In France they call it 'Jour de Victoire 1945', for
VE Day, when anyone in Britain remembers that is. Along with Armistice
Day on November 11th, the French celebrate May 8th as a public holiday.
Indeed the day is considered so important in history you'll find the
streets called 'Rue Mai 8' all over France.
Here in the Orgnac the day begins with a Mass at eleven for the dead
of all the wars of the last century. The service is short, allowing
worshippers plenty of time to stroll to the War Memorial in the centre
of the village and pay their solemn respects. The memorial is pristine,
the limestone scrubbed white, the handful of names clearly etched,
the gilt letters sparkling as if new. The church clock begins to strike
midday and two veterans lower their standards while someone switches
on a wobbly tape of the Last Post. We observe a minutes silence. The
Chef du Pompiers - our Chief Fireman - reads out each name of the
fallen - Aluzen, Coste, Rieu men whose families, without exception,
still live in the village. After every name, the Chief's deputy intones,
'Mort pour la France', died for France, and, as the brief litany ends,
the tape machine plays 'La Marseillaise', that most stirring of national
anthems.
The Mayor fumbles in the pockets of his Sunday suit to find the little
speech he has prepared and all at once the familiar ceremony is done.
We are heading for the vin d'honeur in the village hall - plastic
cups of wine, pasties, mineral water, coke. We stand nibbling bits
of pizza, talking about the weather and where we shall eat lunch.
The procedure is much the same on Armistice Day, November 11th. Usually
the sun shines, cool and brilliant, while the Mistral flutters the
tricolours and chases the bronze vine leaves around the square. Of
course, we Brits observe Armistice Day, though on the nearest Sunday,
when some of us still stand in the rain or fog, wearing our poppies
and singing 'Abide with me'. But the eleventh is not a holiday. At
least we have in recent years tried to revive the custom of the two
minutes silence. I doubt it will last, anymore than the practice of
men raising their hats when they passed the Lutyens cenotaph in Whitehall.
Who remembers that? No hats today, no remembrance.
So! Do the French have the right of it? Should we take a leaf out
of their book and turn the 8th May and 11th November into public holidays?
I really don't know but suffice to say, as I sipped my pastis and
discussed the prospects for the grape harvest, I did begin to wonder
what if?
What if we English watched the triumphant foreign armies marching
down the Mall three times in the last 150 years? What if we had seen
Kent and Sussex change hands three or four times in the same period?
what if much of the South of England had been overrun by an enemy
and turned into a killing ground where a million of our young men
had died? And what if, within, living memory, the whole of mainland
Britain had been occupied by hostile forces for four years, during
which time we had experienced the dangers of resistance and the shameful
compromise of collaboration? What if a group of Wickhambrook men had
taken to the woods and fields the to fight the enemy? What if some
of them had been summarily executed by the side of the road at Thorns
or Genesis Green? What if the whole population of Denston had been
taken one day into the church yard and shot?
There are still old men in Orgnac who were members of the Resistance,
who had comrades tortured and executed, and a few miles down the road,
in the now deserted hamlet of Le Crottes, in March 1944, all the inhabitants,
old men, women and children, were assassinated by the Nazis (as we
no diplomatically call the war-time Germans) because no one would
reveal, perhaps no one knew, the whereabouts of the local Maquis headquarters.
Whether you believe we were more valiant, more fortunate or simply
protected by the English Channel is really here nor there. The fact
is we have been spared such dreadful experiences.
Next time you visit France by car and enter via Calais, leave the
A 26 for an hour or so and drive south towards Somme into the countryside
which was a British battlefield in the First World War. Count the
war cemeteries. Observe the meticulous rows of headstones, or the
black crosses of the German dead. View them and reflect. The French
and Germans statesmen who conceived the idea of European Union (supported,
I may say, by our own Winston Churchill) were motivated by an overwhelming
desire to prevent a recurrence of the horrors of modern European war
which they had personally experienced.
When we (sometimes rightly) criticise the bureaucrats of Brussels
or smirk in our sterling complacence about the performance of the
Euro, perhaps we should go out into those trim cemeteries of the young
dead and ask for their opinion. Did they give their precious lives
for no reason? What is so important about the surrender of a little
sovereignty compared with their surrender? As the Mayor of Orgnac
said when he finally plucked his speech from his suit pocket, "We
are not on holiday to rejoice but to remember all those men, women
and children who died for a peaceful Europe, a better world."
We owe it to them, do we not, to achieve that reality? |
