In 2007 I went with a group of friends to the Champagne region of France, making sure we sampled the local produce both discerningly and enthusiastically! We’ve just been again with a bigger group of friends with added appetite and enthusiasm! On the first trip, once we got through the Euro tunnel, I put my foot down and we hurtled along the A26 because of the 3 cars travelling together, we had been pushed into a different traffic lane at Folkestone and had been made to wait for a later crossing! So we sped through France in pursuit of our fellows (and I’m slightly ashamed to say caught up very quickly – the angels were clinging for dear life to the wing mirrors I imagine!). As we zoomed through the countryside there wasn’t much time for sightseeing, and indeed there’s not much at all to see really. But as we flew through the Pas-de-Calais, the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge stood out on the skyline, atop Hill 145. Even at speed, it demanded attention, and was a sharp reminded that the fields of that same bleak countryside we know today were, and still are fields of horror and a landmark to human atrocity.
The Battle of Vimy Ridge was one of the opening battles in a larger British campaign known as the Battle of Arras during the First World War. It is also considered a major event in Canadian history for the key role the Canadian Corps of First Army played in the attack – hence the prominence of the Canadian Memorial. The German army had fortified Vimy Ridge with tunnels, three rows of trenches behind barbed wire, massive amounts of artillery and numerous machine gun nests. During the course of the First World War, the French and British had suffered thousands of casualties in previous attempts to take it. The French alone lost 150,000 men in 1915, including about half of the elite Moroccan Division and two-thirds of a full regiment of the French Foreign Legion (3,000 men).
On March 25, 1917, what was then the largest artillery barrage in history started. The German trenches were shelled for over two weeks, using over one million shells. The German artillery pieces were hidden behind the ridge, but by using observation balloons in the air and microphones on the ground to triangulate the sound and flashes from their firing, the Canadians were able to locate and destroy about 83% of the German guns. The Canadians also made many night trench raids during this week, a 7 day period known in German battle history as the "Week of Suffering". At dawn on Easter Monday, April 9, the assault divisions of the Canadian Corps attacked. The attack was so loud, the sound of guns could be heard plainly in southern England, about a hundred miles from the front. The first wave of about 15,000 Canadian troops attacked positions defended by roughly 5,000 Germans, followed by the second wave of 12,000 Canadians to meet 3,000 German reserves. Over 1,100 cannons of various descriptions, from British heavy naval guns mounted on railway cars miles behind the battlefield, to portable field artillery pieces dragged into place by horses, mules, or soldiers just behind the Canadian lines, fired continuously. Nearly 100,000 men in total were to take and hold the ridge.
By April 12, the Canadians controlled the entire ridge, at a cost of 3,598 men killed and 7,004 wounded. The German Sixth Army suffered approximately 20,000 casualties. In all the battles at Vimy Ridge in World War I, there was a staggering cost in dead and wounded on both sides. Across 16 kilometres of ridge, approximately 200,000 men perished: French, British, Canadian, and German. Considering that typically there were three wounded to every man killed, the total casualties at Vimy during the War can be estimated at 800,000.
….and I put my foot down, and sped past it, like so many thousands do on a weekly basis, along the A26 toll-road. I didn’t know then about the 200,000 who fell at the Ridge. And although it seems ironic, shameful even, to have sped past last Monday, almost without a second thought, that fleeting glimpse of the memorial on Hill 145 led me to look it up - and to learn. We said that we ought to go back to the Memorial sometime – and last Monday we did. Of course this trip was all the more poignant as I prepare to visit Canada as part of my sabbatical in the autumn and I guess gives a little bit of context and sows a few seeds for my planned reflection on how reconciliation and inclusion can emerge from conflict and crisis.
The complete photo album from last Monday’s visit to Vimy can be seen here:
As this is likely to be one of my longest blog entries to date, so I’ve broken it up into smaller posts. If you want to read more about the Memorial and what I made of it, then click and read on!
