Vimy Ridge: I think this is the big night; damn the war...

 

My grandfather's WWI photograph

Vimy Ridge Behind the Scenes: March 1st to the 20th When the Shooting Begins and Doesn't Stop

My grandfather was just one of so many mule-skinners hauling ammunition up the line during the period leading up to the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April. He notices the increasing urgency with which they were working and the increasingly heavier bombardments from the Germans. Pierre Berton's Vimy notes that on the 20th of March the shelling begins, all different sizes of guns begin to fire a seemingly infinite number of rounds from 500 guns until April 2nd (only half were allowed to fire in order to conceal the strength of their artillery from the enemy). The risk to the gunners (mule-skinners) was increased when a defective batch of 18-pounder ammunition with faulty time fuses caused two "prematures" in six rounds fired to explode while leaving the muzzle. My grandfather describes shells exploding nearby a number of times and on Monday, March 5th writes, "Fairly heavy bombardment during the early morning. This place is going to be another Somme. It's going to be a bad place. All four Canadian Divisions are moving in here (Vimy Ridge front)."

October 19th to November 10th, 1916: From Petewawa to Ross Barracks, Shorncliffe, England - Selected Letters Home

I am now scanning selected letters written by my grandfather to my great grandparents from Petewawa, Shorncliffe and eventually, in the spring of 1917 - France.

Vimy: February 15th, 1917; Living with Conflict Around the World

Perhaps the compelling interest for this peace-coddled Canadian reading about the world's wars in the past and present conflict around the globe in the paper every day - with up to the minute updates thanks to social media - is due to its "foreignness". If the act of economy is today's salvation, a type of religion based on surviving with less, (more of a revival as we have been through all this recession, depression, global economic collapse, etc., before), then the act of war has been a daily ritual for generations of people on the planet and still is for many. War and its unwelcome hangers-on: fear and dread, anger with nowhere to go, privation, deteriorating civility, suspicion, envy, grief become a way of life as familiar as the sunrise and the slippers you stick your feet into when you swing your legs off the bed in the morning.

It is possible to dip a toe safely in the water when reading about the horrors endured by so many just in the 20th century and when I read about so many civilians and war correspondents dying in Syria, as they have recently, I empathise with the dead, injured and survivors, but I am so far away from that exotic conflict I can still regard fireworks on Canada Day as just fireworks rather than a wormhole for agonised memories.

When I lived in Korea, the North persisted with that tired sabre rattling refrain of a nation technically still at war. After the initial reaction of outrage among South Koreans to the North's March 26th, 2010 torpedoing of the Cheonan warship, calm was restored with an elasticity that I found surprising. When I asked my friends and colleagues about their views on the North, their experience with the Korean War via their family history, most would discuss the hardships endured by their parents, but the Gwangju massacre was more within their scope of real experience, May 19, 1980.

Despite the monthly military drills that involved every citizen practising for the outbreak of war - military helicopters flying past my English classroom windows on a regular basis, with detonating shells in the mountains punctuating the loud-must-pause-teaching-while-they-fly-by cacophony and the regular threats postulated by Kim Jong-il that were realised with the torpedo attack likely authorised by his son - despite or because of all of this pervasive, invasive threat-of-war bindweed parasitically entwined with every South Korean - they shut it out and carried on their lives because to fret about what could not be changed would be maddening.

Even though, as four Canadians living in South Korea, we were instructed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Seoul Embassy of Canada to pack our bags and prepare to evacuate at a moment's notice (and give our car for the cause), South Koreans remained focused on the task at hand, could not, would not be deterred from daily living with its reassuring routines. I can only imagine the bleak existence of the North Korean citizens faced with a similar threat without the strength of full bellies, good health and a democracy. I understand that to keep one's sanity intact, deferring the anxiety and stress until absolutely necessary is an adaptive strategy that, thankfully, so far Canadians have been spared for the most part.

Into Action 1st Time: Saturday, February 17th, 1917

 

War Horse; A Real Soldier Now - I'm Lousy; Bum Food: Bully Beef and Biscuit; and Moving Pictures

Last night I watched War Horse and was interested in the depiction of the "mule skinners" - the soldiers responsible for the calvary horses and mules, moving munitions and supplies to the front. The movie touched on the subject of underage enlistment with the young German brothers and the main British character, Albert. I found the movie overly sentimental, simplistic and too graphic in the "No Man's Land" fleeing, terrified horse and barbed wire scene, but I appreciated the visual images of the soldiers working with and caring for the horses - it helped to fill in the areas of my imagination that were sketchy about the day-to-day gunner drudgery.