From the Ridge, with Pride

My dearest Eleanor,

I am writing this from the top of the world.

We took the ridge yesterday. The Germans held it for three years — three years, Nell — and we took it in a matter of hours. When we reached the crest, I looked back and saw the whole plain below us, the ruined villages, the roads crawling with our boys, the guns being hauled up. And everywhere, men were cheering. Not a battle cry, but a real cheer. Some of them were crying. I won’t pretend I wasn’t one of them.

The ridge is a terrible place. The French tried and failed. The British tried and failed. But we did it. The Canadians. Our boys from Nova Scotia and Quebec and Ontario and the prairies, all fighting together for the first time. Today, out here on this hill in France, we proved we are our own nation. Not just British colonists. Not a footnote in someone else’s empire. Canadians.

You should have seen the tunnels, Nell. The engineers spent months digging them through the chalk — whole underground cities with electric lights and mess halls and hospitals. We rehearsed the attack over and over on a mock battlefield behind the lines, marching through tape-marked lanes until every man knew his job in the dark. It was that training that got us up the ridge. That, and something else. Something I can’t quite name.

I am sitting in a German officer’s dugout as I write. He left in a hurry — there’s a half-eaten biscuit on the table and a photograph of a woman pinned to the wall. She looks like someone’s mother. I suppose she is. The Germans are not the monsters the papers describe. They are men like us, scared and far from home. But today we were better.

I think of you constantly. Of the sea air in Halifax. Of the autumn colours on the hills — the maples and birches. I think of our wedding day, how you laughed when I stepped on your dress. That laugh is what I carry with me into every fight. The memory of it is worth more than any medal.

I love you, Nell. I love you more than I have words to say.

Yours forever, Tommy

P.S. — If I don’t come home, tell our children — the ones we haven’t had yet — that their father fought on Vimy Ridge and was proud to be Canadian. Tell them I died on high ground, looking east.