Posted on 09/26/2007 4:12:42 AM PDT by Clive
CALGARY -It's a sure bet that not many Canadians under 50 could tell you much about the Battle of Passchendaele. For a few of us, it might ring vaguely familiar -- a place once spotted in some long-ago textbook or overheard on a television documentary, likely recalled more for its odd sounding name than for its significance. It's a battle "lost to Canadian history" as Calgary-based historian Norman Leach puts it, obscured by the shadow of the fabled Vimy Ridge. But as defining accounts of Canadian military exceptionality go, it may be more compelling.
Passchendaele has occupied Paul Gross's thoughts since his youth, when his grandfather -- who had long kept quiet memories of his own youth spent fighting for Calgary's 10th Battalion in the Great War -- near the end of his life finally revealed tales of his terrible battles. He was there, at the incomprehensibly ugly scene of Passchendaele, a ridge near a village by that name, a few miles northeast of Ypres in Belgium. A battleground about which British anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote: "I died in Hell (they called it Passchendaele)." In Calgary, shooting a film depiction of one of Canada's greatest, least understood triumphs, entitled simply Passchendaele, Mr. Gross, known better for comedic turns -- swaggering curling skip in Men With Brooms, earnest Mountie in CBS's Due South, yuppie businessman on The Red Green Show -- is doing a remarkable job recreating hell on Earth.
"It was probably the most grisly of the campaigns," Mr. Gross says on set, at a former military training ground -- now part of a native reserve -- as extras dressed as soldiers, bloody and bandaged, limbs seemingly blown off into mutilated stumps mill outside a gore-stained medical tent waiting for the next take.
"It was a major offensive, whereas Vimy was a smaller undertaking," he says. For him, the First World War is a particularly important moment in Canada's history, where the country forged its identity in the "crucible of those battlefields on the Western Front"; a time when Canadians were admired as "fierce warriors." It was here where Germans coined the term "storm trooper," referring to fearsome Canadians, notes Mr. Leach, a production consultant, troops who "came on like a storm and couldn't be stopped."
But like so much of Canada's military heroism, figures Mr. Gross, the son of a tank commander, Passchendaele's victory was lost in an era of post-Vietnam pacifist vogue.
"I think we went through that funny period ? where if you celebrated or studied or paid attention to military history, it somehow meant you were in
favour of going to war," he says. "Everything got so consumed by the notion that we were peacekeepers and nothing else. We lost all sorts of understandings of ourselves."
A few hundred yards away, workers have built a facsimile of a place where Canadians proved indomitable warriors: a cluster of trees have been erected, stripped bare by artillery fire. Sprinklers douse the land constantly, recreating the bog that Passchendaele had become after 4.5 million shells pounded the ground for 14 days in July, 1917, a futile attempt to soften up German defences, which, along with three months of heavy rains, turned land to muck and water, in which nearly as many Allies drowned as were killed by guns. A short drive away, crews finish remaking the pulverized village, finally taken by Canadian troops -- and here is the stuff of lost legend -- in just two weeks, and with 16,000 casualties, something British, French, South African and ANZAC troops could not do in three months, incurring more than 230,000 casualties in trying.
Mr. Gross is writer, producer, director and lead actor on the film, scheduled for release around Remembrance Day, 2008, playing a character named for and loosely based on his grandfather, Michael Dunne, who falls for a nurse and makes it his duty to save her brother and last surviving family member from death in Passchendaele's quagmire (the romance part is fictional). It is a huge production by Canadians standards, with a $20-million budget, a quarter financed by the Alberta government.
That's one reason, Mr. Gross explains, why the film took so long to produce. He has worked steadily on it for at least a decade, he figures, though Francis Damberger, co-producer and a long-time friend from the days when he and Mr. Gross grew up around Calgary, says he remembers discussing the idea as long ago as 15 years.
Compare that with the 12 months or so Mr. Gross estimates it took him to get a green light on his offbeat curling comedy, Men With Brooms, and you might despair for Canada's cultural priorities. Mr. Gross seems not to. The fact that he eventually raised millions, much of it from private investors looking probably for more of a moral return than a financial one, was "overwhelming and encouraging," he says. And the political discomfort that once suffocated a proud military past, he senses, is waning, as Canadians debate their preferred role in Afghanistan. He expects Passchendaele will help, comparing it with Peter Weir's 1981 film, Gallipoli, which opened Australia's eyes to its own faded war memories. "Only in Canada is our military record strangely absent," Mr. Gross believes. He sees it as his mission to change that.
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One of my great uncles fought in that battle. He was an extraordinary man.
wow...did not know this....good article.
I ran across an account a few years ago told by a fellow about a neighbor of his who had been an English MP during the Great War.
Later on in the war, some soldiers would refuse to go "over the top"; it was the duty of the aforementioned neighbor to perform a summary battlefield execution of those soldiers, who considered that death preferable to a slow, lingering death in no-man's land.
I thought John Keegan's was better. Also check out Winston Groom's "A Storm in Flanders."
Passchendaele was the last gasp of the "one more push" philosophy which posited that the stalemate of attritional trench warfare could be broken by brute offensive action against fixed positions.
Well it could have been, IMO, but there never seemed to be the resources/will/plan to properly follow through. The history of the Great War is replete with examples of forcibly gaining a breach in the enemy's defensive line, creating a threatened salient, and later withdrawing from it to avoid being cut off and annihilated.
Breaking the line is only the beginning. It's what you do afterward that makes the difference.
My Grandfather was there, and described some of it to me, before he passed away. Bad, bad scene.
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