Canadian National Vimy Memorial

Listen first to the wind. Up here on the ridge it rarely stops. It pushes across the grass and through the pines, and it carries the faint smell of cut turf and chalky earth. Below you, the flat plain of northern France runs away to the east, grey with towns and green with fields. Above you, two pale towers rise into the sky. They are so white they seem to hold the light even on a cloudy day.

You are standing on Vimy Ridge, on the highest point of a long, low slope that soldiers once called Hill 145. It does not look like much of a hill. But in this flat country, a few dozen metres of height meant everything. Whoever held this ridge could watch the plain for miles. During the First World War, German forces held it for more than two years. French and British attacks had already cost tens of thousands of lives here before the Canadians came.

On the morning of the ninth of April, 1917, Easter Monday, the attack began in sleet and snow. For the first time, all four divisions of the Canadian Corps advanced together, side by side. They moved behind a carefully timed curtain of artillery fire that crept forward just ahead of them. Months of rehearsal, tunnelling and mapping had gone into those few hours. Within days, the ridge was in Canadian hands.

The cost was heavy. Close to 3,600 Canadians were killed, and many thousands more were wounded. For a country of only a few million people, those numbers reached into almost every town. In the years after the war, many Canadians came to see Vimy as a moment when the young nation stepped out of Britain's shadow. Historians still debate how far that idea is true. But it is the reason this monument stands here, and not somewhere else.

Here is something many visitors miss. The ground under your feet is, in a sense, a gift. In 1922, France granted Canada the use of this land, roughly one hundred hectares of the ridge, free and for all time. It was a gesture of thanks to the Canadians who had fought and died on French soil. So the young Canadian guides you may meet in the visitor centre are working on land their country holds in trust.

The memorial itself was designed by Walter Allward, a sculptor from Toronto. He won a design competition in the early 1920s. Allward later said that the image came to him in a dream during the war — a vision of the dead rising to help the living. The work took more than a decade. Construction ran from the mid 1920s until 1936, when King Edward the Eighth unveiled the monument before a vast crowd that included thousands of Canadian veterans and their families.

Why did it take so long? Part of the answer is in the stone. Allward wanted a limestone that would stay pale and luminous, and would not darken with age. The search took years. In the end, the builders chose a stone from a quarry near Split, on the Adriatic coast of what is now Croatia. Huge blocks travelled by sea and rail to this ridge. Then carvers worked on site, shaping the figures from enormous rough pieces, using plaster models as their guide.

Now look up at the two pylons. They rise about thirty metres above the stone platform. One carries a maple leaf, the symbol of Canada. The other carries a fleur-de-lis, the lily that stands for France. Together they represent the two nations and the sacrifice they shared. Between them, near the top, a group of figures surrounds the Spirit of Sacrifice. Just below, one figure passes a torch, a symbol of remembrance handed from one generation to the next.

Walk to the front of the monument, on the side that faces the plain. There, a single cloaked woman stands alone, looking down with her head bowed. She is often called Mother Canada, or Canada Bereft. She mourns her dead sons. Below her, at ground level, lies a stone tomb draped with a helmet and sword. She is the largest figure on the memorial, and she was carved from a single great block of stone. Many visitors find this the most quiet and moving corner of the whole site.

Around the walls, you will see names. Thousands upon thousands of them, carved in neat columns. These are more than eleven thousand Canadian soldiers who died in France during the war and have no known grave. Some were lost in mud. Some were never identified. Families who could never visit a burial place found their son, or brother, or father here instead. Take a moment to read a few names slowly, out loud if you like.

The landscape around the memorial is part of the story too. Step off the paths and you will see the ground is not smooth. It rises and falls in deep hollows, softened now by grass. These are shell craters and old mine craters, left exactly as the war left them. Parts of the site are still fenced off, because unexploded shells remain buried in the soil. Sheep are sometimes used to keep the grass short in areas that are too risky to mow by machine.

Nearby, in a separate part of the site, you can walk through reconstructed trenches, with sandbags and concrete walls. Here the opposing front lines were astonishingly close, in some places only a short throw apart. Guided tours also lead visitors underground into the Grange tunnel, part of a network the Allies dug to move troops safely to the front. The forest around you was planted after the war. Locals sometimes say each tree stands for one fallen Canadian, though that is a story rather than a documented fact.

The memorial has not stood untouched. Weather and time cracked the stone and stained the carvings. A major restoration in the early 2000s cleaned and repaired the monument. Queen Elizabeth the Second rededicated it in April 2007, on the ninetieth anniversary of the battle. Ten years later, the centenary in 2017 brought thousands of Canadians back to the ridge once more. Many of them were students, walking the same ground their great-grandparents had walked.

Before you leave, stand at the edge of the platform for a moment. Look out over the plain the soldiers fought to see. Notice the slag heaps from old coal mines, the church spires, the roads moving quietly toward Lens and Arras. Behind you, the white stone keeps catching the light. As you walk back down through the pines, listen again for the wind. It is the same wind that blew across this ridge on that cold April morning.