Today is Maundy Thursday, the day on which Christians begin the weekend that ends with Easter, the day we celebrate Christi's resurrection. This being a blog devoted to the Christian faith, this post should really be about that tremendously important historical event. However, it happens to be the day that I read Joe O'Connor's report about the Vimy Ridge memorial week, when Canada remembers, mourns and celebrates the supreme sacrifice thousands of Canadian soldiers made at Vimy Ridge in France. It was such an important event that it has been credited with the birth of the Canadian nation.
I don't get a chance/time to write a post every day or even regularly, but I will try to treat you to some meditation on the Good Friday--Easter axis before the weekend is over. However, as a Christian writer I cannot simply ignore such an important and sad event for and in our nation. Actually the Good Friday--Easter axis has this in common with the Vimy story: they both include a very sad part and very joyful one. For Vimy, the sad part is the death of thousands of young Canadian men; the happy part is that it represents a young nation coming out of the closet of obscurity onto the world stage. We Canadians are proud of that. So, death leading to a new life.
Similarly, the sad part of the Christian story is the death of Christ through crucifixion for the sinfulness of the human race, including yours and mine. The celebration is about the resurrection of Christ: Death does not have the final word; it is not the real end, except of just a phase. And that resurrection spelled the beginning of a new awakening emerging from Jerusalem into pretty well all the nations of the world. Here, too, death leading to a new life.
But for today, the Vimy story as Joe O'Connor tells it in the "National Post in the Vancouver Sun (April 10, 2017). I decided to leave the newspaper's reference to "related stories" down below in place for your further edification.
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Willie McGregor was sitting in a
tent, sipping on bottled water and peeling an orange. It was going to be a long
day, the 94-year-old Albertan said, as the hot April sun beat down on Vimy. The
last time McGregor was in France was June 1944. He landed on the beaches of
Normandy — as an army medic — and saw things that no person should ever see.
“There are
times when I’ll think about the war every night,” McGregor says. “I was asked
after I came back if I wanted to work in a hospital and I said, ‘No, I’ve seen
enough blood.’
“I went
into farming. I have had a good life.”
On Sunday,
McGregor was here, at Vimy, positioned in the shade near the soaring Canadian
Memorial. “It is an honour,” he said. The 25,000 other Canadians who came, many
wearing red and white, would agree. A 21-gun salute was fired, replica biplanes
flew past, bagpipes played, a minute of silence was observed. Prime ministers,
presidents and future kings gave speeches. Justin Trudeau elicited roars from
the crowd, speaking of “the burden they bore, the country they made;” the
Prince of Wales intoned, “this was Canada at its best;” while François Hollande
said the “message of Vimy was to stand united.”
Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images
But Vimy,
at its core, is for the Canadian people: a memorial to 3,598 farmers, city boys
and fishermen, killed taking a ridge that no other nation could take. The land
is a gift from France, paid for in Canadian blood. Walter Allward’s soaring
monument exudes an aura of permanence.
In northern
France and nearby Belgium, the war — even 100 years after Vimy — is not viewed
at a distance, but up close. people hear that you are a Canadian and some smile
with surprise. Every village has a cenotaph. Every other field, it seems, a
cemetery.
Kurt
DeBacker was born in Ypres, Belgium, the site of the world’s first gas attack,
a town pulverized during four years of fighting, a place full of Canadian
ghosts.
DENIS CHARLET/AFP/Getty Images
“I grew up
in the world’s largest graveyard,” DeBacker says.
When
DeBacker was a kid — he is 46 now — his mother would tell him to watch out for
the rusty bits in the garden, shrapnel pieces that he and his pals dug up by
the bucket and traded in at the museum for Snickers bars. He was 13 when his
school principal appeared at the class door and asked his friend, Laurent, to
step outside.
“Laurent
didn’t return to school for two weeks,” DeBacker says. “His father was a sugar
beet farm. He ploughed over an old shell and was killed when it exploded.
“My
friends, we grew up playing in the Commonwealth cemeteries — we were respectful
of them — but the grass there was always so soft and green.”
That grass
was once mud. Deep and thick, and full of the dead, about 50 per cent of whom
were never identified. What sometimes gets forgotten in the memory wars — in
the tribal custom of honouring our dead — is that the Germans were boys, too.
With moms and dads and brothers and sisters and stories and dreams that died in
the mud. In this land of bones, it is hard to find a place more lonesome than a
German cemetery.
Christian Hartman/AFP/Getty Images
I went to a German cemetery and it was very emotional for me,” says Heike Hemlin, a German-born public servant who moved to Canada 25 years ago. Hemlin grew up in
a culture of silence, when being German meant being ashamed of what your
grandparents and great-grandparents had done. “We were the bad guys,” she says.
Commonwealth
cemeteries are full of light, colourful flowers, manicured grass and white
marble headstones. German crosses are black. The men are buried in mass graves.
There are no flowers. Germany rents the land — in perpetuity, relying on groups
of schoolchildren and volunteer donations to maintain their burial sites. It is
punishment, everlasting, for starting the war, and it is part of the tragedy of
it.
The pain is
everywhere: John Kelsall’s father, Sam, fought at Vimy. Sam would often tell
the story of a farm boy in his unit from Saskatchewan. When a hand grenade
landed in a trench full of men, the boy pounced it — sacrificing himself for
his friends.
“My father
would tell that story with tears in his eyes,” Kelsall says.
Peter
Robinson’s great-grandfather, Pte. Edward J. Clement, survived Vimy, but was
killed three months later near Arras. His widow, Elizabeth, lived for another
seven decades.
“I saw what
his death caused,” Robinson says. “Sadness, anger, financial strain — not least
because the politicians of the day were so indifferent to the widows’ plight.”
Related
·
Vimy Ridge database: Search
the names of ancestors who died in the historic First World War battle
Six days
ago, Gen. (ret.) Rick Hillier addressed a crowd of Vimy pilgrims on a boat
gliding up the Seine River and told them how, if they were proud of being
Canadian now — if their hearts beat red — that their hearts would be bursting
come Sunday, April 9th. There is pride, indeed, great big chests full of it,
being here, on this day, and listening to stories about our
great-great-grandparents’ generation, dying, living, fighting like lions to the
everlasting gratitude of the French.
But pride,
perhaps, isn’t the correct word at Vimy, with its soaring monument, and with
the politicians on-hand to give speeches on the 100th anniversary of an event
where nothing needed to be said.
Words can’t
capture the magnitude of the place. Look east, away from the monument, over the
Douai Plain, and what you see is beauty: farmers’ fields, rich and green in the
April afternoon light. Walk around the base of the monument, however, and the
meaning of Vimy is clear. It is carved into the stone — 11,285 names of the
Canadians who died in France and whose bodies were never found.
“We haven’t
learned a thing, have we?” Willie McGregor said, his voice full of wonder. “I
think of this world, and it is still a terrible mess.”
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