MEMORIAL TO MISSING

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVII, Issue 4459, 19 October 1933, Page 6

MEMORIAL TO MISSING

HUGE PYLONS ON VIIHY RIDGE. A British and a German soldier lying hand-in-hand in death is one of the grim discoveries made during the building af a £200,000 memorial to the “Missing” on Vimy Ridge. It has taken nine years to build and will be unveiled in 1934. It is the most remarkable memorial on the Western Front.

It records the names of over 11,000 Canadians ‘.‘Missing” in the fighting in France in 1915-18. It weighs over 50,000 tons, and rests on a bed of 15,000 tons of concrete.

The body of a German general has also been found on the site, and as late as this year two German soldiers were unearthed two feet below the surface.

The memorial stands over the famous Grange Tunnel, a vast network of underground galleries excavated during the war and used as assembly trenches for the troops in the battle for Vimy Ridge. One of these subterranean works was struck when the foundations were dug. “The memorial is a sermon against the futility of war,” said Mr. Walter Allward, the architect and sculptor, to an Observer representative in the London studio where Gilbert created his world-famous statue of Eros.

“Vindictiveness and hate have been excluded from my design. In my original drawings I had a foot trampling on a German steel helmet. Even that symbol I have removed.”

The whole of Europe was searched for a stone that, in such an exposed position as Vimy, would weather and endure for centuries hence. This was found near where were fired the shots that hastened the Great War. Mr. Allward leased an old Roman quarry in Yugo-Slavia that had not been worked since the fourth century; from those quarries 8000 tons of stone have been shipped to France.

Beneath two huge pylons, representing Canada and France, the heroic figure of Canada broods over her dead. Twenty sculptured figures, including Peace, Justice, Truth and Knowledge, each twice life-size, are striking features of the monument. _A group of defenders shows the breaking of the sword, another the sympathy of the Canadians for the helpless. The mouths of the guns are covered with olive and laurels.

Below the pylons is the Spirit of Sacrifice, who, giving all, throws the torch to his comrade. The memorial voices in stone a superb heroism, the defeat and victory of youth, and the constancy and fearlessness of a great Western people. In majesty of conception and grandeur of design it is one of the most important works of modern times. From the highest level of the ridge —“that great bastion of the Western Front,” as Mr. Lloyd George described it —commanding a forty-mile view, the memorial rises from a 2235-foot base. The site, and 200 acres surrounding it, are France’s gift to Canada, forming the Dominion’s War Park, a “Park of Peace” on land where Great Britain and Canada suffered enormous sacrifices that it might be made safe for the Allied cause.

When the memorial is u'nveiled, in the presence of a vast contingent from the Dominion, the only unfinished monument will be the Australian one at Villers-Brettoneaux, near Amiens.

Work was suspended on this memorial when the financial situation became acute in the Commonwealth, and the “cease work” ban has not been lifted.

Australia'n it will be what the Menin Gate is to the Empire —the chief Commonwealth memorial on the Western Front.