Copyright © Tanya Piejus, 1999

4 p.m., 21st March 1999, Sunday

"Well, let's go then. We've been promising ourselves we'd do this for years", I said.
"Yes, we have, haven't we?" replied Mum.
"Ever since we both studied the war poets we've always said we'd go to the battlefields. Now's as good a time as any" I continued. "Richard has a book I can borrow that'll tell us the best places to go and I can get the Michelin maps of the Somme and Ypres Salient in London."
"OK," Mum agreed, "we could do it over a long weekend. Can you take a day off work?"
"Yeah, that's no problem. Three days should be enough. How about I take a Friday off?"
"Yes, I think that'd be all right. When shall we go?"
We compared diaries.
"How about the weekend after Easter?" I suggested.
"Yes, that looks fine for me. Come down on the Thursday night and we can set off first thing."

5.30 a.m., 9th April 1917, Easter Monday

A gnawing westerly wind drives sleet into the bloodshot eyes and frost-cracked lips of 80 000 young men as they crouch in rotten trenches below Vimy Ridge. Most of the faces pressed against the Flanders mud are Canadian; empire boys gung-ho in a foreign land, fighting for a people with whom they have little in common. The Allied front line has been static on the Somme for the greater part of two years and today it is the turn of the Canadian Corps to take up the torch and carry it forward in the race to break the deadlock on the Western Front. It is the first time the four divisions of the colonial army have fought side-by-side, and it is to be the premier and ultimate test of their faith in the cause of what is being called 'the war to end wars'.

As the bone-chilling dawn breaks across the blasted woodland that has become No Man's Land, a shrieking, deadening cascade of metal screams over the heads of the waiting soldiers from 850 heavy guns and the men press themselves harder against the sticky clay of the jumping-off points. On the maps before them are traced the thin black, red, blue and brown lines of a carefully-planned advance. Black crosses, way behind the German lines, mark their objectives. On the extreme left of the line, the men of the 4th division squint through the battery of icy rain towards the dark bulk of Hill 145, the highest point on Vimy Ridge and unfailingly defended since the beginning of the war.

Then silence. Soldiers' ears continue to ring as the hurricane bombardment abruptly ceases. Shrilling of whistles down the straggly 14 km length of the line. A deep intake of breath and the khaki bodies, cowed beneath the weight of their equipment, boil over the lips of the trenches and out across the mud and dirty snow. Wave after wave they heave themselves into the watery daybreak - and wave after wave they fall into the waiting mud. Ten thousand are left behind as their comrades surge forward through the German lines, a third of them never to realise what their weeks of preparation have achieved. By the time the pale sun has reached its midday peak, only Hill 145 is left unbreached and the enemy line is shattered. The Canadians have smashed through to an unparalleled victory.

For the German leader, Hindenburg, Easter Monday is a day of 'much shade and little light'.

Noon, 9th April 1999, Friday

Moving on from Dud Corner, our starting point at Loos, we skirt Lens and follow the N17 highway south through Mericourt and up onto Vimy Ridge. We weave along narrow roads, through trees and cratered ground still bearing the eighty-year-old scars of battle, to the Canadian memorial that crowns the highest point of the ridge, the former Hill 145. The monument is a vast piece of modernist sculpture, all in white limestone, encircled with the names of 11 000 'missing, presumed dead'. The cloaked, mourning figure of the nation of Canada commands a panoramic view of the former battlefield beneath where her lost young brothers lie. The memorial behind her stands, stark and solid, against the skyline.

The memorial site has a small but excellent museum about the decisive battle that secured the ridge for the Allies at the cost of 3500 officers and men. While reading the information boards, I realise that the battle, in a strange and moving coincidence, had commenced 82 years earlier to the day. Decades on, I watch their silent struggle on gritty black and white film with a group of subdued British schoolgirls and emerge from the museum to a cold wind and a chill grey sky. Mum sends a postcard to her Canadian friend to tell her about our visit and we drive past the memorial, stopping to absorb its grim remembrance before moving on to the two cemeteries nearby. There are many English and Scottish names among the Canadians, including several Royal West Kents, soldiers of our local regiment.

We walk through the pitted former battlefield, much of which is screened off with red danger signs to warn the unwary of still-unexploded mines and shells that litter the woods even now. An area of the front line has been preserved and the trenches fortified with concrete 'sand-bags' in order to show where many of the Canadian soldiers fell. The trench-lines of Ally and German are frighteningly close together in some places; so close in fact that the opposing troops could easily have lobbed rocks at each other over the wire.

I close my eyes and imagine the sudden sound of birdsong as the screaming metallic bombardment ceased before the 1917 attack, then the thin trill of the whistles ordering the men over the top. I open my eyes and see the pale, ragged figures of men emerge from the zig-zagging trench-lines below me and walk uncertainly towards their destinies in the wire and shell-holes beyond, laden with redundant ammunition and sodden packs. Some make it past a battered stump that marks the halfway point to the German lines, then disappear into the fading distance, ghosts lost forever in rolling green.

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