Vimy Ridge: Canada's Defining Battle Part 1

The Battle of Vimy Ridge remains a defining moment in Canadian history. It not only showcased military innovation but also played a crucial role in shaping Canada's national identity. Today, in part one, we visit the  South Alberta Light Horse Regimental Museum and speak with Curator Wes Krause about Medicine Hat’s role in the battle. Understanding this battle helps us appreciate the complexities of World War I and the sacrifices made by those who fought for freedom.

00:00 - Introduction 
00:34 - Overview of the Battle of Vimy Ridge and its symbolism for Canada
01:37 - The Regimental Museum and Historical Context
03:05 - Strategic Importance and Battle Overview
05:15 -  Canadian Corps and Tactical Innovations
08:42 - Weather and Trench Warfare Conditions
12:36 - Artillery and Technological Advancements
19:39 - Personal Reflections and Memorials
23:28 - The Legacy of Vimy Ridge
27:27 - Cultural and Historical Preservation

Key Details for Museum Visitors
Location: 120 Cuyler Road SE, Medicine Hat, AB, 
Hours: Generally open Wednesdays from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Tours can be arranged by calling (403) 504-3775 or emailing the curator at salhrmcurator@gmail.com.

Why Vimy Ridge Was Important
1. Strategic Location:  The ridge provided a commanding view of the surrounding landscape, allowing for control over troop movements and artillery fire. Holding this position was crucial for both sides in the war.
2. Historical Context: Prior to the Canadians' assault, numerous attempts by British and French forces to capture Vimy Ridge had failed, resulting in heavy losses. The successful Canadian offensive changed the narrative of the war.
3. National Identity: The victory at Vimy Ridge is often regarded as a moment when Canada emerged from Britain's shadow, fostering a sense of national pride and unity among Canadians.

Despite the strategic success, the Battle of Vimy Ridge came at a high cost. Approximately 10,600 Canadians were killed or wounded during the four-day battle. This sacrifice is a poignant reminder of the human toll of war and is commemorated through the Vimy Memorial, which stands as a tribute to those who served.

The Battle of Vimy Ridge remains a defining moment in Canadian history. It not only showcased military innovation but also played a crucial role in shaping Canada's national identity. Understanding this battle helps us appreciate the complexities of World War I and the sacrifices made by those who fought for freedom.

Soldiers with connections to Medicine Hat who served and died at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917.
Sgt. Alex Cathro:
Age: 26, Rank: Sergeant, Force: Army
Unit/Regiment: Canadian Infantry (Alberta Regiment), Division: 50th Bn.
Enlistment: Medicine Hat, Alberta
Death: April 10, 1917

Pte. Thomas Campbell:
Age: 27, Rank: Private, Force: Army
Unit/Regiment: Canadian Infantry (Alberta Regiment), Division: 50th Bn.
Birth: December 25, 1889
Enlistment: Medicine Hat, Alberta
Death: April 10, 1917

Private Charles Torr Axworthy
Age: 28, Rank: Private, Force: Army
Unit/Regiment: Canadian Infantry (Alberta Regiment), Division: 10th Bn.
Birth: October 30, 1888
Enlistment: Medicine Hat, Alberta
Death: April 9, 1917

Private James Morrison MacKay
Age: 30, Rank: Private, Force: Army
Unit/Regiment: Canadian Infantry (Alberta Regiment). Division: 50th Bn.
Birth: August 20, 1886 Summerside, Prince Edward Island
Enlistment: February 18, 1916 Medicine Hat, Alberta
Dea

