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A great war museum must hit in the heart, the mind and the gut.

Relics, artifacts, equipment, art, photos, text, exhibits and the space itself must come together to widen the eyes of an eight-year-old who knows almost nothing of what has come before, to slacken the jaw of all of us and cause the heart to pause with the enormity of our past and of conflict itself, and perhaps in a humbler or more visceral way, get at some essential, shattering truths that must be laid bare to do justice to the topic.

It must have the power of the Vimy Memorial in France, where, among the grassy, still-pocked fields, my great-uncle Claude, like so many others, was mortally wounded that tumultuous April day in 1917. One stands before the massive white monument with the striking crevice in the middle, like a crack in the earth, the names of the missing etched in endless white marble, almost thankful for the cold wind.

And it must expose the horrors of war, as in the almost-unknown Hill 62 Sanctuary Wood museum in the once-shattered Belgian town of Ypres. Among walls, shelves and floor space packed with rusting, dusty artifacts dug out of the surrounding woods, is the gripping stereoscopic photo collection of the Anthony brothers: portraits of dead soldiers and animals relentlessly photographed in the mud. Even by today's standards, they seem too graphic.Ottawa's new Canadian War Museum, on LeBreton Flats just a cannon shot west of Parliament Hill, officially opens Sunday in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of V-E Day. With the country's deep military past, its present full of failing equipment and a growing self-image as an international peacekeeper rather than warrior, visitors may wonder: How should Canadians portray war in a museum?

Set scenically by the Ottawa River and shaped in part like a crustaceous underground bunker, the Canadian War Museum meets the criteria of a great war museum admirably. It will be a place to visit time and again for those wanting to engage on many levels with the topic of war.

The arrival of the $136-million facility has been much anticipated. It replaces the antiquated Sussex Drive location, home of the War Museum since 1967, and where, growing up in Ottawa, I spent many great field trips climbing on the ancient tanks out front and peering into the dark and scary First World War trench that resonated with the noise and flares of distant explosions and with the feel and smell of sandbags and the dust of a wooden plank floor. But the old building was fusty and crowded, with many of its treasures never on display. Work started on the new museum in November, 2002. Already, the new museum is making its presence felt on the Ottawa landscape. The striking design is by Raymond Moriyama, who was interned as a young Japanese Canadian during the Second World War and went on to design the Ontario Science Centre and the Bata Shoe Museum, and by Alex Rankin, who has lately helped to design Ottawa's new international airport. Architecturally it speaks of regeneration, most powerfully represented by the self-seeding grasses of the rooftop Memorial Garden, which gently slopes upward toward Parliament Hill. The building also has a copper-clad, dangerous-looking shark's fin -- Regeneration Hall -- and, on the eastern side, a glass wall exposed to the world like a cross-section cut-away.

Yet much of the building is grey, unadorned concrete angled back as if to deflect the shock of explosions, and cut only with narrow slit windows. Concrete reigns throughout to remind us constantly that in war, adornment, like truth, is one of the first casualties. Step inside and the ceiling slopes down tent-like, the walls and floors often slanting off in unusual angles. The space has been constructed to keep us slightly off-balance and uncomfortable, in keeping with the jarring and fractured nature of war.

Inside, the museum offers a multifaceted look at war from Canadian perspectives. Features include memorial areas built for reflection, a new art gallery offering special exhibits of Canada's long-unseen war art, chronologically divided exhibition spaces covering war from conflicts among the native peoples to contemporary peacekeeping, the huge LeBreton Gallery, which showcases military hardware, a publicly accessible archives and library, teaching spaces and an auditorium for films and presentations.

Although this is primarily a museum and not a memorial, it serves a memorial function as well through two thoughtfully unsettling spaces.

The Memorial Hall is a surprisingly spare, tightly angled, high-ceilinged, almost hidden room with a lone window strategically located to allow the 11 a.m. daylight on Nov. 11 to strike the fading, still muddy-white headstone of the Unknown Soldier repatriated from the area around Vimy Ridge five years ago. The path of that light is marked in the floor traversing the museum as a constant reminder.

If that doesn't clutch your heart, then wander into Regeneration Hall, a larger space with a similarly steep-angled ceiling, reminiscent of both a church in semi-ruins and Canada's Vimy Memorial in France, the most breathtaking monument of the First World War.

In Regeneration Hall, several large maquettes of that memorial's gigantic figures are arranged with wooden backings exposed to purposely reveal their precarious state after all these years. Hope stands at the eastern end, with the Peace Tower tightly framed in the window beyond. From Hope's vantage point, turn around and look upward at Charles Sims's enormous 1918 painting Sacrifice with Christ on the cross, his back to us, looking down on the devastation of Europe and the sorrow of those on the home front.

