Tribute to Vimy Ridge rises in rural cemetery
The striking monument rises from the grass in a simple, rural cemetery.
Its distinctive stone towers hearken back to France, and a historic First World War battlefield: Vimy Ridge.
The countryside monument in the Horn Hill area just off Highway 42 south of Red Deer came to stand in the Alberta graveyard through the efforts of local dairy farmer Matt Richards, whose great-uncle William was hit by a shell and killed in the battle at Vimy Ridge.
Through a clerical error, William’s name didn’t make it onto the official Vimy memorial, Matt Richards says. Financial hardship back home at the time, meanwhile, meant the fallen soldier never had his own gravestone at the local cemetery.
When Richards learned of the oversight, he was moved to create a lasting tribute not only for his family member, but to other residents from the region who fought in the Great War.
“I was going to do a memorial for him, just a gravestone, then it just kind of expanded into a miniature version of the Vimy memorial with all the men and women that served in the First and Second World Wars in the three districts in the area — Clearview, Horn Hill and Hill End,” Richards says.
The toll of the war on the rural communities was immense, Richards came to learn, with up to 30 per cent of the men who enlisted not making it back home in some districts. Further, some of the soldiers were recent immigrants who signed up as bachelors, with no family back in Alberta to mourn them.
“There’s basically no record of them having lived or served, and so I think the memorial is a good way to remember them,” Richards says.