Vimy Ridge

On this Easter Monday, Canadians and their Queen will commemorate the 90th anniversary of one of the country's most enduring pieces of mythology Ð'-- a minor battle for a French hill, transformed by alchemy into Canada's defining moment of nationhood.

Canadians, and only Canadians, call it the Battle of Vimy Ridge, begun on another Easter Monday, a grey, frigid April 9, 1917, at 5:30 a.m., and lasting four days.

In everyone else's historical lexicons, it was a limited tactical victory in the First World War's horrendous Battle of Arras, which the British and their allies lost.

It had a negligible effect on the war's outcome. The Canadians had equal casualties and more strategic successes in other battles, such as Amiens and Passchendaele. If French or British rather than Canadian troops had driven the German enemy off Vimy Ridge, history probably would have forgotten about it.

Canadians soliders examine a human skull found on the Vimy Ridge battlefield in 1917.

Celebrated as an event that forged a nation, it led directly to an event that almost fractured the nation Ð'-- conscription, and its cleaving of English- and French-speaking Canadians.

It is today the site not of a victory monument but of a haunting memorial to grief, woven through with Christian resurrection symbolism. A memorial that both Canada's senior general of the war and the architectural jury that selected its design initially wanted to locate elsewhere.

Yet so powerful was the myth of Vimy that 23 years later Ð'-- after France fell to the German military in the Second World War in 1940 Ð'-- Canadians were whipped into visceral fury and hatred by British reports that the memorial had been destroyed by German bombers. Adolf Hitler's advisers thought it necessary for the Nazi leader to hurry to Vimy and be photographed at the monument, to demonstrate that it was still intact.

It is fascinating how mythology can so easily trump history, and even culture.

"Mythology is a funny thing. We don't need to know what happened, we simply need to know what the myth tells us is significant," says historian Geoffrey Hayes, associate director of the Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., and co-editor of a remarkable new book of essays on the battle, Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment. "Everywhere we look, we can see that Vimy Ridge has become so closely associated