My father's diary entry was written in Normandy towards the end of June 1944. He'd landed six days after D-day. "In the first days, the French were cheerfully optimistic. Refreshing, wholly delightful, it cheered us through the dust and the mud... But chatting with the inhabitants we're becoming aware of their split feelings. They profess hatred of the Boche, yet we're coming to realise he has not been such a terribly hard taskmaster as we had all believed, for the French are really not living so badly. This new war, on the other hand, is a disaster for them. It kills and wounds so many of them. It knocks down their houses, smashes streets and indeed sometimes (as in Caen) a whole town."
War experienced and remembered differently by different people: when five of the world's leaders, who themselves don't see eye to eye on many of today's issues, particularly war, stand shoulder to shoulder to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings, each will be honouring a different thing.
I grew up in the aftermath of the war, partly in France, mainly in England, where a diet of comic books, novels and films all celebrated not only British pluck, but also the conviction that by first resisting Germany and then liberating France we had done something honourable, even great. So I was surprised a few years ago when a close French friend, in his sixties and a lifelong anglophile, became very angry at what he considers the unforgivable and wholly unnecessary "English" bombing of French towns. It echoes what my father heard at the time and is a criticism voiced increasingly frequently, with its implied comparison to the German invasion of 1940, which spared France's beautiful towns.
When I asked the children in my son's school, deep in rural southern France, what they knew about the Normandy landings, the answer was nothing. The best guess was, "when the English invaded and we had to fight them." What Florent actually meant was the Black Prince's rule here between 1360 and 1369. That occupation is evoked more readily by my neighbours than the more recent German one. Indeed, the war down here bore little relation to the one I'd read about as a boy. Certainly, my neighbours who remember those years tell me they lived in fear. But not of the Germans. They never saw any: 30 miles of twisting lanes separated them from the small town where a dozen young men in green uniforms were billeted. No, my neighbours lived in fear of their neighbours, of the anonymous letter. "I had been ordered to go to Germany," Louis, 20 in 1940, told me, "to work in their factories. I didn't go. I didn't dare show my face, even in the village. You never knew who bore a grudge or needed to curry favour with the militia. I grew a thick black moustache and for two years didn't leave the farm." Louis's younger brother, Jean, was spared until 1943, when the gendarmes sent a warning that they had orders to come and get him. He took off into the woods, living camoufl?ith a few friends, creeping back to his family on Sunday evenings. On 6th June 1944 a neighbour trudged up to their lonely farm: "He told my mother the Americans had landed that morning. That's all he knew."
"They did it to thank us," Jean went on. "We'd given them the Statue of Liberty, you see. Our way of life, our civil code, all these things are copied throughout the world." The brothers' faith in the Americans was absolute.
"No one over 60 is anti-American," a different group assured me. A little younger than Louis and Jean, these retired professionals live in Montpellier. "Where I grew up," said our hostess, "Memorial day was a major event. The enormous American cemetery was covered in flowers, you couldn't help but be moved, grateful. I don't know when all that changed." Not anti-American, then, but what about anglophobe? Now there was a polite silence. There is a crucial semantic difference: "anti-" means merely against, whereas "phobie" is true aversion. They are not interchangeable. Nobody present disagreed. Fran?s, a retired teacher, began insistently jabbing at his Adam's apple with his right hand: "What sticks in our throat with the English is Dunkirk. We've never got over the way you abandoned us there. That's probably what people meant when they spoke to your father."
I was too surprised to point out that nearly a third of the soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk were French. I was fascinated that the name which has become synonymous in English minds with back-to-the-wall solidarity epitomises English treachery in the French mind. I knew Fran?s's generation were still bitter that we destroyed their fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, killing over 1,000 French allies, but Dunkirk was new. Abandonment and treachery is what they remember, not our return at the Gold and Sword beaches and Pegasus bridge. I suspect that the entente cordiale, artificially resuscitated for another series of celebrations this year, in reality perished with all those French hopes in 1940, ground into the sand at Dunkirk. Maybe it's better that none of it, good or bad, is remembered in my son's school.
