Sunday started slower than most for the crew both here and at the other guide house at St-Aubert. The sleeping endurance title went to our most recent arrival, Jenna, who clocked in at 14 hours of sleep, on her way to extinguishing some of the jet-lag that we had all incurred over the past week. My roommate Colin, Jenna and I spent our last evening before training walking the cobblestone streets and seeing Arras by night.
When awoke early the next morning to get ready to head to Vimy Ridge, the house was freezing. The stone floors felt like ice, making getting out of both bed and the shower and extra challenge at such an early hour. At some point during the night our heaters had shut off, leaving the house barely warmer than outside. We made it out of the house on time, but to no shortage of grumbled complaints. We, along with the guides from St-Aubs, jumped into two white cars with "Canada" emblazoned on the side for the trek to Vimy Ridge, some 20 minutes outside Arras.
The Battle of Vimy Ridge was part of the larger British offensive known as the Battle of Arras, undertaken on April 9th, 1917. It marks the first time that the four Divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together, taking on three Divisions of the German Sixth Army in order to secure a ridge that had eluded both French and British troops in past attempts. After an extensive artillery barrage and meticulous planning, the Canadian Corps advanced at 5:30am on Easter Monday, 1917. By the evening of April 12th, three days later, Canada had firm control of the ridge and the surrounding countryside. The battle established Canada as a formidable fighting force, one that lead the charge in the defeat of Germany the following year, and has been known for generations as "a nation-making moment". Said one veteran after the battle "We went up the ridge as Albertans and Nova Scotians. We came down as Canadians."
The costs were heavy as well, however, as Canada suffered 10,602 casualties with 3,598 killed and 7,004 wounded during the battle. As a result of Canada's incredible success in the battle at Vimy and unprecedented contribution to the war, it signed the Treaty of Versailles as an independent nation, and would later gain complete independence from Great Britain in all matters, including foreign affairs, with the Statute of Westminster in 1931. In gratitude to the Canadian people, France granted a 260-acre parcel of land on the site of where the battle occurred in perpetuity to Canada, where the breath-taking Vimy Ridge Memorial was completed in 1936. As well as a commemoration of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, it stands as a memorial for all Canadian soldiers who fell in France with no known grave, their names engraved in stone around the base of the structure. The site today is also comprised of the remains of trenches and shell craters, as well as 500 metres of underground tunnels that once snaked for kilometres under the battlefield on both the Canadian and German sides.
Vimy remains a watershed moment in Canadian history, and as a proud Canadians and a historian at heart, the battle has interested me since I first heard about it in Grade 6, and my interest has only deepened as I studied it further through High School and during my undergraduate degree at UPEI. Part of my job will be informing visitors about the contributions of Canadians here, and of those of the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel during the Battle of the Somme. Monday morning, however, was to be my first time seeing it in person.
The Chemin des Canadiens snakes into the commemorative park between convolutions that fold the landscape into mounds around pits and pockmarks carved by artillery and explosives long ago. The soft green grass and trees that have grown in the 94 years since betray the story of the brutal battle, but also create an eerie silence amidst the fog that often clings to the forest here. This is the final resting place of many Canadians whose bodies were never recovered, and there are untold numbers of unexploded and undiscovered shells that hide somewhere deep in these mounds. The impact of this sight was perhaps stronger than that of seeing the monument itself, which is no small statement, as the two white pillars of the Vimy Memorial reaching 40 metres above the French countryside is a spectacular sight.
We began the day with introductions and then progressed through the usual administrative and introductory work to familiarize ourselves with our roles and responsibilities as guides with the Government of Canada. This was followed with a brief tour of the memorial itself, and then of the tunnels used by Canadians during the battle, some eight metres below the surface. We then drove to Beaumont-Hamel to visit the Newfoundland Memorial, about sixty minutes away.
The Battle of the Somme represents for many the senseless and brutal slaughter that was the Great War. In the first day of the battle alone, the British Empire lost 60,000 men - and this was a battle that lasted nearly four months. The Royal Newfoundland Regiment, made up of men from the Dominion of Newfoundland (independent from Canada until 1949), has been transferred to the Western Front from their post in Gallipoli in March of 1916, and was part of the 29th British Division on the first day of the Somme. It remains an infamous day in British military history, but particularly for the people of Newfoundland.
When the Newfoundland Regiment advanced the morning of July 1st, 1916, they faced barbed wire defenses and artillery fire, and struggled to advance over the bodies of the dead and wounded men who had faced the same perils minutes before. Pinned down by heavy machine gun fire, the Newfoundlanders relented in their push and moved back towards their trench, only to be gunned down as they retreated. They suffered a horrendous casualty rate of 90% and of the 780 Newfoundlanders who had gone over the top, 68 answered roll call the following morning.
A lone caribou stands watch over the remains of the battlefield today, representing Newfoundland and the caribou on the crest of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. The land it overlooks is the largest section of the Battle of the Somme that remains, the rest now stretching out as tranquil farmland in all directions.
After visiting Beaumont-Hamel, we returned to Arras, only to find that our house was still frigid. As it turns out, we were out of oil, and none could be delivered until the following day. Mercifully, several space heaters had been dropped off for our use. We plugged in a few of them and began to cook supper. Meanwhile, as we turned on the electrical heaters around the house, we threw the circuit, leaving the house in complete darkness, and our meals cold. Unable to fix the problem with the usual fuse box-flick, we called in a repairman, and went off in search of fries via fry wagon, or some other such French delicacy. We found one down the street and, after ordering, returned home and sat down for our first family meal together at Vauban, bonding over heaping portions of fries and croque-monsieurs, or other such sandwiches.
With the power restored, we re-set our alarm clocks and climbed into out cold beds in our cold house. However, our grumbling complaints from that morning were perhaps somewhat muted after having walked through the fields where Canadians had suffered far worse conditions and awaited far worse fates so many years ago.
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