TriumphAnt

Our drive from Honfleur into Arras followed a path with names that have profound echoes for someone who, like myself, has an interest in military history. I’ll mention just one here, because even though it was a beautiful sweep that took us down into a valley to an overpass that crossed the Somme River, it was still... the Somme.

Among the many horrors that World War I calls to mind, none are more easily called to mind than those associated with the Battle of the Somme. It was the first day of the Battle of the Somme that made July 1 in Newfoundland forever a day of mourning rather than a day to celebrate the birth of Canada. On that date in 1916, the First Newfoundland Regiment was all but wiped out in an attack on a section of the Somme front called Beaumont-Hamel. 733 out of 801 men, a future province’s entire generation, died or were badly wounded in the space of 30 minutes.

Our destination today, Arras (pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable – “ah-RASS”), is not far from the most significant of the many Canadian World War I memorials in Europe.

Arras is a very old town, but it is a new old town. “Old”, because it traces its history at least as far back as when years were measured in two digits, and possibly as far as numbers requiring a “BC” in front of them. (I found at least one reference that relates how, as the already established Roman town of Atrebatum, it was converted to Christianity late in the 4th century by Saint Diogenes.)

But “new” because it had the geographical misfortune to be located at a position on World War I’s Western Front where the war pretty much settled into its bitter trench war of attrition for four years. During that time, it was for all intents and purposes flattened and the rebuilt Arras you see today, while quite beautiful in many respects is also quite new, by European standards.

For example, I found this online photo of the artillery-smashed ruins of the Arras City Hall, which sat (and today sits again) on one boundary of the main town square. (Source: cache.gettimages.com) It’s hard to believe that the Hall, as you see it now, is less than a hundred years old. Similarly, this wider photo shows the main square – “la Grande Place” – in 1919.
(Source: mstation.org)

And here are, in turn, the City Hall and – in a photo taken from its bell tower – "Place des Héros", a second square just yards from la Grande Place, in October 2008.


From the perspective of the tower, we discovered Arras’s secret: the reason that the town was so quickly rebuilt after The Great War. Obviously it was done by the same folks who do those “Puzz-3D” jigsaw structures of places and objects the world over, both famous and ordinary. In Arras, the only difference is that they did it up life-sized.


On to things less flippant. Just 20 minutes or so to the north of Arras is a 7-km long escarpment known as Vimy Ridge.

You can’t be a Canadian without having heard of Vimy Ridge. The subject of innumerable essays, books, TV and film documentaries, Canada’s successful assault on its heights during WWI after both the British and French had failed is most often characterized as the event that marked our “coming of age as a nation”. For the first time in our history, Canadian soldiers acted as an entirely “Canadian” Corps – four Divisions numbering about 98,000 men – rather than as a wing of a larger British army. (In fact, they were bolstered by the addition of the British 5th Infantry Division for this attack.) On the downside, that “aging” process cost some 3,600 dead and over 7,000 wounded over the battle’s four days on April 9-12, 1917. Vimy is the stuff of heroism on a grand scale and around it swirl so many of the unanswered wartime “Why?” and “How?” questions such as, What possibly is it that gives mere human beings the inner fortitude to rise up and march forward against a hitherto unbeatable and still heavily armed enemy?

The Canadian Memorial at Vimy sits atop what in 1917 was known as Hill 145, the highest point of land on the entire escarpment. Although much of the gently rising approach to the Memorial today is surrounded by patches of forest, this was not the case in WWI and from its height, even today, you can instantly appreciate why it was so strategically important. You can see literally for miles in all directions. In the stagnant daily grind into which the war settled for four years, the Germans who were dug in on Vimy could watch vast swaths of Allied battle preparation so as to be ready when each new attack came.

Without turning this entry into a lengthy dissertation on military tactics, what drove the Canadian success seems by modern warfare standards to be forehead-slappingly obvious, but was entirely new in 1917: incredibly detailed planning, rehearsal and up-to-the-hour intelligence. Canada’s troops spent the months leading up to the attack visiting enormous plasticine scale models of the battlefield well behind the lines. Each unit’s objectives, therefore, were not simply lines on a map. They were painstakingly accurate three-dimensional representations. The battle plan was known by every single soldier in the army – another Canadian innovation. (Prior to Vimy, maps and the full plan were entrusted only to senior ranks. This led to two obvious problems – first, the uppermost among the higher ranking officers “fought” from protected headquarters sites well behind the lines and communicated their commands via radio, semaphore, human runners and even carrier pigeons. That required not only getting their orders forward to the fighting troops, it also made those orders often already outdated because rapidly changing battle information was frequently hours old by the time it got back to headquarters. Second, even though a great many officers were also in the front lines, when they were wounded or killed the full battle plan died with them.)

