I've encountered the above quote while working on the Canadian role during the First World War. Another notable one is:
We went up the ridge as Albertans and Nova Scotians. We came down as Canadians.
Again, if someone could walk me through the veracity of this quote, it would be much appreciated.
Hey, dubious quotes are always fun. Let's see what we can find.
Proving a negative is almost impossible, but I do not think there is a verification for the Winston Churchill quote - fitting, considering how Churchill himself likely made up quotes by the likes of Otto von Bismarck. I have never seen it referenced in any sort of academic literature and it seems to have been created on and for the internet. Winston Churchill has a whole 6 volumes written in an all-out epos about World War II and wrote his personal take on World War I as well. He doesn't make any claim to the superiority of Canadian soldiers in either. This also does not appear in documents about British cabinet meetings during the war.
The quote is fake.
Meanwhile, the quote about the creation of Canadian identity at Vimy Ridge is attributed to "a veteran" and has been attributed as such even by Mr Trudeau, the current Prime Minister of Canada, in a 2017 public statement commemorating the 100th anniversary of Vimy Ridge. It is more widespread in actual literature, and is for example a favorite quote of Douglas N. Sprague, who quoted it in his Structure of Canadian History in 1984 (p. 302), and in his Post-Confederation Canada: The Structure of Canadian History Since Confederation in 1990 (p. 141). These are also the oldest citations Google Books knows, whatever that's worth. But even there, the author is cited as "As one veteran put it". Sprague's book in 1984, written together with John L. Finlay, is the earliest reference to the quote I found.
It has since then often been replicated, like in Ian McKay's and Jamie Swift's The Vimy Trap of 2017, where it is cited as a "saying" rather than the quote of "a veteran" under citation 127. Citation 127 then points to 2012's Canadian History for Dummies by Will Ferguson. The "For Dummies" series is a bit more in-depth than the title might make you believe, so let's not lose faith yet. And yes, there is a small chapter on Vimy Ridge in Ferguson's book, but, you guessed it, this is all it has to say about the quote:
Called "the most perfectly organized and most successful battle of the wole war", it was Canada's greatest victory, and one that has since been hailed as a "nation-making moment" that involved Canadians from every region.
We went up Vimy Ridge as Albertans and Nova Scotians. We came down as Canadians.
- a war veteran remembering Vimy Ridge.
There he is, our nameless war veteran again. Ferguson's book is pop-history and has the annoying tendency to not cite quotations, so our hunt ends here already. It is however interesting to note that McKay made a direct quote attributed to a veteran in Ferguson's book into a 'popular saying' in his own. Oh well.
The quote is dubious. The fact that the veterans is never named makes it just very easy to quote and to give from one author to the next to appeal to a sense of patriotism in the reader. That said, it is so often replicated that it might be correct. It is never dated, so the fact that the quote's earliest appearance in 1984 doesn't necessarily mean its fake - in theory, one of the remaining Vimy Ridge veterans could have said the quotes in the 1980s.
But a quote that is only plausible, that is neither dated nor personally attributed, at some point stops having any of the characteristics that make a quote a quote. Perhaps McKay was correct in calling it a "popular saying".