On Sunday, near Arras in Northern France, a WWI battle centenary commemoration looked for all the world like a celebration — even a birthday party.
Canadian pop stars entertained a massive crowd – organisers expected 23,000 – with ballads sung from the iconic white marble memorial at Vimy Ridge, turned into a stage. Canadian actors performed excerpts of soldiers’ letters. Dignitaries abounded. French President François Hollande spoke solemnly of Franco-Canadian friendship and this patch of land France gave Canada in gratitude in 1922. On stage, Britain’s Prince Charles quoted the Canadian national anthem, saying: “The Canadians at Vimy embodied ‘the true north, strong and free’.”
But it was Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and William, Duke of Cambridge, on hand with his brother Prince Harry, who earned hearty unabashed whoops from a crowd that included 10,000 young Canadians on field-trip pilgrimages to make this page of their high-school history books come alive.
On April 9, 1917, under the cover of a deafening barrage of artillery, thousands of young men surged out of the obscurity of the trenches at 5:30am and into the battle of their lives. It marked the first time all four Canadian divisions, made up of volunteers from all over Canada, would fight together for a single cause.
“It is through their sacrifice that Canada became an independent signatory of the Treaty of Versailles,” Trudeau told the crowd. “And in that sense, Canada was born here.”
Germany had been fortifying the position, a strategic lookout above the Douai plain north of Arras, since 1914. France had suffered more than 100,000 casualties in vain attempts punch a hole in the Western Front at Vimy. And now Canada — a young country with no military history months shy of its 50th birthday, with a rag-tag bunch of eager but amateur soldiers – was being asked to succeed where the French and British had failed.
Nearly 4,000 dead
The Canadians would take the ridge in four days, served in the end by a collegial approach unheard of in the class-bound British forces and the inventiveness that a lack of military baggage affords. Canada suffered 3,598 dead and 7,004 wounded in the four-day battle, adding to 10,000 casualties lost in preparing it. But the country’s very youthfulness turned out to be a battlefield asset in victory.
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