A RIDGE CALLED VIMY
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. All week CBC has been flush with related articles, reports, videos, and even virtual reality walkthroughs of the trenches. We're told the prime minister made a pilgrimage to France for the largest ever Canadian celebration outside of Canada.
So glad am I that we're making such a tremendous deal of this event, that many millions are spent on the memorial, and that we've also, somehow, come to label this battlefield "victory" as Canada's defining moment. I mean, you don't even have to look, nevermind look hard, to notice that every part of this national yarn is, at best, an embarrassing embellishment.
Even to call Vimy a "Canadian" battle is highly misleading when the Canadian Corps were comprised almost entirely of British-born soldiers with little or no connection to Canada. This is well-documented. (Further, so flimsy was the Canadian-ness of this force that there's even an account of a German-born Canadian soldier deserting immediately before the battle at Vimy to join the other side...) And then, until conscription came, the minority of Canadian-born enlistees were almost exclusively Anglo-Canadians: Indigenous, Asia, Black, and French-Canadian folk were routinely turned away. That's some Canadian battle and some vision of Canada you've got there.
In addition, as is widely documented, these "Canadian" (largely British) divisions were so ill equipped for the task of taking Vimy that they needed considerable support from British infantry, artillery, engineers, and others. With only eight field artillery brigades and two heavy artillery groups, Canada's force was overshadowed by the British who brought to the fight no less than nine field artillery brigades, fourteen heavy artillery groups, three divisional artillery groups and the artillery complement of the British 5th Division, as well as that of their 1st and 17th Corps. So this "Canadian" force was a minority in this "Canadian" battle – and would likely have been mopped up by the Germans were it not for these considerable (non-Canadian) enhancements.
Oh, and then there's the actual event itself. No serious historian can argue this was an critical battle or victory – nevermind being worthy of tremendous national memorial. Perhaps most glaringly, at the time Germans didn't even consider the events at Vimy a loss. There at the ridge, around 35,000 Germans stood their ground for years, suffering the French 150,000 casualties and largely resisting the overwhelming onslaught of 170,000 Allied ("Canadian") troops, including months of trench raiding and artillery fire that destroyed virtually all German defences at Vimy, all before the official battle we elect to (mis)remember. In fact, given how badly the Germans had been crushed by the unrelenting bombardment of a million or so artillery shells, it would have required nothing less than an act of God for "Canada" (Britain) to have lost the Battle of Vimy Ridge. (In this way, celebrating this victory, and doing so with such fanfare, feels something like valorizing a hockey win in which the opposing team had no goalie, no defensive line, and a pair of forwards with no padding on under their uniforms... "Hoorah!") And as evidence of just how unimportant Vimy Ridge was in the scheme of things, after losing this location the Germans made no attempt of any kind, at any time, to take it back – not even during the Kaiserschlacht (or Spring Offensive) of 1918: that major territorial advance along the Western Front near the end of the war, where Germans sought and retook virtually everything in the area but Vimy.
(So maybe you've begun to see why Vimy only came to be celebrated generations after the war, after virtually all the veterans of the battle had died of old age...)
Even ignoring all of the above, to suggest this battle or war was the "birth of a nation" is positively ridiculous when few events have caused such deep rifts. The divisions brought about between French and Anglo Canada by this war's conscription is virtually unparalleled in our extremely controversial and divisive history. When the federal government opted to conscript citizens into the war there was strong opposition among French-Canadians as well as unions, farmers, and non-Anglo immigrants. At the time, a majority of Canadians lived a rural, pre-industrial, existence of subsistence farming; and as such, the very survival of most of these farms required the sweat and blood of every available male. The idea of sending them off to Europe to die, and at such an early age, would have been, by any rational assessment, a sacrifice too great. So in response pro- and anti-conscription advocates attacked one another loudly and publicly with charges of cowardice, disloyalty, and immorality or otherwise cries of bloodlust, imperialism, and just plain stupidity. Eventually things escalated, with the federal government seeking the arrest of draft dodgers. In Quebec this resulted in days of rioting and violence leaving civilians injured and dead. So this war and act of conscription can easily be seen as a defining moment not for Canadian unity but for its division. In fact, one could argue that this whole episode of war resistance, largely a marker of identity and a point of pride in Quebec, was the seed from which Quebec's independence movement grew.
Much like Remembrance Day, this whole thing appears an act of frightful patriotism through collective misremembering and not sober, reflective memorial. More than the actual historical events, it seems Vimy is important because Peter Mansbridge assures us it is, because we've built a monument to it, because it's a tiny, vague, smudge of maybe-something (if you close your eyes and wish for it really hard) in an otherwise vast historical sea of nothing. You're welcome to that if you want; but, me, I'd much rather nothing at all.
Comments