Got up this morning to some overcast skies and by the time I
left to go find a rental car, it was sprinkling. It wasn’t too bad so I grabbed my raincoat
and hit the road. Found a little cafe
for a coffee, wow, that had a kick! The coffee
here is served in a little cup and is pretty much a shot of espresso. Prices in Arras are pretty good too and
actually cheaper than back home. I
struck out at the first car rental place so I hit Hertz (that car is pretty
hurting as Alyssa would say) and got a car for a day. I’m used to driving round abouts now so being
back on the right side of the street was nice and stress free. I loaded the girls into the new car and
headed for Vimy Ridge.
Driving up to Vimy was super easy, just 15 km out of town. The grounds are beautiful but the first thing
that jumped out at me was the crater holes.
There wasn’t any flat ground just all these holes with ridges. We went into the visitor information centre and chatted with the info attendant. Turns out they are all students, working over
here on a 4 month term and hired by Veteran and Foreign Affairs as I guess
Parks Canada can’t hire people to work outside of Canada. So we got tickets for the 2pm bunker and
tunnel tour and headed to the memorial for lunch.
I didn’t know what to expect but the memorial is quite significant
as you drive up. Construction started in
1928, took 11 years to build and is solid white limestone built right on the
ridge. It was designed and sculpted by a
Canadian, Walter Seymour Alward. The
carvings are stunning and it’s incredible how the names are just perfect. There were 11,285 Canadian soldiers killed in
France whose final resting place is unknown and their names are recorded on
this memorial. All together over 66,000
soldiers were killed in the First World War.
As we sat there eating lunch looking at all the names, it was pretty
hard to imagine what it would have been like in this beautiful country fighting
this terrible war.
After lunch we went on a pretty cool tour of the trenches
and subway. They were underground
tunnels dug over 8 meters down through the chalk and reinforced by wood
timbers. It was used to move soldiers
and house the officers and also to bomb the enemy underground. They would actually dig out areas and fill
them with explosives to bomb the enemy trenches as well as fire mortar through
the air at each other. Some of the
craters from this underground bombing were 15 plus meters deep. At one point at the memorial the “no man’s
land” was only 30-meters wide with subways and trenches that close. Canadian and German troops were within that
distance of each other for over a year!
Just before the storming of Vimy, the artillery was launched
for over a 36 hour period. Soldiers were
moved into the tunnels and sat in the dark listening to the artillery barrage
for 15 to 36 hours. Then at first light
they stormed the German lines. Every
three minutes the artillery would move 90 meters and the soldiers were supposed
to keep up. This artillery was 4.5 km away
so accuracy wasn’t exactly perfect.
Sitting in these cold tunnels on a beautiful warm day made you realize
how incredibly terrible this must have been especially in the wet and cold.
We were also told about how the three of four divisions
stormed Vimy on April 9, 1917. The final
division didn’t make the objective and the Nova Scotia Highlanders were pulled
up to the front line even though they hadn’t been given rifles before this
point in time. They took the rifles from
the dead and the plan was to follow the artillery as the day before. It turns out the artillery barrage was
cancelled but the runner hadn’t reached the front lines to tell them. The Highlanders went over the top anyways
and jumped the German troops before anyone knew what was going on. I guess there was some luck to the whole
thing. They fought in the trenches hand
to hand to overcome the enemy. There
were more Canadian troops lost in the battle of Vimy than all the other
offensives combined in the First World War.
Another crazy fact was there were close to a million bombs dropped but
30% of them didn’t explode. That is how
many undetonated bombs are buried around this area. So when they say stay on the trail or off the
grass, they mean it!
After the tour we headed down to the cemetery. This is one of 30 war cemeteries in a 20 kilometre
radius of the Vimy Memorial where Canadians are buried. It was very well manicured and we all felt
the enormity of the sacrifice made by all those soldiers and their
families. We all had a read through the
cemetery registry looking for local boys (and a lot of them were boys 18 – 21)
and left our name in the visitor book.
Wow, Remembrance Day will definitely have much more significance after
today.
No comments:
Post a Comment