You know you've been in France too long when walking home from the store with a baguette under your arm no longer seems cliché.
Most of my housemates have gotten onto an intense baguette and cheese routine, to the point that there are literally 7 types of cheese per person in our kitchen. This isn't a bad thing in principle, but every now and then someone will get adventurous with their cheese selection, and then our fridges end up smelling like a poorly-managed waste treatment plant for a few days. And as the French have made the odd choice not to sell baking soda in their stores, the rest of are completely at the mercy of the stench. Fortunately, just as the baguette and cheese stereotypes hold true, so do those regarding chocolate and beer. Though I have always liked chocolate as much as the next guy, I have never eaten it to the extent that it consumes a significant portion of my disposable income. It seems I have developed a full-blown chocolate addiction here and am, by times, flirting on the edge of a diabetic coma. While I hope the same doesn't hold true for my booze intake, beer is ridiculously cheap in France. Last week a 12-pack of Stella Artois was going for 3.66 Euro (roughly $5) at the grocery store. And while the locals consider Stella a small step above Listerine or turpentine, I have absolutely no shame in buying it by the case. The bottles are slightly smaller, so we've done the math, and it turns out that a 12 of Stella here is about 1/3 the cost of a 12 of Tremblays or Boréale in Montréal... and lets remember that once you buy it, you don't have the misfortune of having to choke down 12 Tremblays or Boréale. That's a win-win-win by my count.
Back on the Western Front, our education on the First World War and the commemorative efforts here in Northern France and on behalf of Canada and the Commonwealth continues each Monday. Last week we had the opportunity to visit the Commonwealth War Graves Commission headquarters here in Arras. The Commission was established in 1917 (then the Imperial War Graves Commission) as a result of the concern that there was no coordinated plan in place to facilitate the construction of cemeteries and memorials for the hundreds of thousands of men who were dying in the war. Through the two world wars, the Commission worked to secure land for cemeteries and memorials, standardizing the design of gravestones and cemeteries to ensure some regularity, as well as somewhat of a comforting atmosphere for the families visiting the graves of the men who never came home. The final construction efforts were completed just a few years before the outbreak of World War Two, and then their work began anew. Funded by the governments of Commonwealth countries, their work continues today, maintaining the cemeteries where the soldiers who fought and fell now lay. In France alone, the Commission maintains graves in some 2991 cemeteries, and around the world is responsible for around 23,000 sites in 150 countries. In all, they are responsible for the maintenance of gravestones and memorials that commemorate about 1.3 million individuals.
Needless to say, their work is cut out for them (so to speak). Stones have to be replaced in the thousands each year due to age, and each must be carved in the stone originally chosen for the cemetery in which it stands. The same is true for the aging gates, fences, doorways and metalwork in each of the cemeteries. While the stones are now carved mainly using computerized machines, the wood craft and metalwork is still done very much by hand, and visiting each workshop to speak with the artisans on-site certainly gave a better idea - and an appreciation - for the amount of work that goes into maintaining such a massive amount of aging, yet none-the-less important, sites.
This Monday half of our group drove through Northern France to Belgium and visited several memorials and battle sites where Canadians, Australians, Indian and other Allied and Central Power forces were engaged during the First World War. We visited sites associated with the Battles at Ypres, where Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae wrote his poem 'In Flanders Fields', St. Julien, where Canadians suffered and endured the first poison gas attack of the war and held the Allied line, and Passchendaele, a costly victory for the British Forces, where Canada lost almost 16,000 men in just over two weeks.
The most sobering sights of the day were perhaps Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world, where over 46,000 men are buried or commemorated, and the Langemark German Military Cemetery, where more than 44,000 German soldiers lie, mostly unknown. The sheer numbers associated with the battles and memorials was certainly astounding, but it was even more incredible to see how extensively the men who fought and died are commemorated and honoured throughout the villages and the countryside. In Ypres, for example, Canada's contribution and losses during the war are still remembered today. Canadian flags hang from several buildings and mark the entrances to some of the stores and pubs along the cobblestone streets of their main square.
