Vimy: The Battle and the Legend by Tim Cook (review)

The creeping barrage of films, television treatments, news reports, books, and articles–scholarly and otherwise–became deafening in 2017, the centenary of Vimy Ridge. Many reflect a perspective that Ian McKay and I have dubbed "Vimyism." This patriotic condition asserts that this one battle was the "Birth of the Nation." It proclaims that soldiers from all parts of Canada, unified by shared ideals of self-sacrifice and valour, worked together to take the Ridge and, in their unity, today provide Canada with memories of a world-reshaping victory, a long-lasting source of national inspiration.

At the centenary of the battle, military historian Tim Cook felt moved to tell a New York Times reporter that "Vimy matters because it matters" ("100 Years Later, Battle of Vimy Ridge Remains Key Symbol for Canada," New York Times, 9 April 2017). In his well-researched and lively depiction of Vimy Ridge, Cook emerges as too sophisticated a scholar to succumb fully to Vimyism's crude martial nationalism. He attempts to transcend conventional war stories, exploring, but not really defining, the "idea of Vimy" (378). Along the way, we learn that a brand of 1920s canned salmon was named for the battle, its label offering "a stylized assault by Canadians up the ridge" (227). And who knew that a stark photo of dead Canadians on the Vimy battle-field survives (121)? The image stands in sharp contrast to the cheerful, official photo of a truckload of smiling Vimy survivors that greets every international visitor at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. Cook explicitly distances himself from Vimyism's core doctrine: "Vimy became prominent not because Canada was born on that captured ridge. We can put that to rest. It was not" (379).

Yet, has Cook really renounced this notion? His emotional attachment to the legend is palpable. Confronted with an invented tradition–for, on his own evidence, the battle was far from universally revered or even much noticed in the decade and a half after it happened–Cook refrains from any systematic investigation of the use to which it was put by nationalist elites. Nor does he familiarize his readers with the global literature on such nationalistic deployments of supposedly epochal battles.

Two issues in particular stand out, showing that many of the useful facts included in Cook's narrative stand at odds with the nationalist conclusions he draws from them. "Most veterans," he writes, were appalled by post-war white poppy campaigns promoted by peace activists, for "they would not stand for the denigration of the memory of their fallen comrades" (238). Saying with certainty what "most" or "all" veterans felt is fraught with difficulty in the Canada of the 1920s and 1930s. Even a casual examination of the published opinions of countless veterans, even some who were called upon to write memoirs and histories, uncovers a much more critical stance toward the British Empire's war. Frank criticisms of mismanagement, harsh despotism, immeasurable cruelty, disappointing outcomes, and staggering long-term costs abounded. The implied equation of "denigration" of veterans with critiques of militarism is a present-day imposition upon far more complicated historical evidence.

The raw essentialism implicit in such a judgment comes through most clearly in Cook's insistence on something variously called "the Canadian psyche" (233), "the Canadian soul" (269, 276), and "the Canadian imagination" (285). These constructs imagine the country as an organic, unified being, just as "Birth of the Nation" promoters see Canada as a veritable person, born (or perhaps "coming of age" or "maturing") on the blood-soaked fields of France and Flanders. Even as he rejects such nostrums, Cook paradoxically subscribes to them: "Vimy did not make the nation. It was the nation that made Vimy" (384).

A second, closely related issue arises with the author's handling of Quebec. Does his "nation" include Quebec? Vimy, we are told at the outset, is now "part of the fabric and fable of the nation," but it also "resonates far more strongly in English Canada than...