Finally, Canadian troops rehearsed and rehearsed – eventually perfecting – an infantry attack support tactic called the creeping barrage. This was when the exploding shells of the supporting artillery fire from your own guns moved forward on the line of attack, often as near as just 100 yards ahead of the advancing troops. The blasts kept your enemy’s heads down, indeed kept them deep in their shelters and, when the creeping barrage moved on, before the enemy could recover and move back into their defensive positions above ground, the attacking troops were already in their trenches.

Here endeth the War College Primer. If you have a hankering for greater detail, I do recommend Pierre Berton’s book, “Vimy”, a very well-written account of the fight that doesn’t wallow in “militaria” but describes the battle in ordinary language from the participants’ point of view. It is at the same time both a sadly moving and an uplifting read.

Wikipedia also has a very thorough summary (albeit with much more detail about the units involved, and the place of the battle in the larger strategy of the War on the Western Front). It is here.

But beyond the battle itself, what makes the site today especially meaningful for Canadians is the truly stunning memorial that has been erected there. It sits on land that was granted in 1922 to the people of Canada “in perpetuity” by the Government of France. And like so many other war memorials, it pays tribute not only to those who fought on this particular battlefield, but to those who fought and died throughout the entire war. The Vimy Memorial serves as our national overseas WWI memorial and is carved with the names of 66,000 Canadians who died, over 11,000 of whom have no known grave.

We visited it on a beautiful Fall day and our first view of the monument itself was framed through a “window” of autumn-coloured maples.


Every feature of the monument is possessed of a heavily symbolic meaning, from each of its 22 sculpted human figures
to the simple decision to build two towers to represent Canada and France.
In this photo, the figure “Canada Mourning”
also gives you an appreciation of the view that Hill 145 commands of the Douai Plain (the twin mounds in the distance are enormous slag heaps from coal mines several kilometres away).

The site, in addition to this awe-inducing monument, offers a slightly more intrepid visitor the opportunity to view a small portion of a part of the battlefield that was crucial to WWI warfare, especially on a battlefield where much of it was under the constant watch of enemy observers on the heights – the underground tunnels that soldiers dug deep in the native chalk.

The Vimy memorial site today includes – about a kilometre from the monument – a restored section of this huge and complex underground tunnel network; it’s known as the La Grange Subway and snakes along some 10m below ground. “Restored” is perhaps a bit misleading. The tunnel has been considerably more heavily shored than was the case during the war, and absent is the smell that thousands of cloistered, terrified, heavily-equipped men packed shoulder-to-shoulder for several days at a time would have generated. Absent too was the darkness. The La Grange in wartime was lit only by the occasional candle stuck on the wall every 20 feet or so, while its tourist-navigable portion is today flooded by electric lighting. Also absent the day we visited was the cold – it snowed the April 1917 morning the attack was launched. And finally, we did not have to endure the frequent, terrifying, violent “bumps” of shells bursting on the land immediately overhead. But even in the relative comfort of peacetime and more than 90 years removal, it is still a close, damp place, not for either the claustrophobic or the asthmatic (as we discovered when one such member of our tour group had to return to the surface after just a few minutes underground because of her asthma).


In the second of the two tunnel shots, our guide is faintly visible on the left. She is a delightful young lady named Brianne whose presentation balanced just the right amount of sobriety with humour. At one point, she referred to the relative ease with which the miles of tunnel could be dug because of the softness of the surrounding chalk... “or for the benefit of our visitors from Liverpool today – ‘choke’” (her take on the last word giving it a Liverpudlian twirl that would have done Paul McCartney proud).

Vimy’s guides are all Canadian students who have given up essentially a whole semester of their university programs to work at the site. In a recurring visit from the “small world” world, we spoke for a time with another named Caitlin who worked in the Visitor’s Centre. Caitlin turned out to be from Burlington (where Leslie and family lived for many years), is presently a student at the University of Western Ontario (where Leslie got her Library degree) and has a sister enrolled at Carleton (where Leslie works and Katie is presently on the way to bolstering the ranks of the world’s aerospace engineers).

