Passendaele

They called it Passendaele. Its not spelled the same nowadays, since Flemish is no longer the official language, and when you google the name, you come up with only WW I references. The name means "the valley in which God died". Seems appropriate, don't know that God really died there, but he musta been asleep to allow 5 thousand Australians, and 14 thousand Canadians to die in the mud of Passendaele.
It is a remarkably peaceful place here. Nothing much happens, though there is is a folk festival which is running every second year. Not the year I was there though...grin!
The only thing special about it is that it is the highest place in the area, and as you can see by the pictures, even that isn't very high! But everywhere else was mud, made really mucky by the overflowing scraventafel creek and since Passendaele was the only place where you could keep your socks dry, the Germans hung onto it. It took 14 thousand Canadian casualties to get that little town, and by the time we got there, it was pretty much mud covered bricks, no two on top of each other. There was a little farm at the highest point, and it was imaginatively called "farmcrest", and that is where we put this monument.

These names. They point towards battle sites which can be seen from up here. The last time I saw these names was on the battle honours (flags) of my old Regiment. St. Juliens deserves a posting in its own right, but then I didnt get there and don't know much about it.

The battle did not really have to be fought, but Sir Douglas Haig, the supreme commander, had had a few failures and was in line to get the boot, so he really really needed a victory if he was to keep his job. He had his eye on being a member of parliament, and you don't get there if you have been sacked from your position. So, it was darned nice of the Canadians to fight this little battle for him, just to make sure his career was saved, and he said so afterwards.

Course, once Haig had his position assured, they gave Passendaele back to the Germans with hardly a fight a couple of months later. We had fought enough. Our commander, Arthur Currie, went on to better things as well.

Random things

Yesterday was interesting....they shut all the lights off downtown Ottawa around the War Memorial, and projected the names of men who had died at Vimy. So I had to see that! Interesting enough I guess....though I wish I was in France to see the crowds. Seems everybody who was anybody was there...Queen of England, Prime Ministers of France and Canada. There were plenty of Germans in the crowd, but they didn't speak up. Too bad, only 20 miles down the road is a cemetary with forty five thousand German dead in it. This was just the first world war! That amount is difficult to comprehend. I note that the French left a lot of extra space in that particular cemetary. Presumably to leave room for the "next time".

The battle honour of "Vimy Ridge" is a little odd...you will not be able to find a Canadian who has NOT heard of it, and of course you would be hard pressed to find a British or French person who HAD heard of it. Can't state for sure about the Germans, but they remember the Canadians...they called us "Devils in Skirts". I hope they were refering to the kilts so many regiments wore. Generally speaking, Canadians believe that Vimy Ridge was the battle which defined Canada as a country as opposed to being just a British Colony. Certainly the Canadian commanders had a difficult time keeping them together in Canadian units rather than dispersing them willy nilly into the replacement cadre for mauled British units.

Seems Brenda's Grandfather actually went up that miserable hill...he was in the 26th battalion, who charged up the ridge about a mile south of hill 145, which of course is the site of the present beautifully restored monument. You can see in the map on the previous post where the 26th battalion charged under the command of a very junior but veteran Lieutenant Thomas William Brewer. Shortly after the big push, he was sent to hospital in England for (of all things) sciatica. Guess it was slugging all those sand bags into place.
Not bad for a fella who had survived The Somme. They liked his performance so much that they promoted him from the ranks in THAT bit of unpleasantness.

Incidently, the reason they name the hills like they do.....hills are named by how high in meters they are above sea level. Although rare, there might be several "hill 145's" in an area, but normally you know where to go because you see "145" written as a tiny little contour circle on a contour map.

Vimy Ridge

Part of the Battle of Arras.

Attacking together for the first time, the four Canadian divisions stormed the ridge at 5:30am on 9 April 1917. More than 15,000 Canadian infantry overran the Germans all along the front. Incredible bravery and discipline allowed the infantry to continue moving forward under heavy fire, even when their officers were killed. There were countless acts of sacrifice, as Canadians single-handedly charged machine-gun nests or forced the surrender of Germans in protective dugouts. Hill 145, the highest and most important feature of the Ridge, and where the Vimy monument now stands, was captured in a frontal bayonet charge against machine-gun positions. Three more days of costly battle delivered final victory. The Canadian operation was an important success, even if the larger British and French offensive, of which it had been a part, had failed. But it was victory at a heavy cost: 3,598 Canadians were killed and another 7,000 wounded.

This was victory?

Well, it is the 90th anniversary coming up. The last Canadian soldier who fought at Vimy died at a nursing home only a few years ago. All his life every night he woke up screaming. For the last ten years, he re-lived the experience every day as well...he never left the trenches for those last years.

Bloody Hell

When you scrape away the topsoil around the monument, you find the chalk and clay stained with thousands of streaks of rust, all side by side, and vertical into the earth, not even a fingers width between them. They are the rusted remnants of splinters from shells. Permanently staining the earth for miles up and down the Douai Ridge.

Makes me sick.

The picture is of Hitler touring the battle memorial site during world war two. He never touched war memorials, probably because he was wounded in the battle of Arras years before. He had a lot of respect for those men.

There will be a Vimy vigil downtown this weekend...all the lights, including street lights will be turned off, and the names of the fallen will be projected on the buildings around the war memorial. I will be there, and likely I will weep, as I usually do in such situations. In about four weeks, I will be at Hill 45 myself on Vimy Ridge. All the people will be gone, and maybe the grass will be recovering by then. Perhaps we will find the battles that Brenda's grandfather took part in....he was wounded before the "big push".

May they rest in peace.