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A bitter wind blew down Queen Street from the west Monday morning and iced a crowd of perhaps 300 people gathered, in the shade of the Hudson’s Bay tower, in front of Old City Hall, for a memorial service to honour the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge.

Still, the frigid wind seemed a trifling thing to endure, compared with the heroism of the Canadians, 3,598 of whom died in the three-day Vimy battle, which began 95 years ago, on Easter Monday, 1917. Kathy Kaufmann, general manager of the Vimy Foundation, reminded the assembled that Canada succeeded at Vimy because, “We were willing to innovate and experiment with new techniques. The French and the British had failed for two and a half years.”Our big city at that moment felt more a village, as everyone, from a baby in a stroller to a woman in a wheelchair, from cyclists to shoppers, stopped to pay tribute. One man wore a CFL jacket. One toddler sat braving the wind on his father’s shoulders. The little boy wore a Thomas the Tank Engine jacket and a toque shaped like a moose’s head, its antlers knit from red and black checked wool.