From the News

Dated: August 9, 1919

Vimy Ridge Remains Shell-Torn Wonder

Salvage Corps Gather Materials and Find Buried Soldiers.

The fact alone that the Canadian corps took such a gallant part, not only in the capture of Vimy Ridge, but also in the holding of this position during the great German offensive will no doubt be a reason why no Canadian tourist will fail to see this historic battleground.

The French have already rebuilt the Amiens-Arras and Lille railway, which runs through no man's land along the Ancre river, passing through the ruins of Albert, Beaumont Hamel, Miraumont, and many other villages made famous in the furious fighting along the Somme.

Today the trains are crowded with French villagers and farmers returning again to find their homes.  One would not care to look upon a sadder sight than to see some of these old French couples standing before a pile of bricks and stone or searching among the ruins of what was once their homes.

It is only some five or six miles from Arras to Vimy along that road so well known to all Canadians who took part in the operations at the ridge.  The French taxi-drivers were not slow to realize that this road would be a favourite route for sight-seers. At least a dozen taxi-drivers stand outside the Arras station all willing to take fares to the Ridge for forty or fifty francs.

Vimy Ridge today is much the same in appearance as it was a year ago, but what a difference.  The silence and loneliness of this plain seem uncanny.  Here and there over this battered stretch of ground, pitted so thickly with shell craters that one can scarcely walk, roam small sections of a British labour battalion still digging among the shell holes, salvaging war materials and incidentally reducing the numbers of the missing, while adding to the lists of those now "officially killed in action."

It is an unpleasant task, as one British Tommy told the writer.  "I little thought when I helped take Vimy Ridge that they would keep me here two years cleaning up the mess we made of the place."

The huge cross erected on the ridge to the memory of the Canadians killed at Vimy, remains a lasting tribute to those who fell, and the hundreds of other neat crosses on either side of this famous road, each bearing the date April 9, 1917, tell, as no historian can, the part Canadians played in this fierce struggle.