I’m continually amazed at the information that you can glean online, and also with that amazing tool/time waster, Google Earth. One of the things I’d really like to do at Vimy is stand where the 16th Battalion stood at 5:30 am, the time that they went over the top that Easter morning 90 years ago. I have a map (from Nicholson’s History of the CEF) of the troop movements for the Vimy attack.
I took a screen shot of the Google Earth image of the area, and then in Photoshop played with the two images until they were the same scale. Then I superimposed the two images and figured out exactly where the 16th jumped off from. The area today is in farmer’s fields a little south east of Neuville St. Vaast, and luckily a access road runs right along where the Canadian’s front line used to be.
What I find incredible about this image from space is you can still see the scars on the land where the two front lines faced each other (and elsewhere), 90 years after it all the wars mark is still on the land.
In the picture I made I got the name of the cemetery wrong, it is Nine Elms Military Cemetery, not Thelus. In a little more than a month I’ll be standing there, trying (and no doubt failing) to imagine what the scene before me would have been like as my Grandfather went over the top, amidst the shells and the machine gun fire as the piper in his company played (perhaps) the Reel of Tulloch or Devil in the Kitchen (which, by the way, were the tunes played by Piper James Richardson of the 16th when he won the Victoria Cross at Regina Trench.