Lest we forget

by Alexandra McKinnon (Australia)

Making a local connection France

History settles below the surface here, like the veins of coal that once ran through the ground. The slag heaps loom over the land, remnants of an industrial past. We’re here, however, for something much older, at a place called Vimy Ridge. I came here as a student. The Canadian government sends young people from across Canada to work at these sites in northern France, to learn a little of our own histories, and to share these histories with others. I knew my great-uncles had walked this land a century earlier, under a sky lit by artillery fire. I wanted to understand why young men had come to die on the other side of the world. I spend a lot of time thinking about names. I think about the names carved in stone across the former Western Front, and about my own name. The names carved on the monument are of the Canadians missing in France with no known grave – a fraction of a fraction of those who died in the Great War. We learn about Vimy in school, about the heroic men who gave their lives to take the untakeable position at Hill 145. Many more returned. My great-grandmother lost one brother, in a story which ends with a khaki uniform and a white headstone. She gave me his name, and I am now older than he will ever be. The others returned, with no easy ending to tell. The tunnels beneath Vimy Ridge echo. They span approximately twenty-five kilometres or so, all carved in chalk in the prelude to the assault. The sound carries here. Across the length of the tunnel, the men would have waited in silence, illuminated only by the white chalk walls now overgrown by moss. They’d lived in old chalk quarries behind the line in the days before the attack. They carved their names and hometowns into the walls of those caverns, writing goodbyes to a world waiting for them. My great-uncle waited in the same tunnel we take visitors through. With the sound of shells exploding overhead, he waited for the signal to move his men into position, and begin the attack. I wonder what he would think of this place now, this young man who’d returned to a town he couldn’t recognize and a life that was no longer his. As the months pass, I begin to understand the layered histories of Vimy Ridge. The Canadians were never the only story. French colonial forces died in their thousands to advance during the Second Battle of the Artois. British forces held the line for months. Welsh miners dug the tunnels below the ground and Indian artillery supported the Canadian advance. German soldiers survived here for three years. I learn, too, that local teenagers see the memorial as a break from school, sneaking cigarettes in the trenches. Joggers pass by the monument without a thought. Couples walk arm in arm around the base of the monument and kiss in cars in the parking lot. They do this amidst a lunar landscape, marked with the remnants of craters and trenches and tunnels. Sheep graze in the middle of a mine crater, oblivious to the ground around them. Men fought and died in their thousands to take or keep this space. Now we wander freely, as visitors meander along the paths that cross the green fields. Trees grow among the trenches. A few months into my tenure, a family brings nerf guns to the trenches on Remembrance Day. They cannot understand why their children cannot play in the trenches, why they cannot run and shoot and fight this forgotten war. The same day, a grandmother brings her young grandsons, and takes a tour. She had watched the situation unfold. They are young, she tells me. Too young, to understand why anyone would want to remember a distant war. Too young, to remember what the cost of war can be. All we can hope for is some brief moment of contemplation of what a site like this means. She gestures to her young grandsons, patiently waiting for the tour of the tunnels to begin. All we can hope is that someone will remember. Lest we forget.