Mémorial Canadien de Vimy

It's a strange thing to hear stories about what the taking of Vimy Ridge and the battle of the Somme was like. As someone born into this century, I've come to know the concept of warfare very differently. Today we see war on television and whether we admit it or not, we understand the concept of warfare to be much as it's portrayed in movies and video games. In our minds, war is a comparatively clean business, where the sides are unbalanced, the bombs smart, and communication instantaneous. We imagine battles fought from inside control rooms with three dimensional displays serving up real time information, and video from self-guided warheads streaming back to headquarters thousands of kilometres away.

Fighting a battle in the Great War was of course, nothing like this, but I still found myself surprised by just how very different things were. There was no radio in WWI. Messages were literally run from HQ to the front -- a 8km stretch through winding trenches. The messengers dodged bullets and shrapnel along the way and wore a red arm band to alert soldiers huddled in the trenches to (a) let them pass quickly, and (b) not shoot them in the back for being a deserter. Unfortunately this also marked them as a target for the enemy, and messengers had an average lifespan of only a few days. The trip from the front to HQ and back could take up to 20hours, assuming the messenger survived, and only then, would your CO know how and when to advance. Imagine being outflanked by the enemy and only finding out 10hours later, then issuing orders to counter with the understanding that those orders won't be executed for another 10.

Due in large part to the limited communication, the tactics back then were very different. By necessity battles were fought in terms of months rather than hours: trenches and tunnels were dug in advance of a standing army, artillery was positioned and fired in an effort to reshape the landscape with craters and hills to limit visibility, and graves were dug in advance to accommodate the bodies the officers knew would result from the fighting.

All of this preparation, and then a few ranking officers would lead a division of usually under-informed, often illiterate boys into battle -- the plans of which, for security reasons, resided no where but in the heads of those officers. When the officers were killed (as was often the case), the operation fell into disarray because no one knew what was going on. Soldiers slept in pools of urine, rotting flesh, rats, and lice, and would do so slouching in the trenches knowing full well that artillery could make sure they'd never wake up.

The memorial at Vimy is just that: a memorial to the thousands who fell attempting to secure that patch of land, and it's as beautiful as it is tragic.