Speaking of this terrible gunfire, a German prisoner afterwards said, “You English have never been through such a bombardment. You don’t know what it means. We do. You’d have to give in yourselves.” This fire had been kept up by the British guns for no less than a fortnight. Then the British leaders thought the time had come for the bayonet attack.
At half-past five on Easter Monday morning the word was given and the Canadians went at once “over the top.” It was a wet morning, and it was not long before they looked like scarecrows in a prairie cornfield; but they swung on laughing and cheering and joking. The rain was on their backs which was to their advantage. “Our first stretch,” said one of them afterwards, “was about 600 yards of fairly level ground of what we call ‘No Man’s Land.’ Next we came upon a maze of trenches in which we found nothing but dead men and smashed guns.
“Our first objective lay far behind these trenches, and we reached there within an hour, climbing all the way up a gentle slope. On our left front stood a village, with a haystack standing in a field to the south of it. That haystack was known to be a strongly prepared machine-gun position.”
The speaker was wounded not long afterwards and was carried off to the dressing station and thence to London. He did not see the rest of the fighting of that day. But he heard with pride how his comrades had cleared the fortress of Vimy Ridge of its German defenders; how they had pushed on in the face of machine-gun and rifle fire and had done stern work with the bayonet; and how they had finished their work completely before night came on.
The last point of the ridge to be captured was known as Hill 145. Here the Germans had a very strong machine-gun position, but after stern fighting they were at last cleared out, and the Canadians went on to finish their task. They swept over the top of the ridge and down the steep eastern slope, clearing away the last parties of the enemy and taking many prisoners.
The fighting at Vimy was afterwards said to be “the most successful single day’s work in all the operations on the Western Front since the beginning of the war.” It was successful for three reasons. First, because the artillery prepared so well for the attack; second, because the officers had learnt their lesson from that useful little plasticine model; and third, because the Canadians were among the bravest of the brave.