Canadian Cemetery No. 2, 2005.
Image Size: 14" X 14" silver print
Sheep at Pasture on the Preserved Battlefield, 2005.
Image Size: 14" X 14" silver print
Great War Relics Displayed in Former Brigade Command Centre, Grange
Subway System, 2005. silver print
Engraver Luc Goemaere Restoring Names on the Base of the Monument,
2005. Image Size: 14" X 14". silver print
Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the managers Pascale Iveson and
M. Devloo for arranging access to the various parts of the Vimy Ridge
site, Senior Technical Advisor Peter Craven for explaining the restoration
process in great detail, providing me with transportation and generally
supporting my efforts, and the employees of the Monument restoration firm
who were friendly and helplful.
This project was funded by a grant from the Canada Council under its International
Residencies Program. |
This exhibition is about the Canadian First World War memorial park
at Vimy Ridge, near Arras, France, as it appeared in the fall of 2005
during the restoration of its great limestone monument.
The Great War brought together millions of soldiers from every part
of the world to fight and die in Europe, many believing that their sacrifice
would cure the world of barbarism. Today , the rural landscape of northern
France and Belgium is dotted with thousands of Great War cemeteries
and memorials along the line of the Western Front.
It was a policy of the allied powers in the war not to repatriate the
bodies of those who died in battle. Many were buried close to where
they fell, and graves were sometimes dug in advance of an assault. Thus,
the names of hamlets like Passchendaele, towns like Cambrai, and geographical
features like the Chemin des Dames ridge and the Somme valley came to
designate virtual cities of the dead. And for those whose bodies were
never found, cenotaphs were erected after the war at or near these same
sites.
The memorial park at Vimy Ridge marks a savagely contested site on the Western Front. The capture of the strategic ridge by Canadian forces on April 9, 1917 was one of the greatest military feats of the war. It was also the first battle in which the Canadian army had fought as a unit under its own command. More than 7,000 Canadian soldiers are buried in 30 war cemeteries within a 16 km radius of the Vimy monument. The two cemeteries shown in this photo series are located inside the park itself.
The 92 hectare park surrounds the magnificent monument by Toronto sculptor Walter Allward. It also preserves the shell pocked landscape, mine craters, trenches and tunnels that were part of the war. The park already attracts many visitors, but its visibility can only increase in the coming years with the construction of a new branch of the Louvre in the former coal mining centre of Lens, close below the Allward monument.
As my photographs show, the Allward monument, unvieled in 1936, is currently
the object of a significant engagement in the perpetual war against time
and forgetting. During the restoration, its distinctive twin pylons have
been transformed by scaffolding and plastic sheeting into a single gigantic
stele, surmounting the large temporary shed that has been built around
its base.
Major restoration work is being done on the base of the monument, which
bears the names of the 11,280 Canadians killed in France whose final resting
places are unknown. The long lines of type which stretch across all four
faces of the base are being replaced using a combination of computer controlled
sandbasting and hand carving. As one photo shows, the editing process
uses photos of the original inscriptions displayed on computer monitors.
In photographing the park, I could not help but be reminded of the archetypal
black and white photos of the Western Front showing beleaguered infantrymen
struggling through a quagmire. But while it is important to recognize
the suffering caused by the weather on this front, recent histories have
examined other determining factors such as geology and topography.
Vimy Ridge sits just south of the point where the clay soil of French
Flanders gives way to the chalky soil of Artois. Deep trenches and tunnels
dug through chalk were much dryer than those driven through clay, and
were largely self-supporting. The concrete supports shown in my photos
of the preserved battlefield tunnels are modern replacements. The original
wooden props were probably lighter and more widely spaced.
Mining warfare had already left its mark on no man's land at Vimy Ridge
before the Canadian attack in April, 1917. Both sides had attempted to
gain ground by digging offensive tunnels called saps, in order to detonate
explosive charges under each other's forward trenches. But the huge craters
that resulted often became obstacles to forward movement. The Broadmarsh
Crater, shown in one of my photos, was among the biggest.
One of my photos shows the gently rising ground Canadian soldiers would
have had to cross in order to reach the crest of Hill 145, the site of
Walter Allward's monument. Tens of thousands of men were routinely sacrificed
on the Western Front to capture and hold positions that were only a few
meters higher than the surrounding terrain, but few had the strategic
importance of Vimy Ridge.
As if to acknowledge the absurdity of the struggle, ironic or whimsical
place names were commonly used for combat orientation during the Great
War. On a battlefield map for the Canadian attack on Vimy Ridge, the following
names designate places around the Broadmarsh Crater: Bleary, Black, Batter,
Bauble, Bed Bug, Blunt, Bessy, Bitter, Banff, Beer, Billy, Biff, Basso,
Blue, Barrow, Beano, Bell, Beggar, Boat and Blighty.
The preserved Grange Subway, a network of communication tunnels under
the Canadian trenches, is named after the Grange residence in Toronto
which is now part of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Other features shown
on maps of the battlefield are the Montreal Crater, La Folie Wood and
a notorious redoubt called The Pimple.
The taking of Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917 was preceeded by a two week
artillery barrage by Canadian, British and South African batteries. More than a million rounds of all sizes were fired. A large number of
poison gas shells were used in the barrage in order to kill horses and
prevent the Germans from transporting munitions to the front.
The shell pocked battlefield is still off limits to visitors because
of unexploded munitions lying below its surface. But as one of my photos
shows, sheep are allowed to graze in the shell holes. (No sheep has
ever been lost in an explosion). In addition to the practical function
they perform as efficient grass mowers, the sheep have an obvious symbolic
role. The Commonwealth infantry soldiers of the Great War, who wore
standard issue sheepskin coats, were at times characterized collectively
as trusting sheep, and their officers as protective or incompetent shepherds.
*
The Canadian painter David Milne visited Vimy Ridge in 1919 and made
several watercolours of its still ravaged topography that are currently
part of an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Jane Urqurt's 2001
novel, "The Stone Carvers" gives a fictional account of the
construction of Walter Allward's monument. And Allwards original half
sized plaster models, from which the allegorical figures on the monument
were copied, are in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
* See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, New York, Oxford
University Press, 1975, pp. 239-241
|
