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.
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