The Vimy Trap

Ian McKay, Jamie Swift

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781771132763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

The story of the bloody 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge is, according to many of today's tellings, a heroic founding moment for Canada. This noble, birth-of-a-nation narrative is regularly applied to the Great War in general. Yet this mythical tale is rather new. "Vimyism"— today's official story of glorious, martial patriotism—contrasts sharply with the complex ways in which veterans, artists, clerics, and even politicians who had supported the war interpreted its meaning over the decades.

Was the Great War a futile imperial debacle? A proud, nation-building milestone? Contending Great War memories have helped to shape how later wars were imagined. The Vimy Trap provides a powerful probe of commemoration cultures. This subtle, fast-paced work of public history—combining scholarly insight with sharp-eyed journalism, and based on primary sources and school textbooks, battlefield visits and war art—explains both how and why peace and war remain contested terrain in ever-changing landscapes of Canadian memory.

1

MYTHS, MEMORIES, AND A CREATION STORY

The reason the world pays heed to Canada is because we fought like lions in the trenches of World War I, on the beaches of World War II, and in theatres and conflicts scattered around the globe.

— JUSTIN TRUDEAU, 10 June 2016

It would be difficult to imagine a Great War that looks less like Fred Varley’s blood-soaked field in For What?

The 2011 edition of Discover Canada—the late Conservative Harper government’s citizenship guide for future Canadians—manages to paint a picture of the war that is so remarkably different that it seems to portray a world of warfare that once existed in some far-off fantasy land.¹

The guide shows a valiant member of the Fort Garry Horse, mounted upon his steed and leading his troops into battle. A ruddy-faced General Currie, “Canada’s greatest soldier,” resplendent in his uniform and medals, meets our eyes as he gazes confidently into the horizon. A soldier astride his horse leads his troops into battle. In the foreground of the Vimy Memorial in France, one member of a party of uniformed soldiers bows down, seemingly in reverence, before the monument’s twin towers. The “First World War,” the text announces, proved that Canadians were “tough, innovative soldiers,” whose valour earned Canadians a reputation as the “shock troops of the British Empire,” in a war that “strengthened both national and imperial pride.” At the bottom, in a section called “Women Get the Vote,” a nursing sister, one of three thousand nurses in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, or “Bluebirds,” is the very picture of blue-and-white-clad femininity as she looks demurely down, the visual antithesis of the hyper-masculine, dynamic Currie.

In this short account, there is not a wounded body, bombed city, or mangled corpse to be seen, let alone a blood-soaked field. There is not even a trench. Welcome to twenty-first-century Canada. The Great War has become truly great again.

* * *

At five-thirty in the morning, snow and sleet were driving down. Towering ahead of the soldiers loomed a mighty fortress, the decisive key to a vast front stretching from the North Sea to the Alps.

For years they had said nobody could take this fortress. Many times the French and British forces had tried to do so. Yet as many times as they attempted it, they failed. The word was that it could not be done.

Least of all by the Canadians. The Europeans disparaged this ragtag army of colonial frontiersmen. They called them undisciplined because the Canucks did not obey all their rules. They thought them a rough, tough bunch of individuals.

And they were: men of valour who knew how to get a job done; straight shooters who talked rough and played rough. They had braved the frontier. Now they were braving the Western Front. The big question was: could they take the ridge?

For five months the Canadians had been preparing to answer that question. They had consulted with scientists. For five months the army brass had worked on finding new ways of firing the heavy guns and assaulting an enemy line. For five months they had broken with military conventions and told every soldier about the plan. For five months the battalions of Canadians had been learning to fight as a team.

Now, in the third year of a war of attrition, on 9 April 1917, at Eastertime, that Christian festival so symbolic of sacrifice, four divisions of Canadians—100,000 men—gathered together for the first time. Inspired by the man said to be Canada’s greatest soldier, Arthur Currie, they had a plan to gain some important ground.

At 5:30 a.m. the earth shook. The sky itself seemed to tremble. With the loudest sound imaginable, the Canadians moved forward up the slope, and soon enough the world finally learned what the Canadians could do. By the following day their forces had taken the hill and consolidated their hold on what had been an important German position.

The advance started four days that changed the course of the First World War. The four days at Vimy Ridge not only showed the world what Canadians could do, but showed Canadians themselves what they could accomplish if they all worked together. Soon they would be marching into Germany—an army of freedom-fighters standing up to a bloody dictatorship foreign to our values.

They used to laugh at the Canadians. They said Vimy Ridge could not be taken.