Back at Vimy, things are starting to pick up as Canadian University students and families take a mid-semester break, and as March break approaches. In proportion with the increase of visitors, we also get an increase of trouble-makers. Last week I had to yell at some 20-somethings who were trying to take rather inappropriate pictures with one of the female figures on the monument, which is meant to represent a mourning Canadian mother or wife. And on two different tours I was forced to stop the entire group of British school kids to stop them from a. pretending to shoot each other in trenches and b. making the Nazi salute while posing for pictures. In each case I remind them that hundreds of thousands of men died in the surrounding battlefields, many of whose bodies were never recovered. That Vimy is a very important and solemn commemorative park for Canadians, as well as for those countries whose young men died there as well. "So I would appreciate it if you would refrain from making gun noises or making the Nazi salute," I said. "Not only is this the wrong war, but it is also incredibly inappropriate." The sheepish looks on their faces suggested that they got the message, but I was assured they had when one small British boy came into the Visitor's Centre to apologize to me after the tour. "I'm sorry for giving the Nazi salute, Sir," he said in a very quiet voice and with a very British accent. "I looked very foolish."
Perhaps not as foolish as I looked a few nights later when I was charged with the task of getting gas. Usually a fairly simple task, to be sure. However, being a Canadian boy with very little use for diesel, I brashly thrust the first gas hose I grasped into the tank, and, predictably, gassed up our diesel van with 35 Euro worth of gasoline. Stupid as I was, I did recognize the difference in the smell of gas to that of diesel, and luckily had the sense not to start the van, which would've been fairly large problem, instead of a relatively small one. And so, as I sit here writing this, our staff of 14 has been without our much-needed van for four days, and has instead had to jerry-rig an exchange schedule for all the Canada vehicles at the disposal of Veteran's Affairs here in Arras. Swift move, Gallant.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
The Vimy Shuffle - Part V
As with any new city and any new job, we have all slowly slipped into some semblance of routine as our surroundings have become more familiar and as the once-steep learning curve has slackened. While I still found new ways to get lost on the drive to work every morning, and while many helpful criticisms were shared amongst co-workers in our first week (which were received on a scale varying between gracious and contemptuous), inevitably we have all begun to settle into life in France. (This also means that our fridge is filled with anywhere between 20 and 30 types of cheese, all of which stink.)
For those of us at Vimy, our workday is centred around the Visitor's Centre, where our schedule for the day is coordinated and where tours are booked. From there we take turns guiding or following tours of the tunnels and trenches, answering questions or talking with locals at the monument, and walking around the parking lot waiting for someone to show up or for someone to step on the grass so we can yell at them. Typically the tours of tunnels and trenches take about 50 minutes, and represent the fruits of our in-depth training session we received in our first week here.
At Vimy, the 172nd Royal Engineers dug a series of 13, sometimes interconnected, subways and tunnels that at the time of the battle snaked for 10-12 kilometers under the surface. The tunnel we now have access to was the second longest on that day in 1917, stretching for 1.2 kilometers, of which about 200 meters are accessible to the public today. Tours consist of explaining to visitors how the tunnels were dug the purpose they served and the risks inherent in the operations and maintenance of them during the time leading up to the battle. The tour takes us into an underground battalion headquarters that consists of five rooms (that at the time housed officers from Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry) to the mouth of a deep-fighting tunnel (that would've been used to blow massive mine craters in No Man's Land or under German defenses) and in view of the tunnel where one of the Black Watch of Montreal Battalions would've waited before shuffling out onto the battlefield in the hours that preceded the Arras offensive. The end of the tunnel tour brings us out the original exit of the tunnel into the backside of preserved Canadian trenches where we continue to explain the tactics that were used at Vimy, the awesome power of the rolling barrage that helped secure victory that day and show examples of the effects that the underground mines had on the surface.