Finally, a couple of other Vimy tidbits. Zoom in on this sign.
As completely surprised as you might be (I know I was) to discover this, almost a century after World War I passed from this landscape, there are still large portions of its major battlefields where one is aggressively warned not to tread for the reason given on the sign. One of the more sobering examples of just such delayed munitions is not far away from Vimy, across the border in Belgium on a section of the front known as the Messines Ridge. On July 31, 1917, the Battle of Passchendaele was launched with the simultaneous detonation of 21 massive separate mines – large caves tunnelled deep under enemy lines that were packed with explosives. At Messines, a total of 455 tonnes of highly explosive ammonal went off, instantly killing an estimated 10,000 German soldiers, and not surprisingly relegating many of those poor unfortunates to the post-mortem ranks of “no known grave”.

That at least was what was supposed to have happened. In fact, two of the huge mines failed to detonate, their existence being unsuspected until July 17, 1955 when a lightning strike in what was fortunately only a farmer’s field caused the 20th mine, buried deep below its surface, to explode. Its only victim was a haplessly grazing cow. The 21st mine’s exact location is unknown to this day (but apparently is suspected to have been found, I read recently. It’s not been removed because of the almost nitroglycerine-like sensitivity of ammonal.)

Things like this give me serious pause when I think how many tens of millions of much smaller but no less lost anti-personnel mines have been buried in terrain ranging from more firmly defined boundaries, such as that which divides North and South Korea, to the tens of thousands of “anywhere”s that have been the sites of the world’s countless brush wars and factional fights in the many decades since this especially ugly and impersonal little killing machine was invented.

Support your local landmine ban / mine removal group.

And the second Vimy tidbit? When the Germans – this time as Nazis – once more swept across Belgium and northern France at the start of WWII, a great many war memorials were destroyed either by German commanders acting on their own initiative or under orders from Hitler. Because of course they mostly commemorated Allied victories / German defeats. But Vimy, dedicated in 1936 after 11 years of construction, was near the battlefield on which the future Fuhrer of the Third Reich, then a lowly Bavarian corporal, also fought. In fact, Hitler actually posted Wehrmacht guards at the Vimy memorial to prevent its defacement by German troops. Which led to images such as this “How I spent my French vacation” snap
from June 12, 1940 that the French (and no doubt a great many descendants of Canadian veterans), given the chance would likely wish into oblivion. (Source: cachegettyimages.com)

Hmmm... I think I digressed there. Back to Arras.

Arras, like so many old (or old / rebuilt) towns in France, is wonderful to just walk about, day or night.


We forced ourselves to enjoy yet another wonderful French dinner. (We also learned something. Apparently France has a law guaranteeing that workers receive at least one day in seven off. This has largely shaken out as an almost country-wide closure of tourist-related and service type businesses on Monday. The rationale, of course, is that more people are likely to use such businesses on the weekends. But it also means a lot less choice on a Monday. So rare is a Monday opening, in fact, that it becomes a feature for a restaurant to self-promote on the menu board out front – “Ouvert les lundis”. Our host in fact pretty much suggested only one place to us for dinner on the Monday night we were in Arras – the Bistrot du Boucher. After we each opened with French onion soup (deliciously validating our theory that if anywhere is going to produce amazing French onion soup, it’s going to be a place in France), Leslie opted for (Surprise!) lamb, accompanied by a wonderful thick disc of chorizo sausage, all on a bed of something neither of us could put a name to, but which seemed like coucous with the mumps (referring to its size, not its flavour). I also repeated an earlier success and opted for seafood – salmon this time, accompanied by a side of fettucine in a fantastic smoked salmon alfredo sauce. And for dessert we had a “tarte au citron meringuée”.

I know what you’re thinking – “C’mon you dummy; you had a piece of lemon meringue pie!” Well yes, but it actually was a tart – made of a crust that was flakier than the House of Commons, filled with a lemon filling that flawlessly balanced the citrus’s acidity with beet sugar sweetness (unlike the House of Commons) and topped with a cloud-like meringue that had to have been scorched by a kitchen pyromaniac wielding a blowtorch, because no broiler in my experience is going to yield the nearly-but-not-quite-burned surface over a firm but sticky under layer. Wine tonight? A medium-bodied red Chateau des Tours Brouilly that nested perfectly on the fulcrum midway between the “Great with lamb; great with salmon” extremes). And rounding out a perfect dinner experience, our VISA gold card – complete with six-digit PIN – worked!

Next: one more brief view of Arras (I was tempted to insert a bikini shot here -- *Slap* *Slap* Bad Mike! No cookie!) both above and below ground, then on to Alsace – Lorraine, where French and Germans have always gotten along just fine.