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Every attempt was made to hide this intrusion to the final resting place of a Canadian solder who died nearly 90 years ago. The Canadian soldier who lay in this grave has no name, no age and no place of birth. Only a week ago, he was buried in one of the many military cemeteries that dot the highway from Arras to Vimy Ridge. There are many such cemeteries along this stretch of road. A kilometer away is a cemetery for the war dead of Poland. Another kilometer along is a cemetery to the war dead of Czechoslovakia. In the Czech cemetery, there is yellow warning tape around the memorial, a stone structure that is crumbling and a danger to visitors. No one is left to tend the Czech graves -- one of the spinoffs from the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of those things you never would have thought of until you come here. The unknown Canadian soldier was buried in a British cemetery -- the Cabaret Rouge -- less than 10 kilometres from Vimy Rouge. It is meticulously maintained. There are more than 7,000 graves here, and each has its own flower plot. Each has a tombstone. A week ago, the tombstone over this soldier's grave read: "A Soldier of the Great War. A Canadian regiment. Known unto God." Today, the tombstone reads: "The former grave of an Unknown Canadian Soldier of the First World War. His remains were removed on 25 May, 2000 and now lie interred at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, Canada." It's not true -- yet. It will be another day before the body of the Canadian soldier returns home. When he left Canada, this soldier had no idea it would be nearly a century before he would return to a hero's welcome in Ottawa, greeted by the prime minister and the Governor General, his body driven by a horse-driven gun carriage to Parliament Hill, where he would lie in state for more than two days, before being buried again this Sunday at the National War Memorial. Who can ever tell how these things play out? You wonder about that as you drive around the countryside around Vimy Ridge. The difference between Canada and France could not be more pronounced. With the exception of the War of 1812, we have never been invaded. Wars are foreign affairs to us. In France, however, the countryside is littered with the bodies of young men who came here to die. France is the original Killing Fields. When the Great War broke out in 1914, Canada had a standing army of 3,100. When the war ended four years later, we had lost more than 66,000. Nearly 20,000 of those -- that's the entire populations of Carleton Place, Smiths Falls, Kemptville, Antrim, Chelsea, keep on going -- died in the mud of Europe, their bodies blown apart, their remains never identified. We were a young country then with no army, no military history, no reason to come here. And yet we came. We enlisted across this great wilderness that was then Canada -- a country not even 50 years old -- and we came to Europe, many to France, to this area of France that borders Belgium, to fight a war we could have walked away from. But we didn't. Vimy Ridge turned out to be Canada's coming of age. The ridge is one of the few elevated areas in northern France, and the army that controlled that ridge ruled the Douai Plain virtually all the way to the English Channel. The Germans held Vimy almost from the first day of the Great War and repelled both French and British attack. On Easter Monday, 1917, four Canadian divisions tried again, and this time, within days, the Germans were driven off the ridge. It was a stunning victory, although it cost thousands of men. The Unknown Soldier may have died at Vimy, although he could have died at the Somme or perhaps another battlefield nearby. There are so many. I was thinking about that when I stopped for supper in Arras. There are many restaurants and bars bordering the square of this picturesque village. This one was almost perfect, like the bar out of Hemingway's A Clean Well-Lighted Place. The bar was polished and gleaming. The beer was ice cold and you could have eaten from the floor. The proprietor's two teenaged sons arrived and the owner gave them full kisses on the lips, touselled their hair, and asked how their day had been. Then they went to work. As I sat there, I thought of the unknown Canadian soldier who had died perhaps no more than a 10-minute drive away. The owner came up and said: "Are you American?" "No. Canadian," I said. "Canadian," the owner said. "There are a lot of you here today. How come?" I looked out the window at his sons. They were laughing and going about their chores. Two hours ago I saw tombstones for young Canadians who died when they were not much older than these two boys. "We've come to bring someone home," I answered. The owner looked at his sons and nodded his head. Then he walked away. I waited a long time for a bill, but it never came.
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