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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWNIFE
Sixteen-year-old Greg Huvenaars navigated tight caverns and dirt dugouts, battled rocky terrain on Juno Beach and crested Vimy Ridge—and after his tour overseas, returned safely to classmates at St. Patrick High School.

St. Patrick High School student Greg Huvenaars went on an educational trip of a lifetime in August to Vimy Ridge in France as part of a national military history expedition through the Vimy Foundation. - Katherine Hudson/NNSL photo

While the Battle of Vimy Ridge happened nearly a century ago, reliving the April 1917 fight wouldn't require a major stretch of the imagination for Huvernaars and 12 other young Canadians last summer who saw for themselves in England, Belgium and France, the devastation wrought by two world wars.

"It doesn't look much like battlefield anymore, it looks like peaceful countryside," he said about visiting the Ypres salient this past August. "But you get thinking about it, and so many thousands of people died on such a small piece of land."

A student at St. Pat's, Huvenaars was the recipient of the Beaverbrook Vimy Prize, the annual flagship program of the Vimy Foundation, which gives students from Canada, the U.K. and France a living history lesson so they can better appreciate the war-time cooperation of the three nations and understand the sacrifice of war. The troupe of students marched the same path at Vimy as the Canadian soldiers – the "back road" outside Vimy Park, not one visitors usually take – experienced caverns and dugouts not generally open to the public, were privy to guest lectures at Oxford University and visited dozens of cemeteries for soldiers killed in war.

The scholarship, open to participants ages 15 to 17, is awarded on the basis of essay submissions, interviews, grade average and proven leadership skills. As part of the scholarship, students researched and presented a given topic while on tour. Each student also chose a fallen soldier with whom they had a personal connection, either through hometown, school, family, friends or a shared last name, and wrote a biography and tribute letter. Huvenaars chose Capt. Charles Sproxton, from Yorkshire, U.K., who shared his grandmother's maiden name. While overseas, one particularly emotional day was when the students visited cemeteries where these soldiers were buried, read tributes and rubbed a black wax crayon over a sheet of paper on the face of the headstone to make an impression.

"It was a very small cemetery, no more than 100 people," said Huvenaars, who said the grave made quite an impression on him, too.

"It was very powerful. The part I especially remember was reading what was written on the tombstone, the epitaph. It said: "his soul to god, his life for his country."

This was not the first Huvenaars trip related to military history. He visited France, Belgium and the Netherlands with his Grade 9 class in 2010 for the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands in the Second World War.

With Remembrance Day now approaching, Huvenaars has found a deeper meaning in what the sacrifices of Canada's soldiers truly entail and will speak about his experience at the high school's Remembrance Day service.

– with files from Katherine Hudson

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