Vimy

Berton, Pierre 1920-2004 (Author).

Summary: One chill Easter dawn in 1917, a blizzard blowing in their faces, the four divisions of the Canadian Corps in France went over the top of a muddy scarp knows as Vimy Ridge. Within hours, they held in their grasp what had eluded both British and French armies in over two years of fighting: they had seized the best-defended German bastion on the Western Front - a muddy scarp known as the Vimy Ridge. The French, who had lost 150,000 men trying to take the ridge, didn't believe it could be done. Nor did the Germans; even the British were skeptical. But the Canadians triumphed. They went over the top at dawn; by lunch time, most of the risge was in their hands - at a cost of only ten thousand casualties. How could an army of civilians from a nation without a military tradition secure the first enduring Imperial victory in thirty-two months of warfare? The answer, as Pierre Berton makes vividly clear in his haunting account, was precisely that these men were civilians, with flexible minds unfettered by military rules. In his step-by-step reconstruction of the events leading up to the battle, Berton shows how the offspring of a frontier nation used daring and common sense to solve problems that had eluded professionals. Vimy has become an enduring Canadian myth marking, in most minds, a turning point in Canada's relations with the world and in the image Canadians have of themselves. As the author shows, it has become the historic milestone in our emergence from the colonial shadows as an indepenent nation. But this book is more than the story of a nation finding its manhood. It is equally the story of individual soldiers, trapped in the horrors of a silly and senseless was and enduring almost indescribable conditions. Drawing on scores of interviews and a treasury of unpublished personal accounts, Pierre Berton has told not only what happened in the Great War but also, what it was like for the youth of Canada. Some were no older than sixteen when, in one dreadful morning, they clawed their way up those sodden, shell-torn slopes as their part in a struggle they innocently believed would make war obsolete.