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Transcript

0:00

Hey, this is Brian again. And I'd like to ask you to do a favor. We can't do this work without people like you. So if you can, please, like, share, subscribe. Tell your friends about bring back the porch. This is where you need to go during this time. So the men of the regiment really had an understanding of not only the importance of the battle, but where they were going to be and what they needed to do. So that was key. This episode of Bring Back the Porch, brought to you by Bernie Leahy, River Street Realty. Let's get you home. Well, we have moved off the porch. We are now in the south, our Light Horse Regimental Museum with the curator, West Cross. And we're going to talk about the importance of the Battle of Hemi Ridge. Well, Brian, welcome to the regimental museum. There's a brief background of it. The museum was established in 2005 to highlight the history of the South Alberta literacy and the regiments it perpetuates. I took over in 2014 as a curator and, have found myself, kind of a home away from home because I, I love military artifacts. I love military history. And when you bring up any ridge, that's an interesting time. There was an interesting time. And in World War one, it was an interesting time for the Canadian Expeditionary Force. And a variant resting time for Canada as a whole. I'm sure you want to talk more, but. I do, because they always point to the battle of Ridge as the point in history when Canada became a nation because of the involvement of the Canadians in that battle. That's, 100% true, because, the battle of naming Ridge, initially, when the Germans, occupied the ridge in 1914, it was established that they have to, as the Commonwealth has to kick them off the the ridge because it was a key point, a key promontory that could monitor any of the movement of any Allied units across that whole area. So the original battle of Iraq, they were trying to take that area to consolidate it. And the Battle of Army Ridge actually started, like I said, in 2014. The British tried to take it, the French tried to take it, and they expended over 150,000 men trying to take that ridge, and they couldn't take it. So finally, at the beginning of 1917, they decided, hey, you know, maybe we might as well just bypass this because we're not going to be able to take it. Nobody has been able to take it until somebody in the back room have put up their hand. Or what about the Canadians? And, well, they kind of jokingly kind of said, okay, well it's like, give it to Mikey, literally. Well, let's give the ridge to the Canadians. Let them try. Try. Well, there's a lot of things that happened during the lead up to that, and I know we're going to be talking more about them. And, one of the key things was that the Canadian Corps, which was under the control under the command of, I think it was a, general, Bing was his primary commander. Basically what they did the assigned four divisions to take the, take the ridge within all of those divisions. There's just a number of battalions from different parts of Canada. And the one of the key things that I talk about here, because it's related to the South over the leaders, is the 31st Battalion. They were part of the second Division. So they had a specific how can I say, alley, for lack of a better phrase, a sector of the ridge that they were assigned to first, second, third, fourth. Each had their own sectors. And so the second Division, which the 31st was part of, they are assigned a sector. You don't worry about anything else. Don't worry about the other guys. You take your sector, you dedicate yourself to that and you'll do and do good. The Canadians practiced how they actually set up in England. Cape like rotate or something like that. To illustrate where German trenches were, where their trenches were, and promontories that were problem areas so that they could practice moving around these areas to advance to the ridge. The other thing is that, and this was unheard of, this was an unheard of concept in the British military and the Commonwealth and the allies. The Canadians gave all the soldiers maps of Vimy Ridge. Intelligent. Intelligence. Basically, they basically put out over 40,000 maps were given to the soldiers of all the battalions, all the divisions and all the NCO. They were also, you know, explained to them, this is where you need to go during this time. So the men of the regiment really had an understanding of not only the importance of the battle, but where they were going to be and what they needed to do. So that was key. So when you look at Vimy Ridge, it's not just a little spot, it's spread over quite a not quite large area. I think it was like a 2.5km front sort of thing. And there's areas in there that were very bad. There are other areas that were, oh, not so bad and the Canadians were able to advance, but it was a tough go. It was really tough. The importance of every ridge militarily is that it's the high ground, and that's always something that a military operation would like to control. I believe you could see for 8 to 10km down the hill, so you could see if anybody was coming to try and, you know, take the hill. So that's why it was something that Canada and the allies wanted to control. Exactly. Standing on the actual Vimy Memorial, like the monument, you look down into the valley? Yes. You could see miles and miles. From that point, you could see the village of Vimy, which is something like 3.5km from the from the ridge. Or a little bit further, actually. But it was right down there. You could see it. And then you look the closer and then you look over it. Okay. Well, you see the lay of the land, and it's just amazing how open that land is. Not some like 20, 2016 and 2019 over there. The lay of the land. It was it was open. Even though by now, you know, tree growth and stuff like that. But at that time, there was nothing there. It was just completely decimated. One of the promontories was called the The Pimple, and that was way off to the far side. But that was a stronghold that they really had a problem trying to break. And the 10th Battalion from Calgary, they went there and they took a shellacking, but they took that and they cleared the Germans from that area. So Canada takes them a ridge in the spring of 1917. Yep. Did the Germans ever try to counteroffensive? