Our ancestors fought for different sides, but we remembered them together at Vimy Ridge

first person

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We had grown up with our grandfather’s stories of the First World War. Last summer, my brother and I and a good friend, Andrew, took a road trip to find their battlefields in Northern France. Our grandfather, Ernest Strong, 26th Battalion (New Brunswick), fought for the Allies. Andrew’s great-grandfather – Paul Kölling, infantryman – had fought on the enemy side.

At Vimy Ridge, Canada’s most visited war memorial, Andrew called to us from the German trenches. They were within shouting distance of the Canadian lines. We tried to imagine those days from April 9-12, 1917, when four Canadian divisions fighting together for the first time, stormed