Writing in the “ Canadian Military Journal” in 2009, Major John R. Typical of Berton’s style, and perhaps the purple peak of the book, is his description of the moments before “the world exploded” with “the greatest artillery barrage in the history of warfare.” At zero minus two minutes, the “whispered order” came to fix bayonets, producing a “loose locking” of “rings, rippling all along the miles of trenches” like “the humming of a thousand quivering bees.” And in the final, silent seconds, “30,000 men held their breath, tensing their cramped muscles for the moment that some had been awaiting since November.” The British hadn’t done it the French hadn’t done it they had done it – the Canadians.” Entitled simply “ Vimy,” nine-tenths of the book paint a broad-brush picture of personal courage and strategic achievement, sweeping success and seminal sacrifice on that nationally sacred Easter Monday when, fighting together for the first and last time in the Great War, all four Divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force “punched a hole in the 400-mile line of German trenches.
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