The Brutal Costs Of A Military Victory

Two photographs together show the same place, Vimy Ridge, shortly after the war and years later when the massive memorial was erected there.

This look back at the field artillery I showed yesterday includes a large painting with men at work with one of those guns.

A portion of this area shows the effects of the War at home, with paintings, photographs, and artifacts.

The Halifax Explosion is part of that story of the War at home, an incident that happened on December 6th, 1917. The painting is Convoy In Bedford Basin by Arthur Lismer. He was a commissioned war artist who would, after the war, join his friends in founding The Group Of Seven.

Passchendaele was another Canadian victory, but a horrific one; if ever there was a hell on Earth, it was this place and this battle. 

One can walk in this area that has been designed to recreate the ground at Passchendaele, with equipment and bodies in the mud.

After four years of commanders throwing masses of men into machine gun positions and all for nothing, it was a new way of thinking that would bring an end to the war: combined-arms fighting, or the coordination of all military assets, working together to break German lines. The Hundred Days would see the end of World War One.

The system itself is broken down here; if only military planners had thought of it years before instead of wasting millions of lives with Napoleonic era tactics. Of the Canadians who served, more than one in ten died, with far more wounded. This was typical of that war.

I close out the Museum's coverage of World War One with a painting, one that is said to have included an officer who decades later would be a governor general of the country.