Once upon a time, Lord Beaverbrook, the man responsible for engaging Canadian war artists in the First World War, planned a memorial art gallery in Ottawa to display the resulting extraordinary collection. But the gallery was never built and most of Canada's war art has, until now, been sitting unseen in a converted bus depot in Ottawa gathering dust.

The new museum now provides a much healthier space for this collection, and the opening special exhibit brings together Second World War works from Canada, Australia and Britain, some of them never before publicly displayed. The museum also now has plenty of wall space for such huge paintings as Inglis Sheldon-Williams's Return to Mons (1920), and Richard Jack's The Taking of Vimy Ridge, Easter Monday 1917 (1919). The condition of some of them, after such long years in rough storage, is saddening: The Taking of Mons, for example, is dotted with tissue paper meant to keep the original paint from flaking.

It's typical of the approach of the museum to avoid prettying up the facts. The street-level LeBreton Gallery, packed with aging tanks, jeeps, artillery guns and the odd jet suspended from the ceiling, resembles a functioning equipment depot complete with grease and rust. The Portrait Gallery in the main lobby includes three strikingly unsettling paintings by Toronto artist Gertrude Kearns: a depiction of Roméo Dallaire nearly disappearing in camouflage, a post-traumatic stress disorder victim not meeting our eyes while scrunching his blue United Nations beret, and a portrait of Kyle Brown, the Canadian peacekeeper imprisoned after the 1993 fatal torturing of Somali Shidane Arone.

The main exhibition space whirls confusingly out from a central hub through four chronological galleries. Huge graphics predominate, and many artifacts remain in storage, although there is room for suspended helicopters, some massive tanks, Hitler's limousine and the like. Amid a barrage of background noises and changing video images, textual interpretation is surprisingly sparse, and I suspect museum-going veterans might be put off by the general lack of explanation for many displays.

So, one wanders between the periods, catching glimpses of Hitler addressing the masses, Canadian nurses relaxing on leave in Korea, and of two guys in hockey sweaters -- Maple Leafs and Canadiens -- arguing over Anglo-French relations. The approach seems to be scattershot, and while hoping for focus one stumbles upon a huge photo of tanks firing flame across a burning countryside and then a pair of disconcertingly precise diagrams showing the contrasting effects of a bullet and of shrapnel as they rip through a man's leg.

Off-balance and somewhat lost, I was reminded of a visit a few years ago to that grimy little private museum in Belgium -- it looked like someone's flea market -- where I had travelled to research a novel. For more than half an hour, as much as I could take, I sat transfixed, staring at the portraits taken by the Anthony brothers. Most of these photos could not be published in their day. But if you want to get a sense of the true horror of war, short of being in one yourself, then a half-hour in the Hill 62 Sanctuary Wood museum might do it.

At the new Canadian War Museum, that sort of gut-wrenching moment came for me in two instalments. First was the haunting 180-degree floor-to-ceiling photo exhibit of shattered, mud-locked Passchendaele with its oozing shell holes and ghostly tree stumps. And then the real heart-stopper: the 1943 German video footage of the Canadian soldiers at Dieppe -- their bodies on the beach, their helmets piled like so much refuse, and the dazed, defeated prisoners marching away from battle on the single most costly day in Canadian military history.

The heart, the head and the gut: The Canadian War Museum strikes them all in memorable, often unsettling but fitting ways, for a country blooded through battle but now prospering in peace.

Ottawa author Alan Cumyn's latest novel for adults is The Sojourn about the Great War

Pack your bags

GETTING THERE

The Canadian War Museum is situated on the banks of the Ottawa River just west of Parliament Hill, a short walk from the Bayview O-train stop, the Bayview and LeBreton bus stops and the NCC bike path. The site's underground parking will be closed on the opening weekend, but free parking and shuttle buses will be provided at Tunney's Pasture in Ottawa and the Robert Guertin Arena in Gatineau.

OPENING WEEKEND

On Saturday, the museum will be free to the public from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., with many family events, including concerts and a mock battle. At 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, veterans will parade from the National War Memorial to the Canadian War Museum. The afternoon will feature more live concerts, outdoor activities and an opening ceremony at 3 p.m. The museum will be free to the public from 5 to 9 p.m. on Sunday.

MORE INFORMATION

Canadian War Museum: 1 Vimy Place; 819-776-8600 or 1-800-555-5621; http://www.warmuseum.ca. Regular admission prices: Adults, $10; seniors, $7; students, $6; children aged 3 to 12, $4; children under 3, free; families, $22. Half price on Sundays, free on Thursdays from 4 to 9 p.m. Open every day from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on Thursdays until 9 p.m.