Posts with the Vimy Foundation tag

Barris Beat

Tempest in a passport

Written by Ted Barris on . 2 Comments
Abandoned target range where 116th Battalion recruits honed their marksmanship for war in 1915.

Last April, about the middle of the month, I took a detour from my regular travels. I turned down a dirt road south of town, got out of my car and wandered into the bush. There, just a few feet into the woods lies a bunker containing the rusted frames of century-old shooting targets.

It was here young men, three generations ago, prepared to become part of Canadian wartime history. And as I imagined those young recruits of the 116th (Ontario County) Battalion, practising on their Ross rifles, I think of the photograph – at our township museum and depicted in our downtown mural – of troops leaving for the Great War in 1916.

Volunteers depart Uxbridge for overseas in 1916.

“God bless our splendid men,” the sign over Brock and Toronto streets reads in the photo and the mural. “Send them safe home again.”

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Barris Beat

Springtime poppy

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Walter Allward's marble sculpture of Mother Canada mourning her dead at Vimy Ridge memorial site in France.
Walter Allward's marble sculpture of Mother Canada mourning her dead at Vimy Ridge memorial site in France.

About a year ago, I received a letter from a stranger. He had read my book “Victory at Vimy,” the story of Canadians pushing the German Army from its nearly three-year occupation of strategic heights in north-central France. Born in Chile in 1944, the man said he had immigrated to Canada in 1976. In what had clearly been an important step in their lives, Pat Carvacho, his wife and two children became Canadian citizens soon after. Now a semi-retired architect, he wanted to share a dream he had experienced prior to reading my book.

“I saw a soldier of the Great War. I instantly learned his name, Charles Roy,” Carvacho wrote me. “Later (in the dream) I saw this soldier in a trench immediately before an attack, then advancing with his rifle and bayonet. There was a powerful explosion and the rifle and bayonet broke in pieces.”

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