Finaliste : David Little, Vimy Ridge

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Vimy Ridge: Deception and Discovery

Deception: a recurring theme of our National Historic Site at Vimy Ridge, France. In the first place, how many realize that the long arm of Parks Canada reaches beyond our borders and extends across the Atlantic Ocean to this place — and one at Beaumont Hamel, to boot?

Once at Vimy, one peels away layers of the unforeseen. Ask most Canadians to describe the site; inevitably their response will focus exclusively on the monument and its twin columns’ Apollonian reach skyward. I too was deceived — my focus narrowed, no doubt, by my framed edition of the Star Weekly, which features those majestic columns at the site’s official opening in 1936.

What a surprise then to arrive and discover so much more, like well–preserved trenches and tunnels. Oh yes, those tunnels constructed secretly to hide our attacking soldiers from dangerous German eyes and to protect our supply lines. In fact, to ensure that the deception here was total, the telltale chalk tailings were carefully hidden. Humid during my recent tour, I could easily imagine how oppressively close these tunnels would have been for our packed, frightened soldiers in 1917. Perhaps the tour’s most surprising revelation is of just how extensive and sophisticated that tunnel network became. More than ten kilometres in total, it featured telephone and water lines, electricity, ammunition caches, rail tracks, and command and dressing stations.

For me the ultimate deception at Vimy Ridge involves… the sheep. At first blush, my accompanying photo seems a run-of-the-mill effort to portray a peaceful, pastoral scene — an uninteresting photo that could have been taken at thousands of places across the globe. Don’t be deceived. Step back several paces from the wire, sharpen your focus, and foreground those bright red signs that now enter your picture: Danger — No entry — Undetonated explosives. Suddenly one understands that this is no idyllic, bucolic scene, but an area so charged with danger that almost one hundred years later humans still may not tread. Munching sheep notwithstanding, Arcadia was never like this.

Each year I present Vimy Ridge to my grade eight students as part of our Remembrance Day commemoration. Strangely enough, neither the grandeur of the monument nor the story of those secret tunnels finally captures their greatest interest. No. It’s those sheep every time. There is something so deceptive and ironic about that picture that it seems to define the site for them. It’s that simple photo that ultimately brings home the danger that Canada endured here. So many shells were fired during that brutal spring of 1917 that the peril encountered by our troops persists, concealed, lurking below, reaching into our present. These are the Vimy Ridge “no-go” areas — the preserve of those sheep cropping the grass, unaware of the dread hand from the past that threatens to annihilate them. Living history, indeed.

Vimy: an unfolding story of remembrance, of trenches and tunnels, of sheep and shells. Celebrate the deception and ignite a journey of discovery.