But after the great Battle of Vimy Ridge, they stopped laughing. The Canadians had arrived. Canada rejoiced. And every year on 11 November, every true Canadian honours the memory of Vimy and our veterans.

There it was, on the record: 5:30 a.m., 9 April 1917. Vimy 1917. Turning point in the war. Birth of a nation.

* * *

Or so goes the oft-repeated story. Unfortunately for generations of Canadians eager to learn about the “turning points” in their nation’s history, most of it is more than a little off course. This standard version of Vimy is a highly dubious, mythologized narrative. It is akin to a fairy tale for overaged boys who want their history to be as heart-thumping and simplistic as a video game. Parts of it are (roughly) true. About 97,184 Canadians in four divisions of the Canadian Corps, often also called the Canadian Expeditionary Force or CEF,² which was in turn a part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), did indeed unleash a formidable synchronized barrage of artillery upon three German divisions holding Vimy Ridge, a high spot of land offering a vantage-point over the western edge of the Douai Plain. Although the defenders put up a fierce fight, the Canadians ascended the ridge; and four days later, at a cost of 3,598 dead and 7,004 wounded, they held it. The Germans retreated to the east.

Especially since the 1980s Canadians have been told again and again that Vimy represents the “birth of the nation.” Sometimes they have been told that the Great War as a whole, lasting from 1914 to 1918, proved to be Canada’s “War of Independence.” For Canada’s most popular historian and myth-maker, Pierre Berton, writing in 1986, “The victory at Vimy would confirm the growing realization that Canada had, at last, come of age.”³ The popular hockey commentator Don Cherry, in his florid style, hammered that point home in an April 2014 “Coach’s Corner” segment of Hockey Night in Canada:

April 9th—boy—this is when Canada … became a nation—birth of a nation … the French and the British tried to take it for a whole year … and General Currie said, “No British, No French involved. I’m a Canadian general, we will take it in two days…” We are the best. Afghanistan, Vimy, Second World War, Korea. We are the best.⁴

Starting with its original publication in 2008, the federal government’s glossy Citizenship Guide—a less dynamic but more official source, and perhaps just as far-reaching—began to deliver much the same message. In addition to informing new citizens that Sir Arthur Currie—the general applauded by Cherry and the supposed co-architect of the victory at Vimy—was “Canada’s greatest soldier,” the guide stated of those days of glory: “It was Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade.” Those unidentified words can be tracked down to a statement from Brig.-Gen. Alex Ross, C.M.G., D.S.O., of the Dominion Council of the Canadian Legion, in his introduction to a 1967 book by D.E. (Eberts) Macintyre, a veteran instrumental in organizing a pilgrimage to the new Vimy Memorial in 1936. “In those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation.”⁵

The Ross statement, ruthlessly decontextualized and made to appear as though it were an eyewitness account and not the sort of thing normally said at commemorative services, is now repeated on countless official websites. It has received explicit approval from Governor General David Johnston, who in 2012 remarked: “In many ways it was the birth of a nation. It was the first time Canadians fought shoulder to shoulder.… Not as a subordinate unit in the British army, but on our own.”⁶

All immigrants hoping to become Canadian citizens had to attend closely to Ross’s words and similar statements because the newcomers would later be tested on the Guide’s contents. The right answer to “When and where was Canada born?” was coming to be, as a matter of official policy, “Vimy Ridge, 1917.”

Yet the answer to that question is not at all straightforward. Indeed, the subject of Vimy Ridge, including the country’s birth and the glories of the war itself, falls onto a highly contested terrain. Perhaps the question of the birth of this particular nation can never be readily answered; and certainly no serious war historian actually sees Vimy as a decisive battle in the Great War. The truth, evasive as always, is more complex.

What we call “Vimyism” was born on a battlefield a long time ago. Since then it has waxed and waned over the years and been constantly questioned, but still it persists. It is exemplified at its core by the achievements and sacrifices of the Battle of Vimy in April 1917, but it has become more than that, too. By Vimyism we mean a network of ideas and symbols that centre on how Canada’s Great War experience somehow represents the country’s supreme triumph—a scaling of a grand height of honour and bravery and maturity, a glorious achievement—and affirm that the war itself and anyone who fought and died in it should be unconditionally revered and commemorated—and not least because it marked the country’s birth. An irreplaceable element of Vimyism—in Don Cherry’s account and many other popular renditions—is Canadian exceptionalism: we succeeded where they failed. Unencumbered by useless old traditions and unafraid of hardship and death, Canadians carried the day, and—it is strongly implied if not always said—even won the entire war.

