it hard going. “No wonder they called it No Man’s Land,” Jack Mould heard one whisper.