Vimy

We spend the better part of Saturday at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial. The memorial itself, a towering structure of blindingly white limestone, serves as the centrepiece of a 100-hectare park dedicated to Canadians who served and died in France during World War I. The presence of the memorial itself inspires awe, but the solemnity of the place is somewhat dimmed by a group of Canadian, British, and French veterans in neon cyclewear who arrive and clip-clop around en masse in their carbon fibre shoes, posing for photos. A double-decker coach rolls up and disgorges a load of teenagers who swarm up and over the monument in a sort of symbolic way. I don't see them ever return from the far side, and the coach shortly departs the mostly empty car park.

We get to chatting with a fellow Canadian, a guy from Whitehorse here for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. It turns out that his family knows a friend of mine from uni days personally. I can't fathom the improbability of our meeting. We take a selfie and go our separate ways.

More staggering than the monument is the park itself. Still reputedly littered with century-old explosives, the cratered landscape of the escarpment has remained untouched but for the return of swaying grasses and pine trees planted by a conservation programme. I'd watched They Shall Not Grow Old but I hadn't gotten a sense for the scale of the devastation that heavy artillery wreaks on the landscape. Thirtyfoot-deep craters abut characteristic zigzags of trench lines. Everywhere, the ground roils seawise. I've rarely felt quite so immanent in the past—not visiting medieval churches, not at Hadrian's Wall, not on the cobbled streets of Durham. Maybe the closest experience was visiting the erstwhile KGB headquarters in Riga a couple years ago. Under the windblown trees the shape of the land insists on the present.

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In the evening we drive towards the Pas-de-Calais and stop outside a little town called Wimille. There are two dining options in Wimille: a fancy restaurant with a bunch of foods on the menu that I cannot translate for love nor money, and a local pub with football on in the background and a bunch of guys chatting loudly in Picard. We amble into the latter, order a couple of beers, and sit for dinner; we're the only ones here for food. I don't understand how this can be: it's a Saturday night and food turns out to be terrific. I ask for a second beer.