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Last Vimy Ridge infantryman dies
'There's no one to answer questions now about what it was like,' historian says
Les Perreaux
CanWest News Service
Thursday, March 06, 2003
WINNIPEG -- The last infantry soldier who could recount first hand the trench warfare of Vimy Ridge, Canada's defining battle in the First World War, has died.
Charles Reaper died Saturday from complications of a stroke, one month before the 86th anniversary of what historians consider Canada's first great military victory.
Mr. Reaper was 103.
"It was living history and now it is learned history," said Steve Harris, chief historian for the Directorate of History and Heritage at the Department of National Defence. "It's the kind of loss that is priceless. For people who don't know about this event, we've lost the ability to relate first-hand what happened.
"It's now great granddad's war, it's gone into the past, like the American Civil War."
Mr. Reaper, who came to Canada from Scotland an orphan, joined the army at 16 because he thought it would be easier than the back-breaking farm work he was doing in rural Manitoba.
"He said he figured if he was going to do a man's work, he should get a man's pay. Like a lot of guys at the time, he didn't really know what he was getting himself into," Darren Stirling said of his uncle.
On April 9, 1917, Mr. Reaper was among the 20,000 Canadian soldiers who went over the top to attack German positions on Vimy Ridge. Although the Canadians were given little chance to take the heavily fortified ridge, which French and British troops had tried and failed to capture, within three days they had routed the German defenders. The victory cost Canada 3,598 lives. Another 7,699 were wounded.
There are only about a dozen Canadian veterans of the First World War still alive, all of them more than 100 years old. At least three of them were at Vimy Ridge; Mr. Reaper was the last surviving infantryman.
"He was the last Vimy Ridge infantry veteran," said Mr. Harris. "This is the last of the thousands who went over the top ... there's no one now to answer questions about it, about what it was like."
The battle of Vimy Ridge marked the first time that the four divisions of the Canadian Corps had fought together and was the first battle largely planned and carried out by Canadians.
Canadian troops managed to take the ridge by using innovative tactics such as accurate counter-battery fire to silence German guns and a creeping barrage of Canadian artillery that advanced just ahead of the foot soldiers, who were able to catch the German defenders unprepared.
Mr. Harris said the first people who realized the significance of Vimy were the soldiers who fought the battle.
"They knew it. The soldiers were the first ones to recognize that they and all the guys around them were wearing Maple Leaf (badges) on their shoulders," Mr. Harris said. "And they were the ones who saw what they had done, who took pride in doing what the Brits and the French hadn't been able to do.
"My grandfather -- who was British -- told me that Vimy was the moment when he became a Canadian."
The battlefield was later ceded to Canada by France, and is now the site of the Vimy Memorial, a towering white monument atop the highest part of the ridge that bears the names of the 11,285 Canadians killed in France during the war whose remains were never found.
Mr. Reaper, who worked for Winnipeg Transit for 46 years, was shot in the abdomen and the arm during his two years of service in the war, but Mr. Stirling said his uncle never considered himself a hero.
"He didn't talk a lot about it," he said. "He was proud of the fact he went and served his country. He thought Canada was a great country to live in."
"What he'd done only really dawned on me a few years ago when he received the Legion of Honour from the French government. Since then, I'd catch myself complaining about things, as we all do. I'd bite my tongue and remember. It makes you proud, to know someone like him."
Obituary of Charles Reaper.
© Copyright 2003 The Ottawa Citizen
