Today we took a road trip to the battlefields of the Somme and Vimy Ridge.  Growing up I’ve read Pierre Berton’s Vimy so many times I think it’s permanently imprinted on my brain.  There’s something about that battle and how it changed Canada that intrigued.  Something about all the individual stories that make up that day.

The book Rilla of Ingleside also had a deep impact on me, showing the personal side of the war.  Those numbers were brothers, fiances, sons, husbands…..

Today we went to the Vimy monument and toured the battlefield.  We walked through the trenches where the men waited for the start of the battle.  We stood in the observation posts and looked across no man’s land to the German trenches.

Those rolling hills still hold the bodies of many unfound soldiers and it was so moving reading the names of the 11,000 + Canadians listed on the monument.  Americans may have battlefields of the Revolutionary war.  Canadians have rolling hills in France.

I never imagined that I would ever see these places that I’d read about.  And there we were today.  Driving around the hills you would look and see a large white cross rising up out of the field and rows of white stones.  Again and again.  The countryside is a big graveyard.

Standing on the hills and in the trenches of Vimy, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt more Canadian.  Thousands of miles from home, yet on hard won Canadian soil.