NEWS AND VIEWS: On Remembrance Day (11/23/03)

NEWS AND VIEWS

On Remembrance Day

The article below, written for Remembrance Day, recalls the sacrifices of men like G. Dividenko, 33, who fought for Canada in World War I and whose remains were never found. He and his brother Stephen were Greek-Catholics, probably from western Ukraine, who enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in whose ranks one brother fell. The article was published in the Ottawa Citizen, the Montreal Gazette and the Kingston Whig Standard. Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada.

by Lubomyr Luciuk

They had been there just the day before. They came from Ontario and they left a note. Their words were simple: "We love you grandpa. Missed you and found you."

He rests in a military cemetery, near Duisans, France, not far from Vimy Ridge. At 5:30 a.m. on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, four divisions of citizen-soldiers stormed that summit, advancing in sleet and snow behind a creeping artillery barrage, taking most of their objectives despite a stalwart German defense. Under the command of Sir Julian Byng, and his right-hand man, Brig. Gen. Arthur Currie, this was the first time the Canadian Corps went into battle as one. And they fought well, capturing more ground, more prisoners, and more guns than any previous British offensive had in two and a half years of war. Four Victoria Crosses were earned for Canada at Vimy, two posthumously.

This victory, the most significant success of the Allied spring campaign, cost 3,598 Canadian lives and another 7,004 wounded - one of every four who went "over the top." Before they attacked some soldiers marked out and dug trenches for the coming burials. Within 24 hours their excavations were full. In the cemetery just below the rise, rows of headstones catalogue the carnage. One such file, 25 graves, shelters nine men preserved by name, rank and regiment. Their 16 comrades are "Known Unto God." Pause, now, and think what those words mean. Of 2,966 soldiers buried here only about a third were identifiable.

In this boneyard, and the many, many others of northern France and Belgium, the date of death chiseled into every man's stone echoes what the daily slaughters of the first world war were like. Dozens upon dozens of young men are interred side by side, just as they were scythed down, all on the same day. Only the convention that each grave is touched by the shadow of a flower at least once every 24 hours, a balm reportedly born from the pain of the great poet, Rudyard Kipling, whose teenage son, John, was felled during the Battle of Loos, somewhat softens the enormity of the killing. John Kipling's body was never found. The price of empire paid.

Outside cemeteries gardened meticulously by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and former killing fields cleared for today's tourists, Vimy still oozes the pus of war. On the very afternoon we walked in adjacent fields, three unexploded Stokes mortar bombs were plowed to the surface. The soil remains so impregnated with shrapnel and mines yet to detonate that a purging is unachievable. And this particular earth expectorates more. The bones of two German grenadiers were uncovered just days before we arrived, dug out of a hillock that remains a place of skulls, a 20th century Golgotha, ground still holding close many a Canadian's remains.

More than reminders of how Europe's ichor was squandered during "the war to end all wars" distinguishes this spot. The Canadian National Vimy Memorial is planted firmly on what was once Hill 145, a key enemy strongpoint overlooking the Douai Plain. It was unveiled on July 26, 1936, by King Edward VIII, with 10,000 veterans and guests bearing witness. Twin pillars of canescent Croatian marble, symbolizing Canada and France, rise 27 meters above a monument first dreamt of, then rendered, by Toronto sculptor Walter Allward.

And here, among its 20 statues, there is one of such potency as to command your halt. She is Canada Bereft, a carving symbolizing every mother who lost a son, every wife who gave up a husband, every woman lamenting a lover whose body might not even have been recovered. This white lady in mourning is also what our country was like then, a still-young nation that paid a very high price for its birthing. Decades later that butcher's bill still resonates.

Go and read from among the 11,285 names inscribed on this cenotaph's walls - Desmond, Devereux, Dividenko - those few letters are the only traces of men, and boys, whose final resting-places will forever remain unknown, save to God.

For Brig. Gen. Alexander Ross, commander of the 28th (Northwest) Battalion, the Battle of Vimy Ridge was a metamorphic struggle. At the first post-war veterans' pilgrimage there, in 1936, he declared: "It was Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade. I thought then ... that in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation."

Certainly, ever since, our victory at Vimy has been touted as a landmark event, a sacrificial triumph that heralded the awakening of a Canadian national identity. And Vimy's iconic status was enhanced, in 1997, when the memorial was designated as a Canadian National Historic Site by the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Sheila Copps. Yet for all its supposed relevance few of us actually ever go to Vimy, only 2 percent to 3 percent of an estimated half a million annual visitors. Most who come are British school kids, citizens of France, even of Germany.

Now that I have walked up and over Vimy Ridge, a kilometer where over 10,000 men were brought down, I hallow them, especially today, Remembrance Day. N' oublions pas. But do others? For several years now I have noticed, with growing dismay, how few observe even the two minutes set aside for respectful silence on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. For those so base as to ignore their duty of remembering there can be only one refute, invoked by another Canadian, who gave his life in the Great War, Capt. John McCrae. His parting words "In Flanders Fields" were "If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep ..." In truth we have, and so they do not rest, nor should we, for in forgetting them we have also buried who we are, and why.

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