Vimy

by Pierre Berton

  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.

  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.