Mr. Speaker, I thank my friends.
This brings us to Vimy. Vimy had been taken by our adversaries, early in the war, in 1914. Both the French and the English, the imperial troops of the British Empire as they were known at the time, had lost a lot of men as they tried, again and again, to retake Vimy, but with no success.
But General Currie, who was in charge of the army, had decided to change the way the war was fought. It was that new approach that led to the 5th Brigade, which was entirely on the right, setting off from the little village of Thelus at the foot of the south side of the hill, the one that could be seen in front of the mountain, on April 9, 1917, Easter morning. They moved out and they engaged in a new kind of warfare.
Since April 18, the 5th Brigade had drilled using sketches. They took aerial photographs. Every soldier was therefore familiar with the lie of the land, and every battalion, or rather every platoon, because a battalion was divided into four platoons, A, B, C and D, had specific objectives.
We must remember that throughout the war, the 22nd Battalion had only once failed to take its objective, and that was in the battle of Regina Trench. The 5th Brigade, I should say, to be more honest, never failed to take another objective throughout the entire war, from 1915 to 1918. This demonstrates the strength of those soldiers, people from our hometowns in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Quebec, as I mentioned.
So they left Thelus on Sunday about five in the morning. The first small problem they encountered was the village of Farbus. It cost them dearly. There were 40 dead and 90 wounded in the 22nd Battalion. As an aside, in 1920, a year after the war, the battalion was made into a regiment. The following year, King George V allowed the 22nd Battalion to call itself the Royal 22nd Regiment, which is where the name of our 22nd Regiment comes from. The soldiers of today's Royal 22nd Regiment should be very proud of their forebears.
To come back to my account, they arrived at Farbus and used the same tactic. They fired, they launched, they bombarded all of the barbed-wire emplacements and all of the defences on the other side of the no man's land, and they pounded the trenches on the other side with shells. While their adversaries stayed in their trenches, the soldiers swarmed out, like ants, moving to the next trench and hiding in shell craters. And so they moved up, gradually, and on the evening of April 9, Easter Sunday, they reached the crest of Vimy Ridge. The soldiers of the 5th Brigade were the first to reach the top of the ridge.
I have spent over 200 hours reading about the first world war. To me and to historians, Vimy was the turning point of the war. Our enemies' morale was crushed. Beginning on April 10, 1917, we advanced again and again, and we drove our adversaries back with incredible speed. And finally, on November 11, at the 11th hour, in Mons, the 5th Brigade was there when the Armistice was sounded. This was a tremendous achievement by men.
I am very proud of the 5th Brigade and also of the Royal 22nd Regiment. I wish them good luck; my heart goes with them.