My
turn! Well, Katie has been telling
me for a while that it’s my turn to contribute a post to this blog. My excuse has been that I’ve been
trying my best to live up to the writerly model of Ernest Hemingway, who
described looking out over the roofs of Paris and thinking: “All you have to do
is write one true sentence. Write
the truest sentence that you know.”
Those two sentences have been my morning mantra ever since we arrived in
Paris—and they’ve worked quite well for my non-blog
writing! But maybe I can apply
them now to revisit some of the highlights and sidelights that Katie didn’t
engage with in her recent posts.
Let
me start with that visit to the American Hospital and that photo of me (of few blog posts back) lying
ignominiously on a gurney while waiting for the Cipro prescription that was all
I really wanted! Well, I got the
prescription—along with a bill for 475€!
But I also got to claim that I can locate myself in pretty good
company. For a long time, the
American Hospital provided free treatment
for Americans in Paris. Thus it
became a destination for a number of famous ex-pats: Zelda Fitzgerald had her
appendix removed there, and Gertrude Stein died there. My favorite story, though, involves
Hemingway, who ended up there for stitches after, believing that he was pulling
a toilet chain in his apartment, he actually pulled the chain for a skylight—which
crashed down on him and opened a gash above his right eye! (Good company, indeed . . .)
 |
| Menin Gate, Ieper, Belgium |
But
I digress. I guess that one of the
highlights that needs to be developed was our “field trip” to some World War I
battle sites in northern France and southern Belgium. I was “commissioned” to write a couple of pieces for my hometown newspaper, the Charlottetown Guardian,
recognizing the anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9th and the
general role of Canadian soldiers in “The Great War.”
It
was a very moving experience for both Katie and me but maybe especially for me,
as I grew up commemorating Vimy Ridge in school on P.E.I. . . . without really
knowing any details. So we went in
search of details. . . . The way
we got them—or got to them—was an adventure in itself and took up an entire
Saturday. First we took a train
from Gare du Nord in Paris to the town of Arras—about a 50-minute trip. Then—eventually—we managed to rent a
car: that took forever to finalize—and the clock was ticking, as the rental
office was not open on Sunday and the clerk informed us that we had to return
the car by 5:00 instead of the usual time of 6:00.
 |
| Menin Gate interior |
Well,
we hit the road . . . but not to Vimy.
First we headed to Belgium, specifically to Ieper (known as Ypres in
France, as “Wipers” to Canadian and British soldiers). There, as Katie mentioned in an earlier
blog, we spent time at the Menin Gate, an impressive memorial to the 54,000+
British and Commonwealth soldiers who lie in unknown graves in the surrounding
countryside of Flanders. The names
are engraved in the gate. Because
of our rental car timing, we were unable to be in Ieper for the playing of The
Last Post by the Fire Brigade buglers, who have been performing this ritual at
8:00 each evening since 1928.
After
Ieper we headed out to the nearby farming community of Boezinge, in search of
the grave and the memorial for Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, who was killed by a
German shrapnel attack in 1917. We
found his grave in Artillery Wood Cemetery. His memorial is at the very spot where he died, a few
hundred yards away.
 |
| Ledwidge grave |
Artillery
Wood Cemetery was one of countless (well, more than 900) similar small
graveyards all over Belgium and northern France that mark where soldiers
(mostly British) fell in battle.
The numbers involved are mind-boggling. Driving past them, we felt the sadness and the loss of
soldiers fighting and dying in foreign fields. The experience gave very immediate resonance to the phrase “Lest
we forget,” as well as to the poem “In Flanders Fields”: “In Flanders fields
the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.”
 |
| Ledwidge Memorial |
We
would have liked to spend more time in Belgium . . . but we had to get back to
France and to Vimy Ridge, the site of “arguably the most galvanizing moment in
the history of Canada.” At least
that’s what I wrote in my piece for The
Guardian. I also wrote this: “Vimy
Ridge became instantly etched in the collective Canadian imagination on April
9, 1917. For the first time during
The Great War—World War I—all four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary
Force fought together, and within a matter of six hours they managed to rout
most of the German Sixth Army from its long-held strategic position atop the
natural escarpment rising like a fortress above the table-flat landscape of the
countryside of northern France. In
the previous fifteen months, the French and the British armies had lost upwards
of 150,000 troops attempting the same goal. For their morning’s work, the Canadians suffered 11,000
casualties, almost 3600 of them fatal.”
 |
| Vimy Ridge Monument |
Since
1936, that remarkable military accomplishment—along with its sacrifice of many
lives—has been commemorated on the site of the battle. The center of the commemoration is a
massive monument—perhaps the most impressive monument we’ve ever seen—comprising
two soaring limestone “pylons” mounted on a broad base of steps. Both the base and the pylons
incorporate large carved figures, the largest being of a statuesque woman
representing Canada sorrowing over her lost sons; and on the walls of the
monument are carved the names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers who, at the time of
the monument’s unveiling, were lying unidentified in graves throughout northern
France.
 |
| Vimy Ridge trench |
The
Canadian government operates a small interpretive centre on the site and
provides free guided tours of the battlefield, including representative
trenches and a section of the ingenious system of tunnels dug by Welsh
coalminers that allowed the Canadians to move both troops and explosives
literally under the feet of the Germans in preparation for the all-out
assault. In the tunnel we had a
nice chat with one of the tour guides, who as it turns out hails from my
hometown of Charlottetown, PEI. We
worked out that I was just a year or two ahead of her father in high
school. Smallish world . . .
The
Flanders and Vimy excursion was our only trip outside of Paris in our whole two
months in the city. The richness
of what we experienced makes us want to return for more exploring of the area
and the history. But that will be
for another trip to this part of the world . . .
 |
| Vimy Ridge tunnel |
 |
| Artillery Wood Cemetery |
No comments:
Post a Comment