Out of the already heavily linked French Week at Idle Words, the second day — restoring the truth about France’s attitude during the World Wars — seems crucial to me. Go read that.
World War I has almost comical connotations in our own popular culture. American doughboys, kaisers and marshals in funny hats, the Red Baron. But for France, the Great War was the most traumatic event of the twentieth century. No country lost as great a proportion of its population in that war: 1,400,000 men were killed outright, two million were wounded. A million of the wounded had debilitating injuries, and could never work again. They were a lost generation, and a living reminder to others of what war really meant.
(…)
However dour the strategy of containment and attrition, the French did not hesitate to mobilize in 1939, and they did not shrink from fighting even in the face of overwhelming odds in 1940. In the space of three weeks, some 100,000 men died defending their country from the German invaders. From four to eight million civilians fled their homes; an unknown number died in the exodus.
(…)
But to say that, when war did come, the French lacked courage, is to spit on the graves of noble people.
For shame!
I’d like to back up those words. As your typical Frenchman, I had my grand-parents (yes, the four of them), fleeing on the roads and having to live months and years in unfamiliar neighbourhoods (and even in prisoners’ camps), and suffering from hunger. In every village of France, you’ll find a Monument aux Morts paying tribute to dozens of young local folks dead on the battlefields. Said battlefieds are to be found everywhere in the northern half of the country, and as a kid (and I am just one in hundreds of thousands) I was brought to go and visit them every time my family spent his holydays in Normandy or Lorraine (what a teenager’s delight…).
In Eurasia, war is not the handsome Soldier Ryan shooting a German in the back because.. well, he’s the Bad Guy. It’s not Gone with the wind. It’s not some vague monument about a flag in the Capital.
It’s a very lasting knowledge, written on our walls, on our blood and on our soil, of the inefficiency of violence.
I hope the literate half of the United States’ people won’t have to learn that the hard way because of the other stetson-wearing half.