The tunnels and trenches are quite impressive, but this is hampered once one realizes that this battle and war was fought for practically no reason, and had few redeeming results. For all the lessons learned from the Somme and Verdun that made Vimy a success, millions of men died. Millions more would die before the end of the war. Some were mowed down my machine-gun fire or smothered by poison gasses, many were vaporized by the exciting new technologies of the day, and still others in the trenches, beaten down by the pneumonia, dysentery or other diseases that come with living in frigid holes in the grounds for months at a time. As one of my co-workers emphasizes in her tour, today the whole nation mourns where one or two soldiers dies in a war zone. On April 9th, 1917, 3,598 Canadian died in a field in foreign land, thousands of miles from home, and mostly just because some oligarchical heads of state had bruised egos.
If I was nervous at all about my first tour (I was), I didn't have to wait long to face my fear. My first tour was a group of 25 French students, the morning of my first day. We had been warned that many groups of French students were very badly-behaved, would make fun of our accents and just be general assholes. That did not help my confidence. Nor my already sketchy French accent. However, this particular group was very well-behaved and were also very attentive, and it was instead my french that failed me. One would think that after nine years of French semi-immersion in a classroom with a chalkboard one would remember the word for "chalk". However, pressed for the name of the material the tunnels are dug in, my ind drew a complete blank, and I had to rely on Jenna, my follow on this particular tour to bail me out. (She also says that instead of saying "messenger" for some of the tour I instead said "mailbox", making for some very confused French kids I would assume. "How did they get the mailboxes to run through the trenches?"). In the end, the tour wasn't a complete disaster, but it definitely sent me back to the books and humbled my "know-it-all" demeanor for a day or two. By the end of the week I had led another half-dozen or so tours and they were starting to come together.
Our week of training and of getting a lay of the land during the battle is also very helpful when stationed at the monument, probably the site that most people would identify with Vimy Ridge today. One look at the land surrounding the monument and the view that spans out from its position atop Hill 145 makes its importance to military strategy immediately obvious. The monument itself, however, has a history of its own. Carved from 6,000 tonnes of Seget stone from a Croatian quarry and built on a base of 11,000 tonnes of concrete, the monument took eleven years to complete, and was unveiled at a huge ceremony on July 26th, 1936. After the breakout of the Second World War, accusations were leveled against the Nazis, alleging that soldiers were vandalizing WWI sites in occupied France and Belgium. In response, who had served on the Vimy front as a messenger in the First World War, visited the Vimy Memorial on June 2nd, 1940 to prove that Germany was not desecrating the war memorials of the Commonwealth countries. Later in the war two Nazi soldiers committed suicide by jumping from the memorial after receiving word that they were being transferred to the eastern front.
This is of course not what I think about in my one or two hours a day that I am stationed at the monument. Most of my time is spent greeting people as they walk up to the monument, and then chasing them around to see if they have any questions about it. Though I am a guide, I feel more like a retail salesperson, whose queries of "Can I help you?" are to be dodged at all costs. The only people who do not seem completely annoyed with giving me the time of day are Canadians who have made the long trek to Northern France just to get a glance at the monument, and old French couples who talk on end about their lives here during the Second World War and the coal mines that dot the landscape over the expansive kilometers in view from the top of Hill 145. As the Battle of Vimy Ridge is for Canadians, the monument is symbolic for those who have lived their entire lives in its shadow, and they teach me more about the region and the effects of war than I could ever hope to convey after reading about it in a book. And I am very much content to listen.
For those of us at Vimy, our workday is centred around the Visitor's Centre, where our schedule for the day is coordinated and where tours are booked. From there we take turns guiding or following tours of the tunnels and trenches, answering questions or talking with locals at the monument, and walking around the parking lot waiting for someone to show up or for someone to step on the grass so we can yell at them. Typically the tours of tunnels and trenches take about 50 minutes, and represent the fruits of our in-depth training session we received in our first week here.
