Ottawa held celebrations on Saturday to commemorate the 105th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, which stands as one of Canada's most decisive military victories.
Confederation Square became silent around 11 a.m. as Anishinaabe elder and Ottawa's poet laureate Albert Dumont opened the celebrations with a prayer.
The crowd rose as Dumont and his granddaughter proceeded to smudge the audience of government and military dignitaries with burning sage. "Many of them were young men in their late teens and early twenties, united in their fight for justice, peace, and freedom," Trudeau said on Saturday. But the battle didn't come without suffering; Canada saw 10,600 casualties in the battle — nearly 3,600 of which were fatal.
"But it also shows us what we must always try to achieve; peace. The cost is too high to do otherwise." The Germans transformed Vimy Ridge into a heavily-fortified system of tunnels and trenches in 1914, defended with an arsenal of machine guns and artillery pieces. After three years of unsuccessful assaults, hundreds of thousands of British and French troops had died and failed to capture Vimy Ridge.
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