Vimy Ridge: A monumental labour of love

The greatest art restoration project in Canadian history is a memorial dedicated to one of the most important events in that history. 'We were working on sacred ground, still running with the blood of these soldiers,' the lead architect says.

For 70 years, the gleaming white monument on the crest of Vimy Ridge has cast its spell on Canadians, stirring our memories, summoning the nation never to forget the horror and sacrifice of an ever distant war.

But almost no one alive today has been so touched by the monument's power as those who laboured on its restoration for the past five years.

Today, Easter Monday, thousands are to gather on the grass below the monument in France, to remember the 90th anniversary of Canada's most famous wartime triumph, and to witness the rededication of the monument following a long and arduous reconstruction.

The rebuilding of the Vimy memorial - the greatest art restoration project in Canadian history - is a story of passion and devotion, and proof that a country that so often ignores its past has kept its solemn promise to the 11,000 Canadians who died in France in the First World War in unknown graves, whose names are inscribed on Vimy's walls.

"The importance of these names is that for these men, this is the only memorial, the only marker anywhere that keeps their identity alive, that allows them to be known by future generations," said Julian Smith, the Ottawa architect who, with a Parisian colleague, oversaw the restoration for the federal government.

Smith is an experienced heritage conservator. He helped restore the Ontario legislature buildings 15 years ago. But he said working at Vimy Ridge was an awakening like no other.

Not only is the monument an artistic masterpiece - Canada's largest piece of installation art outside the country - it is also a sacred place, where the soil still holds the bones of men who died there nearly a century ago.

This became vividly apparent to the restoration workers in the spring of 2005, when the remains of two German soldiers were unearthed during the excavation of a temporary parking lot next to the monument.

"It brought home the fact that we were working on sacred ground, still running with the blood of these soldiers," Smith said.

"Certainly it made it very real for everyone who worked on the project. Even the Belgian contractor said his crew of stone masons - who had worked on many old cathedrals and other cultural sites - never had the kind of emotional involvement as they had at Vimy."

In 2001, the departments of Veterans Affairs and Public Works announced, after a period of alarm and agitation in the media, a $30-million program to restore Canada's 13 First World War memorials in Europe, including eight Canadian sites and five sites honouring soldiers from the then Dominion of Newfoundland.

Two-thirds of the budget was earmarked for Vimy, where decades of wind and rain had eroded many of the names inscribed on the monument, and left its limestone walls cracked and crumbling.

Much of this aging was because of a serious error in the original building of the monument in the 1920s and '30s. Walter Allward, the Toronto sculptor who designed the memorial and poured his heart into its construction, chose to embed the memorial's veneer limestone blocks directly onto the concrete substructure, in accordance with the prevailing technology of the time.