Your Majesty,
Mr. Prime Minister,
Distinguished guests,
Veterans,
Ladies and gentlemen:
Thank you all for honouring us with your presence.
We Canadians here today are a long way from home.
But there may be no place on earth that makes us feel more Canadian.
Because we sense, all around us, the presence of our ancestors.
If we close our eyes we can see them, dressed in their olive khaki uniforms, rifles slung over their shoulders, the distinct Canadian wide-brimmed helmet perched on their heads.
They are emerging from the filthy trenches, trudging through the boot-sucking mud, passing skeletons of trees and the shell holes washed in blood, enveloped in the horrible noises of war.
Overhead, the red ensign is fluttering in the breeze.
One hundred thousand brave Canadians fought here 90 years ago today. Three thousand, five hundred and ninety-eight died.
Every nation has a creation story. The First World War and the battle of Vimy Ridge are central to the story of Canada.
Because it was here for the first time that our entire army fought on the battlefield together.
And the result was a spectacular victory, a stunning breakthrough that helped turn the war in the Allies’ favour.
The Somme, Ypres, Paschendaele, Beaumont-Hamel: the names of all the great battles are well known to Canadians and Newfoundlanders.
But we know the name Vimy best of all.
Often the historical importance of events is only realized with the benefit of hindsight.
But at Vimy everybody immediately understood the enormity of the achievement.
Brigadier General Alexander Ross famously said that when he looked out across the battlefield he saw “Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade,” and that he felt he was witnessing “the birth of a nation.”
A year after the war ended, the brilliant Canadian commander at Vimy, Sir Arthur Currie, put it another way in a speech to Toronto’s Empire Club.
Canada was a nation of immigrants before 1914, he said. “Now these men who have come back are your very own.”
The Veterans of Vimy passed their stories to their children, who passed it to theirs, who passed it to us, who are passing it to our children thousands of whom are with us today.
And some of them will return here someday with their children and grandchildren.
Because nothing tells our story of the first world war as eloquently or as powerfully as Walter Allward’s extraordinary monument to the 11,285 Canadians who fell in France and who have no known grave.
It reminds us of the enormity of their sacrifice and the importance of the duty all of us have to follow their example: to love our country and defend its freedom to the end.
Allward said he was inspired by a dream.
He saw thousands of Canadians fighting and dying on a vast battlefield.
Then, through an avenue of giant poplars, a mighty army came marching to their rescue.
“They were the dead,” Allward said.
“They rose in masses…and entered the fight to aid the living…I have tried to show this in this monument to Canada’s fallen, what we owed them and will forever owe them.”
It is sometimes said that the dead speak to the living.
So at this special place, on this special day, let us, together, listen to the final prayer of those whose sacrifice we are honouring today.
We may hear them say softly: I love my family, I love my comrades, I love my country, and I will defend their freedom to the end.
