Military History | Saint Julien Memorial — What the Plaque Says and What Is Printed

On the evening of 22 April 1915 the German army released chlorine along the line north of Ieper (Ypres), and the cloud fell on the French colonial troops holding the ground to the left of the Canadian 1st Division. The French line broke and a gap opened. Veterans Affairs Canada records that the Canadians fought through the night to close it, that two days later gas was turned on their own trenches, and that in forty-eight hours 6,035 of them, one man in three, became casualties.

After the war the Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission picked eight sites and ran a competition for them. Walter Allward's design won and went to Vimy Ridge. The second-placed entry, by Frederick Chapman Clemesha, an architect from Regina who had served in the Canadian Corps and been wounded, was built here instead. Granite quarried in the Vosges makes a shaft about eleven metres high, and the head and shoulders at the top, helmet on and hands folded over reversed arms, were carved in Brussels. The Duke of Connaught unveiled it on 8 July 1923, with Marshal Foch present.

The column's claim is not cut in the granite. It is on a bronze plaque let into one face, raised dots standing between most of the words: THIS COLUMN MARKS THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE 18,000 CANADIANS ON THE BRITISH LEFT WITHSTOOD THE FIRST GERMAN GAS ATTACKS THE 22-24 APRIL 1915 2,000 FELL AND LIE BURIED NEARBY. The Flemish heritage register transcribes that exactly. Veterans Affairs Canada, writing about Canada's own memorial, gives the closing words as "and here lie buried" and the dates as the twenty-second to the twenty-fourth.

Protected as a monument since 2009 and inside a UNESCO core zone since 2023, the column stands on the Brugseweg at Sint-Juliaan, Saint-Julien in French, in the commune of Langemark-Poelkapelle. It rises from a flagstone terrace edged with a mortared rubble wall, and wreaths lie at its foot.

📸 Cover: the column with CANADA in flat relief on the shaft — BigBlobfish, 25 October 2024, CC0. Second image: the bronze plaque — Nancy W. Beach, 11 July 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.