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they did. They weren't successful. But they try to. But now that the Canadians held the high, high ground, they could see the Germans coming. So they were able to prepare the defenses. Now, bear in mind the battle started on April 9th, 1917. Well, that's Easter. Easter Monday. For us. Then all left. Years later, we just think, oh, Easter. Yeah, we got, you know, colored eggs and we got, hot cross buns and turkey and. Oh, yeah, no big deal. But here are Canadian soldiers were fighting at that time. You talked about the preparation the Canadians put in. They practiced. I think it was in England, you know. I also understand that they also took lessons from the Battle of Verdun, which I think was 2 or 3 years earlier. They took some of the mistakes, and that's how they developed. I believe the term was the control barrage or a rolling mirage. Can you explain how they did that? What what that meant? Well, in Verdun it was a meat grinder. The French tried to take that. You know that. That's just being blunt. The attitude and mentality is. Is that okay? We've got a location. We've got a promontory that is German occupied. We need to take that. They'll send a division up there. The division gets completely obliterated and they'll sit back. Well, that didn't work. Let's send another one up there. And they kept doing that. And as a result, in Verdun, the French just were were decimated. Now, here's the thing. The preparatory artillery barrage that they employed in there and other, other battlefield was to lay down fire on the enemy trenches. And sometimes they would spend half a day or a few hours just laying down a barrage of artillery. With the whole mindset, we're going to kill all the bad guys, and there's not going to be anybody in the trenches, and our boys are going to come out of the trenches. They're just going to walk along and they're going to take the position and be done. You know, it didn't work because the Germans were smart enough. If they had artillery barrage on top of them, they went to ground and they took cover. And once the artillery barrage was lifted and the boys came out of the trench to to move ahead, well, the Germans got up and said, oh, there they are, they're coming over here. And they had a bad time. The concept of the rolling barrage or creeping barrage was that the artillery, which was really accurate. It was good, good artillery. They had all the, charts and everything dialed in. They would lay down a line of artillery fire ahead of the trenches, about ahead of the Commonwealth trenches. France would be about 100 yards, and then they'd stop, and then they'd advanced at about 50 to 100 yards, and the men would crawl out of the trench and start walking across, across through no man's land. And they just kept stepping it forward until they got to the final place was the German entrenchment, which then they just gave that a shellacking. And then the Canadians and the Commonwealth would step into the trench and take it over. Generally, it worked really well. As long as everybody had their had their timings down. And that's what the Canadians did. They practiced their timing and they really practiced practiced it. Well, there are some circumstances where British troops that hadn't gotten the concept. It was kind of new to them. They would start creeping the barrage and the men would they would run ahead and oh, no. Don't get ahead of the guns would. Get ahead. And it's like, that doesn't work. That just doesn't work. So the Canadians, the, now the Canadian Corps commander, who was a fellow by the name of, Arthur Curry, just this past, last year, I was at a conference in Ottawa and got to see the Canadian War Museum and got a behind the scenes, you know, tour and the gal looked, Stanek came into the archives, and there's a uniform there. What do you think of that? Look at this uniform. It it it's massive. It must have been like a size 58 or something like that. And I'm standing there staring at it. That's major or a major general Arthur Curry. And she literally said, yeah. How did you know that guy was big as a horse? I mean, he was huge, but either way, he was a smart commander. He was very, very astute. And he saw the the shellacking that the French took. He saw what the British took and said, yeah, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to use arboles Canadians as just mash cannon fodder. We're going to do this right, and we're going to try our best to take the position. And I believed that they were able to advance at a rate of about 90m every three minutes. So if you extrapolate over an hour that's not quite two kilometers an hour, you know, in a in a war zone, that's pretty good. That's really good. Considering that, in April 1917 at Vimy Ridge, it was cold. It's kind of rainy. There's a little bit of sleet and snow. Canadian weather. Exactly. Us guys, we're like, yeah, that's Tuesday. Yeah, yeah, it's no big deal. But it was also an impediment to advancement. Now here's one of the things that the men were trained, all that artillery fire, of course, it creates the craters and stuff like that, and all the mud gets churned up and the rain and everything fill these craters full of water. And it's just a just a disaster area. The men are trained if you're advancing across the field, and one of your chums or one of your platoon members slips into one of those shell holes, leave them and keep advancing because