At Vimy, the 172nd Royal Engineers dug a series of 13, sometimes interconnected, subways and tunnels that at the time of the battle snaked for 10-12 kilometers under the surface. The tunnel we now have access to was the second longest on that day in 1917, stretching for 1.2 kilometers, of which about 200 meters are accessible to the public today. Tours consist of explaining to visitors how the tunnels were dug the purpose they served and the risks inherent in the operations and maintenance of them during the time leading up to the battle. The tour takes us into an underground battalion headquarters that consists of five rooms (that at the time housed officers from Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry) to the mouth of a deep-fighting tunnel (that would've been used to blow massive mine craters in No Man's Land or under German defenses) and in view of the tunnel where one of the Black Watch of Montreal Battalions would've waited before shuffling out onto the battlefield in the hours that preceded the Arras offensive. The end of the tunnel tour brings us out the original exit of the tunnel into the backside of preserved Canadian trenches where we continue to explain the tactics that were used at Vimy, the awesome power of the rolling barrage that helped secure victory that day and show examples of the effects that the underground mines had on the surface.
The tunnels and trenches are quite impressive, but this is hampered once one realizes that this battle and war was fought for practically no reason, and had few redeeming results. For all the lessons learned from the Somme and Verdun that made Vimy a success, millions of men died. Millions more would die before the end of the war. Some were mowed down my machine-gun fire or smothered by poison gasses, many were vaporized by the exciting new technologies of the day, and still others in the trenches, beaten down by the pneumonia, dysentery or other diseases that come with living in frigid holes in the grounds for months at a time. As one of my co-workers emphasizes in her tour, today the whole nation mourns where one or two soldiers dies in a war zone. On April 9th, 1917, 3,598 Canadian died in a field in foreign land, thousands of miles from home, and mostly just because some oligarchical heads of state had bruised egos.
If I was nervous at all about my first tour (I was), I didn't have to wait long to face my fear. My first tour was a group of 25 French students, the morning of my first day. We had been warned that many groups of French students were very badly-behaved, would make fun of our accents and just be general assholes. That did not help my confidence. Nor my already sketchy French accent. However, this particular group was very well-behaved and were also very attentive, and it was instead my french that failed me. One would think that after nine years of French semi-immersion in a classroom with a chalkboard one would remember the word for "chalk". However, pressed for the name of the material the tunnels are dug in, my ind drew a complete blank, and I had to rely on Jenna, my follow on this particular tour to bail me out. (She also says that instead of saying "messenger" for some of the tour I instead said "mailbox", making for some very confused French kids I would assume. "How did they get the mailboxes to run through the trenches?"). In the end, the tour wasn't a complete disaster, but it definitely sent me back to the books and humbled my "know-it-all" demeanor for a day or two. By the end of the week I had led another half-dozen or so tours and they were starting to come together.
Our week of training and of getting a lay of the land during the battle is also very helpful when stationed at the monument, probably the site that most people would identify with Vimy Ridge today. One look at the land surrounding the monument and the view that spans out from its position atop Hill 145 makes its importance to military strategy immediately obvious. The monument itself, however, has a history of its own. Carved from 6,000 tonnes of Seget stone from a Croatian quarry and built on a base of 11,000 tonnes of concrete, the monument took eleven years to complete, and was unveiled at a huge ceremony on July 26th, 1936. After the breakout of the Second World War, accusations were leveled against the Nazis, alleging that soldiers were vandalizing WWI sites in occupied France and Belgium. In response, who had served on the Vimy front as a messenger in the First World War, visited the Vimy Memorial on June 2nd, 1940 to prove that Germany was not desecrating the war memorials of the Commonwealth countries. Later in the war two Nazi soldiers committed suicide by jumping from the memorial after receiving word that they were being transferred to the eastern front.
This is of course not what I think about in my one or two hours a day that I am stationed at the monument. Most of my time is spent greeting people as they walk up to the monument, and then chasing them around to see if they have any questions about it. Though I am a guide, I feel more like a retail salesperson, whose queries of "Can I help you?" are to be dodged at all costs. The only people who do not seem completely annoyed with giving me the time of day are Canadians who have made the long trek to Northern France just to get a glance at the monument, and old French couples who talk on end about their lives here during the Second World War and the coal mines that dot the landscape over the expansive kilometers in view from the top of Hill 145. As the Battle of Vimy Ridge is for Canadians, the monument is symbolic for those who have lived their entire lives in its shadow, and they teach me more about the region and the effects of war than I could ever hope to convey after reading about it in a book. And I am very much content to listen.
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