Alan and Susan Puxley were walking in one of the many small military cemeteries that dot the French countryside, legacies of two world wars.

As they wandered the immaculately maintained cemetery, they found crosses bearing the names of Canadian soldiers killed during the First World War, the one called the Great War, and the one that claimed the lives of one in 10 servicemen from this country.

When they saw a cross with the name Potter, Puxley recalls his wife—a native of Annapolis Royal—was immediately certain it marked the grave of a Bear River man. The cemetery’s registry confirmed her belief and it left the couple, now residents of Smith’s Cove, with the feeling they might have been the first ‘touch of home’ to visit the soldier’s remains.

“Here was a young man who likely had never been more than a few miles from his home, recalls Puxley. The soldier was in a foreign land where the language was strange, and he was never again to return to the small village that spans the river of the same name.

“We might have been the first people to see those graves who knew the place he was from.”





A nation born

This year—2007—is the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, a singular episode in Canada’s history, and often referred to as the moment this country emerged from Britain’s shadow, although at a terrible cost. From the four attacking divisions, 3,598 men were killed and 7,500 were wounded.

The battle from April 9-12 was the first time all four Canadian divisions fought together, and after the war Brigadier-General A.E. Ross declared, "In those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation."

Vimy became a symbol for the sacrifice of the young Dominion. A gleaming white memorial was unveiled in 1936, towering over the Vimy battlefield as a poignant reminder of the more than 60,000 Canadians who died serving their country during the First World War.

Vimy is indelibly part of Alan Puxley’s life. For four and a half years until his recent retirement, he lived at Vimy as the director of European operations for Veterans Affairs Canada. It was the culmination of more than 28 years with the department during which he managed Canada’s memorials to its soldiers killed in the First World War. Canada has 13 such memorial sites, with the largest at Vimy.

Puxley also served with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which maintains graves of Commonwealth soldiers killed in both World Wars and it was the commission that would have been looking after the cemetery in which a young Bear River man rests and which so few Canadians have ever visited.

That continuing disinterest of Canadians—disinterest that he equates with disrespect—perplexes Puxley.

“It’s important to remember these people, and Canada spends a good chunk of change to maintain the 116,000 graves of our war dead,” he said. But only a small percentage of Canadians have visited those graves or the war site memorials, even Vimy, which has just undergone a major restoration.

Canadians are held in high regard by people living around Vimy, but are also a source of puzzlement. Of the one million visitors a year who visit the Vimy memorial with its haunting sculptures, only about 30,000—just three per cent—are Canadians.

It isn’t that Canadians don’t travel to France. In a recent year, 640,000 Canadians visited the country. Many strolled the streets of Paris or toured the wine-growing areas, but only four per cent of them made it to Vimy.

There was a time in the early 1990s when the federal government was making cuts to its budget and threatened to reduce the funds available for maintenance of memorials to Canada’s war dead, “but that’s something you shouldn’t touch,” says Puxley. Ottawa backed away then.

Ninety years after “the birth of a nation”, the story of Vimy is ancient history to many Canadians, and completely lost to most young people.

Puxley feels Canadians would have their perspective changed if they could walk the former battlefield.

“It is quite peaceful there,” he says, but Vimy’s fields remain the burial grounds of an untold number of soldiers, their bodies hidden in the clay of French soil. The fields are reminders of Canada’s sacrifice in the Great War.

“In 1914, we had a population of six and a half million. In the war, we had 619,000 in uniform. That’s one in every 10 Canadians, counting women and children. Sixty thousand Canadians didn’t come home, one in ten who served.”

It was a national commitment he doesn’t feel would—or could—be repeated today, but one that is worth honoring not just on Remembrance Day this Sunday, but by recognizing the role Canadian soldiers played on foreign fields.

jdemings@digbycourier.ca