you could not slow up or stop the advance to try and save your buddy. Because that would lessen the effectiveness of your of your unit. So I talk about that a lot with in the here, the here at the museum, because we got a beautiful diagram of a trench system, which we'll see later on. But, it's really an intriguing thing. Whether it took a was a was a major factor. And I think you actually mentioned as well too, that it was a factor on the German side as well too, because visibility was not that. Snow was blowing in their faces. Which is. That's great. Let's do that. I think that's the that's the, the weather kind of help this out sort of thing. However, the conditions were brutal and I try to impress that to people when they come for tours at the regimental museum that the 31st Battalion, which is one of the units we perpetuated, and the 31st Infantry Battalion was right there, that's the insignia, the badges of that tell you when they went into the trenches initially, they're in the trenches for about 100 days. Initially it rained 75 of 100 days until we even in Canadians, we think, oh yeah, it's snowing today. We get three inches of snow, whatever. However, that was brutal. That was bad. Sometimes, even when it's raining, over the course of the day, it kind of ruins our golf game or whatever we do outside. You know, that's not that great, but this is this is in combat, in a trench system. Life and death. Life and death. Now, here's one thing I need to talk about the the trench system there is that the Canadians, when they built their trenches, the the reinforced the walls with corrugated steel, which was great. That very, very, very positive, very strong material. The Germans use timbers, didn't really work that well. But the other thing they did is that they built the trenches and dug them about 3 or 4ft, roughly about three feet deeper than the anticipated. And they built an A-frame structure that the lead into the bottom of that trench, and they lay boards across that structure. So now the men were not standing in water all day. Exactly. And being cold and wet, the feet really suffered, and there are situations where guys contracted what was called trench foot, and that comes from the feet not being dried up properly, being wet constantly. And it's a, it's a debilitating thing because if a man's been a soldier, has been, you know, diagnosed with trench foot, he is off the line. So your effectiveness as a unit is depleted. Commanders of company commanders, if one of their soldiers was diagnosed with trench foot, he was pulled out of the line and he was punted out. He was gone. He didn't just take them and put them in the back. Back, you know, lines. He was kicked out and discharged. Done. Which that instilled in the officers a lot of respect for the men and a lot of care for the men. And that was also brought into Vimy Ridge as well, too. So that where these men, they or they looked after them, they looked after them a lot. So there's a lot of other aspects that are going on the whether the rolling barrage was another thing, but also of, like you said, practicing, you know, learning how to, you know, where you're going. So in my mind's eye, I see these guns rolling forward, being pushed by hand. No horses. No, no, they wouldn't move the guns. Oh no. Oh no, no. They would just elevate the guns. Oh, just change them. Change the angle. So rather than just lobbing short range like or lobbing short range like that, you just elevated them on longer range and just keep elevating it. You know and I jokingly I have to do this and there's, there's going to be guys that I know that are going to just kind of point their fingers and say, oh, you know the artillery both sides employed artillery had a lot of artillery and their artillery was incredibly accurate. 100% of the shots fired hit the ground. I made the mistake of mentioning that in a tour, and there's a couple of our four artillery men in that unit in the tour, they, oh, you know, the you know, you weren't too pleased. The backs stiffened. Yes, exactly. However, the point was made that the fire ended up in that area, like in the established trench systems. Sometimes that fire ended up in between the two trenches. And it just as I mentioned earlier, every shell created a crater, rain, mud, etc., you know, and you've got little pockets of lakes all around the place. And I imagine the Germans had mines as well. They employed those as well too. And, the Canadians, not so much because they were trying to advance, but they they had set those up and those were kind of unpredictable as well, too, because of your artillery fire. And that's the main reason of the rolling barrage, was to not only soften up the the opposing force, but to also definitely or destroy the, barbed wire entanglements and any of the other, landmines and stuff that would have been laid. So that's why they advanced it that way. So you think, oh, yeah, they're just going to love a couple of shells. Well, no, that that was pretty heavy heavy bombardment to do that. Are you saying to that, the munitions that the Canadians were using had a new fuze that would detonate when it came in contact with barbed wire? Why was that important? Well, barbed wire entanglements, we think of barbed wire when we're driving down the road. And when you see the barbed wire fence from the side of the road and stuff like that, you take that barbed wire and multiply the barbed by about ten. And that stuff was brutal. It was difficult to use. It was incredibly hard on the men, but also both sides, Germans and well, of course both sides employed barbed wire. But they would set these barbed wire entanglements and kind of build a funnel of sorts. And of course, the soldiers saying, oh, there's an easy way to go right down there. Well, they would follow that right into a place of an A in an entrenched machine gun position. So any opportunity that they could use