Tom Goodman - Her Darling Boy: A Tale of Vimy Ridge

Dedicated to the memory of Pte. Archibald John Polson a soldier of The Great War and Elsabet Thuriur Polson his loving mother.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Myth of Vimy

In 1798, English poet laureate Robert Southey wrote an anti-war poem called The Battle of Blenheim . He tells of a young boy named Peterkin who comes to his grandfather, Kaspar, with a skull he has found while playing in a nearby battlefield. The old man says it is the skull of a fallen soldier, and that he often finds such skulls while tilling his garden. He goes on to tell the boy in chilling detail of the battles carnage, and says such things must be in a famous victory. At the end of the poem, Peterkin asks his grandfather a final question:

But what good came of it at last?

Quoth little Peterkin.

Why, that I cannot tell, said he,

But twas a famous victory.

In April of 1917, my uncle, Private Archibald John Polson, was a machine gunner stationed at the foot of Vimy Ridge, the site of the Canadian armys most famous victory of World War I . Like Robert Southeys battle, the bloody victory at Vimy Ridge has been celebrated by the generations that followed. And, also like Southeys battle, Vimy was a mythic event whose myth has obscured what really happened.

When I was a boy, Uncle Archie was little more to me than a handsome young man in uniform pictured in a framed photograph that hung on our wall. That all changed a few years ago when I came across a treasure trove of Archies wartime correspondence with my grandmother. The photo on the wall suddenly came to life as a remarkable family story unfolded. It is my privilege, perhaps my duty, to tell you that story.

Military history as recounted by professional historians can be a dry read, filled with facts about strategy and execution, victories and defeats, but with little sense of the real life experience of the ordinary soldiers who fight and die. Also, the interpretation of military history is often skewed by the rhetoric of generals and politicians, who, like old Kaspar, tend to revel in victory, exaggerating its significance and discounting its cost. They are also inclined to claim noble purpose for their actions.

Regarding the latter point, consider World War I , referred to at the time as The Great War. There have been many generals and politicians who would have you believe that World War I was undertaken by the British and their allies in the defence of freedom, or for some other great and noble purpose. In reality, there was nothing great or noble about The Great War. Rather, it was the unintended consequence of ill-considered foreign policies conducted by the nations of Europe in the early 1900s.

In those days, Europe was a patchwork of adversarial alliances. When Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated in June of 1914, there was a ripple effect, pitting alliance against alliance. Provocative acts escalated into acts of aggression and, within a few months, war was declared by most European nations, including by Great Britain against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

It was a total failure of international diplomacy, or as the British wartime prime minister, David Lloyd George, put it in his memoirs:

How was it that the world was so unexpectedly plunged into this terrible conflict? Who was responsible? Not even the astutest [sic] and most far-seeing statesman foresaw in the early summer of 1914 that the autumn would find the nations of the world interlocked in the most terrible conflict that had ever been witnessed in the history of mankind. [] The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war.

As I have mentioned, I am going to tell you the story of my Uncle Archie, an ordinary Canadian soldier of that most terrible conflict, but first of all, I must tell you about the Battle of Vimy Ridge, because Vimy was when everything changed for Archie and his family.

Until I started to research this book, I had understood that, despite its terrible cost, the victory at Vimy Ridge was a proud moment for Canadians because:

1. Vimy marked a profound turning-point in the War, and
2. it was the first occasion on which all four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought as one unit, and thus marked the birth of our nation.

The attack on Vimy Ridge took place in 1917, three years after the outbreak of the war. As a British colony, Canada had automatically become a combatant when Great Britain declared war, and the Canadian Corps fought as a contingent of the British Expeditionary Force. Things were not going well for the Canadians by 1917. Casualties were heavy and the government was considering the imposition of conscription, an unpopular measure in the province of Quebec and among farmers.

World War I was fought largely along a battle line across France that was known as The Western Front. In April of 1917, the Canadian Corps occupied trenches adjacent to Vimy Ridge, a strategically important point along The Western Front. The French planned a major offensive, later known as the Nivelle Offensive, and the British undertook the Battle of Arras in support. The battle officially commenced on April 9, 1917 when the British advanced against the Germans at Arras, and the Canadians captured nearby Vimy Ridge. Australian and additional British troops joined the fray at Bullecourt on April 11th, and the battle continued until the middle of May.

The attack on Vimy Ridge has become known in Canada as The Battle of Vimy Ridge, but it was not categorized as a battle at the time, and no military historian outside Canada considers Vimy to be more than just one part of the Battle of Arras.