This time next week, I expect to be standing somewhere on Hill 145, Vimy Ridge, France — the site of the Canadian Vimy Memorial (right) — as Prime Minister Harper and tens of thousands of other Canadians mark the 90th anniversary of what is, for many Canadian historians, the battle that forged the nation of Canada. I will be attending this ceremony in my professional capacity, as a journalist travelling with Harper reporting on his activities and the ceremony for CTV National News. (Here in Ottawa, incidentally, the Ottawa Citizen has been running an excellent series in the leadup to this event about Vimy and its significance for 21st century Canadians.)
The reporters at CTV’s Parliamentary bureau take turns accompanying the Prime Minister abroad and I am extra-fortunate that my number has come up for this trip for I was with the PM and his wife last year when they travelled to Europe for the G8 summit. That trip included a visit to the Vimy Memorial and to a small cemetery a few kilometres from Vimy where Mrs. Harper’s great-uncle is buried.
On our visit last year, the giant Vimy Memorial was still undergoing significant renovations. On this visit, of course, the Memorial, now rebuilt, will be “re-dedicated”.
The travel notice from the Prime Minister’s Office arrived this weekend. We depart from Ottawa on Saturday April 7 at 9 am on the Canadian Forces Polaris. (That’s me, left, about to board the Polaris for the first time back in 2005 when I accompanied Prime Minister Martin to a NATO meeting Brussels). It’s not clear in the PMO advisory where we will be landing but when we visited last year, we landed in Lille, in the northwest corner of France near the Belgium border. Wherever it is we land, the PMO says we will be staying in Arras, a city to the west of Vimy. (What Canadians call the Battle of Vimy Ridge was actually one action in what the histories of other countries call the Battle of Arras.)
The main ceremony occurs on Sunday, April 8. The Prime Minister participates in an additional ceremony on Monday April 9 and then we all get back on his plane and return to Ottawa late Monday night.
The long-range weather forecast for Lille, France, sadly, is much warmer than it was 90 years ago — Low of 7C, high of 15 C, compared to temperatures around freezing on the same weekend in 1917 — but it appears to be about as grey: showers and rain are in the forecast.
I’ve just finished reading Pierre Berton’s Vimy, in preparation for this trip, and am making way through Ted Barris’ Victory at Vimy. I studied history at university and, in doing so, have read a great deal about life on the home front during the First World War; the great diplomatic struggles of the era that Canada was involved in; and the domestic political dramas that played out at the time. But both these books are excellent popular histories that focus almost entirely on the experience of about 100,000 Canadians at Vimy during and in the weeks prior to Easter weekend, 1917.