to destroy that barbed wire and the fuze, I'm sure that was like a number 105 or 104 to C fuze that they started using that that was intended to destroy that, that barbed wire. The other thing though, here's something interesting. You think about this. Now, all of that hyper accurate or crushing fire would destroy the barbed wire entanglements. So when there's downtime, at the end of the day, they'd assign soldier to soldier three. You guys go out and fix the barbed wire over there. So you just imagine taking a bundle of sticks, and you hammer and you're going out in the dark, and you start hammering these sticks into the ground to fix the barbed wire. Or what does that do that draws fire? So that was not a very good idea. So the British came up with a brilliant idea and they called it a screw picket. And basically what it is is a long metal rod has a corkscrew on one end, and it's got little loops partway up with the pigtail at the top. Guy would carry about 3 or 4 of those out there, and he'd go through it into the ground, corkscrew it in where you set the barbed wire nice and quiet, and he'd retreat, and the Germans in the morning would wake up versus lost bullets. That via come from. I thought we blew it up yesterday and there is back again. So that was a brilliant innovation. And we do have a couple of screw pickets illustrated here in the regimental museum. And I explain that. And that was a brilliant thing. Brilliant idea. The other thing about the fuzes, too, is that it led to fewer duds. Oh that's interesting, I yeah that I didn't know. Yeah. So every show served a purpose. You know, you weren't wasting munitions. Yeah. Now, how long did the battle last for. You see it lasted about three days from April 9th. April 12th. I'm glad you mentioned that about the fuzes, because there's an areas at the Vimy Ridge that are fenced off in there. And that's where unexploded, unexploded ordnance. To this. Day, to this day. And when we were there, we walked past that the today show. No no no no no, don't go there. And then they explained it because they'd be so high explosives. But they're also beautiful gas shells as well. So every once in a while and this is what the, what the locals do, they let the goats or the cows or cattle okay. Go graze in that area. And every once in a while there'll be this resounding boom. And I said oh yeah I guess Bessie is no longer here. Oh, it's a it's a terrible thing. But, you know, that's another aspect of, of the Battle of Vimy. You look at those areas and it's just, just pockmarked like that. It's just just crazy, you know. West, you have been to the memorial at Lemmy Ridge and the painting on the wall here is the ghost of the ridge. What was that like to stand there where history was made? Well, I was there with a tour group with the South over the late Horse Regimental Association. That was a battlefield tour there in 2016 and 2019. To say it was moving would be an understatement. The first time we were there, we had a tour group of about 100 100 people in the group with a couple of tour busses, we pulled up and everybody bailed out of the bus, and everybody wants to get their photo up. So we're standing quite a ways from the front of the memorial, and we're getting our pictures taken as a group picture. But I noticed two of the guys, they started running to the monument and look around and, okay, where are you guys going? You don't want to be in the photo here. Whatever. So we got that all done. And as we were walking towards the monument, it was probably 3 or 400 yards or so that we were going to walk. People that were at the monument were walking towards us. Tears were streaming down their eyes. I'm like, okay, I don't know what that's all about until we got closer. And here these guys are standing between the two main spires, playing, playing music from the bagpipes as well as the the, the trumpet. It was, very powerful. The effect was that walking up to that monument and seeing the symbolism of each of the bits and pieces of the monument and walking up to the top of it, and then seeing the spires and what that means. But then walking around the back of it and then looking down the valley into into the village of Billy Vimy and seeing pimple and fellas and. All right, not that, farmers on the other side. That was really put it into perspective. When you think of the 15,000 Canadians that advanced on that hill, we think, oh, yeah, we go to a hockey game and the place is filled to the rafters, and they're watching the Tigers win a game, which is fantastic. You heard that win the last game. That's like 4000 people ish. Multiply that by four and imagine that spread over that area there. And then the conditions of the battle, the shellfire, the gunfire, the screams of those wounded and such like that, that that's that's that's powerful. Powerful beyond words. The second time there, we had a similar tour group. And the guy that gave the talk about it, he really got into the details of of things that happened. There's probably about roughly about 8000 Germans with another 4 or 5000 in reserve that were holding that ridge. The Canadians lost roughly about 3600 soldiers died. There's roughly about 7 to 10,000 that were wounded. The Germans, the, it's been said these lost around 70,000 men that died on that battle. I guess that's in comparison, as I had mentioned earlier, with the British and the French. When they first tried. You know, but that again, that harkens back to the pride that one would feel when you walk up on that thing and look at that and said, this is something nobody else could take. And the Canadians took it from that minute. From that point forward, Canada stepped out from the umbrella of the British Commonwealth, and we were no longer the colonials. We were no longer the Westerners, like, thought we were a bunch of cowboys and wranglers and stuff like that. We were now Canadian and that I impression