| The late Pierre Berton’s Vimy is a hard literary act to follow. Like Berton, however, his younger friend and colleague Ted Barris (Juno: Canadians at D-Day) doesn’t believe in definitive accounts. Far from casting a shadow on his own book about the Second World War battle, Berton’s research archive at the University of Hamilton lit Barris’s path in the writing of Victory at Vimy: Canada Comes of Age, April 9-12, 1917. "Pierre," says Barris, "as flamboyant and reclusive as he sometimes was, was terribly open to allowing other generations, other writers access to his work." Barris sensed that considerable room was taken up in Berton’s Vimy by the author’s larger-than-life voice. As a result, he speculated that battle accounts Berton collected hadn’t made it into the book. Such was the case. As well, Barris takes a different tack, eschewing tales of military bigwigs for those of frontline soldiers.
"Pierre was much more interested in some of the larger-than-life characters in the war," Barris says. Indeed, Berton spends a chapter and a half on Sam Hughes, initially Canada’s belligerent minister of militia, Barris a paragraph and a half. "I don’t care because I’m interested in what Gavin McDonald did and people of that rank." The Saskatchewan farm boy turned lieutenant-corporal dug strategic tunnels beneath Vimy ridge. He disposed of chalk earth in shell craters under cover of night to hide the evidence of Canadian tunnelling from the Germans. During a book signing in Saskatoon, McDonald’s niece slipped Barris her great uncle’s hand-written memoir. From his own and from Berton’s files, other fighting-men’s stories similarly became part of Barris’s narrative. "To me," he says, "theirs are the voices that are most important. Pierre lit the way by leaving some of those unused profiles and files of veterans… that he found. I was able to give them some life."
With cross-referencing, he also, for example, pieced together a zany story about a young Canadian frontline anti-aircraft gunner. Watching a British plane cause havoc by inexplicably strafing the Canadian lines with machine gun fire, his superior officer had him shoot the thing down. Barris linked the incident to a nighttime infiltration of an allied aerodrome in which the Germans stole an aircraft. As none of the war’s participants remain alive, such gems can be found only through diligent, meticulous digging and with a prayer that corroborating regimental war diarists got their stories right.
Barris will attend the 90th anniversary rededication ceremony at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial on April 9, providing colour commentary as Lloyd Robertson’s CTV co-anchor. A similar ceremony detailed in Victory at Vimy had a great reawakening effect on the 8000 Canadians in attendance, reconnecting them, says Barris, with the maimed veterans, the victory, death and loss that forged Canada’s identity as a distinct nation. "It really is awe inspiring," says Barris of the marble monument created by sculptor Robert Allward that now stands atop the ridge and features the names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers missing and presumed dead in France. "It’s like a lightning rod of our emotions and you walk the turf where you can and you touch the stone and the inscriptions of the names and stand next to the plinths that tower into the sky above you, and you can’t help but sense something extraordinarily moving took place here."
Thus the story of Vimy and its monument will continue to inspire the nation’s writers. Barris expects that authors will continue to unearth its as-yet-unprinted stories. "My guess," he says, "is that on the 100th anniversary there’ll probably be another Vimy book." |
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