It has become a Vimyist article of faith that the vast majority of Canadians believed that death on the Western Front was noble. Some soldiers and malcontents and cranks might have thought otherwise—but, it is said, most Canadians revered this war so much that they placed it at the core of their sense of nationhood. It became a kind of founding myth that the nation’s rights and freedoms were established by our Great War soldiers. According to this “big bang” theory of Canadian history—that has Canada fighting its war of independence in 1914–18, after which Canadians understood what it meant to be Canadian—the citizens of the Dominion realized that, beneath divisions of language, religion, region, race, and ideology, they shared—after that magic moment on Vimy Ridge—deep-seated commonalities. They shared a great and unifying “myth of Canada,” whose founding heroes were gallant male soldiers and whose founding moments were victorious battles.

Many writers have contributed to this point of view, piling example upon example to build the myth into an almost insurmountable edifice (we will meet a good number of them in the following pages). Among the notable historians is Jonathan Vance, who in a series of books and articles—from his Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (1997) to “Remembrance” (2014)—argues that the Great War brought Canada a new sense of nationhood as its citizen-army carried Canada’s colours, resisted an atrocity-perpetrating enemy, and thus inspired the people. The men willing to fight to defend “Canada, Western civilization, and Christianity” in the Canadian Expeditionary Force became “in a very real sense .. the nation in arms, the life-force of Canada transported overseas.” At Vimy Ridge, Vance states, the Canadian Corps’ “stunning success, a triumph of organization, preparation, training, and raw courage,” represented nothing less than “the birth of a nation.” The Great War constituted “the crucible of Canadian nationhood.”⁷

Vimyism, then, encapsulates a form of martial nationalism that exalts the nation-building and moral excellence of soldiers. Its rampant militarism contends that war is fundamental to human flourishing, specifically because it toughens men and develops their characters. War from this point of view offers transcendent moments of beauty and release from humdrum realities and affords individuals an opportunity to reach their potential. A corollary of the rise of Vimyism, too, is that the Canadian perspective on the war has become progressively more and more provincial, far less conscious of the bigger picture, less sensitive to the people and conditions in other faraway places.

Even General Currie, the hero of the Citizenship Guide and Don Cherry, thought that Vimy Ridge was vastly overrated.⁸ Yet, even if you do not fully believe that Vimy was the decisive battle in the Great War, it is still possible to be a “Vimyist” as long as you think the Great War was a truly great war for Canada—great in giving the country a proud place in the world and great for the values that Canadians ostensibly fought for, such as liberty, democracy, Christianity, and freedom, against an enemy standing for autocracy and lawlessness. What complicates this stream of thought is that during the war itself, and through the following decades, a quite common response to what turned out to be a human quagmire of previously unknown proportions was the very opposite of reverence. Moreover, many elements of Vimyism consist of outright errors, easily refuted; many others are dire simplifications. Other exclamations make untestable metaphysical claims (such as the one that nations, rather like people, are born) promoting questionable ideas that are far beyond any and all validation. After all, the construction of nationhood, as art historian Sue Malvern theorizes, is an evolving process that “is informed by telling stories, manufacturing fictions, and inventing traditions in a ceaseless and selective process of inclusion and exclusion, remembering and forgetting.”⁹

The keys in that explanation are the combinations of “inclusion and exclusion” and “remembering and forgetting.” We call the project of Vimyism the “Vimy trap” because we, like many others, see the dangers of its deep pit: its strict rationale of narrow nationalism and its wilful refusal of the realities of twentieth-century warfare and its even more complicated asymmetric twenty-first-century cousin.¹⁰ The Vimyist understanding that modern wars are designed by generals, fought by soldiers, and driven by such high ideals as democracy, freedom, equality, liberty, and justice confines us to perpetual confusion. The challenge, after a century has passed, is to imagine the Great War¹¹ (which is what, in deference to tradition, we are calling the First World War or World War I or the War of 1914–18) not as any metaphorical birth but as a moment of warning about the unprecedented possibilities of mass death under conditions of industrial modernity. Getting Vimy’s history right brings home the complex horrors and suffering of modern warfare, nullifying the baseless celebration of engaging in war.

Vimy is a trap because, as it has come to be mythologized by militarists, historians, and nationalists, it tempts us to think that chivalric war somehow survived the coming of the epoch of mechanized warfare. There is a childishness to Vimyism. In its essence, it wants us to return to a day of glorious battle—as signalled by the Citizenship Guide’s visual homage to the charges of the mounted cavalry, which were, in one soldier’s words, “exceedingly gallant, but futile” in an age of heavy artillery.¹² So many official and popular representations of war today avoid something that the returned soldiers of the Great War kept insisting upon: that under c...