people and especially young kids, had a cadet were here just recently and I said, hey, guys, if you get an opportunity to travel to France, you know, go see Paris and see the Eiffel Tower, of course. See this? Either you know, whatever you want, go to Vimy Ridge, make it a point. Go there, because that is the location where we as Canada became Canada. And the monument itself, I believe, was built in the mid 1930s. 1936. Yeah. Well, it was dedicated in 1934. Yep, yep. And who built it and who made the decision to put a memorial up for these Canadians? You know what? We have to thank the French. The design was it was a French design, but there was money that was supplied by the Canadian government to help fund the project. That's one thing I have to say about the French. They are very appreciative of the contributions of the Canadians to, oh, how can I say, liberate them from German occupation? The other photographs of the memorials, in this case, these are all memorials that we travel to on these battlefield tours, the battle of, Passchendaele, which we talked about with Robert Williams, Hill 62, also known as, Sanctuary Wood. Saint Julian and of course, left. All of those were battles that the 31st Battalion, which is our what do we south Alberta Lake George perpetuates. That's where the contributed. There is a raft of other, memorials spread across across France. And it's not just strictly to Canadians, it's to Americans that served as well too, that they have monuments of their. When we were there, we were only looking at units, or monuments that, dedicated to the 31st. I believe the Vinnie Ridge Memorial was also, I guess, rededicated by Queen Elizabeth the second after some, sprucing up. And, that was part of the 21st century. You know, 100% true, because owing to the environment, it does take a beating. So when we were there, it was it looked amazing. The second time we were there looked absolutely phenomenal. The first time we were there, you could see it needed a little bit of touching up here and there. It's just the nature of the beast. That's one of the things that kind of impressed me. Or. And I wasn't too impressed. But being in France, it was very humid. It was not like southern Alberta. Dry desert. Yeah. We are dry. Yes, exactly. So it was kind of a shock to a prairie boy to go there and everything's, you know, rain and, you know, high humidity. We're on, Juno Beach. And it was there was a town, of course, left and that was a key Canadian, point during World War two. And as we were walking along, it was raining. Of course, the first year it rained like crazy. And we're we're all trying to be, you know, happy. You can't. You just can't. The second time we were there was a beautiful sunny. We had some amazing experiences. The French people that they see the maple leaf on your shoulder, on your chest and say, Canada, Canada. Thank you. Thank you for what you did. And I'm like. I didn't do it. I didn't do anything. But our forefathers did. And they still recognize that. And there's so many little things that happened there that were just the coolest thing. A little girl came up and she was pointing at us and said something in French. I can't speak French. I know towards a French Pontiac and Chevrolet. I shouldn't say that a little better, but, this little girl was really kind of, kind of kind of cute and all that. And the the mother and father, they came up and he said, oh, our. And she spoke broken English, and that's all. Her daughter noticed the maple leaf. And what does that mean? It's all well for Canada and all that kind of stuff. And and. Oh, yeah, that's very nice. And, she came up and she, the little girl gave. All three of us were sitting on a bench, gave us a hug, and I had a maple leaf flag or a pin. I took that off and pin it on her dress while she just was, and, the parrots were just. It was funny. It was really humorous because they were just all, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. What you did. No, no no not. And I said yeah okay. Yeah yeah yeah. Our ice cream is melting okay. Oh where was that gelato I can't remember, but but it was really kind of a humorous little little thing there again. When when we're in Vienna. They were just finishing and starting the rebuild of the, interpretive center. Now they've all done that. They still had trenches built in there, and they're very well done. It's really interesting because they had the sandbags on the sides of the trench, which were made out of concrete. It was like a lot of sandbags and. The. Oh, okay. That's a concrete brilliant idea. The other thing that they had was some of the tunnels that they utilized at Jimmy Ridge, and a lot of people don't, don't really they really don't think that they use tunnels at Vimy. Well, they did, and it was really an amazing thing because they're dug out of the chalk and they had some of the, like the, the one area they had, beds in there, like it was like a mini hospital sort of thing. And that put another perspective in there because we, during both of those tours, as we, we saw a lot of these, these, underground tunnel systems and the complexity of some of them was mind blowing. They had lights, they had hospitals, they had offices, they had soldiers, gathering points. There was stuff carved into walls with different units, like, hey, hi, I'm George from, you know, wherever, you know, what's the guy? Hi. I'm Mike from Kenmore. Not that kind of thing, but you know what their units were and stuff like that. So you'd walk along? Oh, yeah. They just carved the cap badge of the, you know, the 13th, Highlanders or cat badge of the 1/38 or something like that. So it was really quite fascinating. And that's the mark. They left their mark. Well, we said in November, lest we forget, but we need to remember that every day. And we do. Thank you, us. And thank you for coming over here. I hope you had enjoyed it. Oh I did. Oh.