DEJA VU
[In this month's Déjà Vu column, we bring you Andrew Shaindlin's journal of his recent trip to Europe on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. More articles following the theme of "History" can be found in the January 1994 issue.- Ian]
Cornelius Ryan called June 6, 1944 "the longest day." In 1994 the same phrase is used by an overtired passenger on my transatlantic flight. Complaining of his fatigue after a sleepless six hours in economy class, he turns to his companion and says "I've had the longest day...." Upon arrival, we shuffle through the cattle pens toward immigration. Ryan used the phrase in literal and in figurative ways. British glider pilots approached the Orne River and its strategically important bridges just after midnight on the 6th of June. 24 hours later the flow of Allied men and materiel into Normandy was just gearing up, and for everyone involved it had been a long day indeed.
Fifty years later some of us seem to be prolonging that day, not wanting it to end. How else to explain my arrival from the States to accompany one of the many "D-Day Remembered" tours with about 20 of my alma mater's alumni? Many, especially those who were there, will say that the 50th anniversary celebrations are a solemn occasion, more properly considered a commemoration. Maybe our trip should be called "D-Day Remembered." But what are we remembering? Not only the sacrifice of young Allied lives, striking "the ultimate blow for freedom," but also the hopeless self-sacrifice, in the worst sense of those words, of young German lives, for no reason at all. Which is more stirring? Which more tragic?
London's air in April has that same grimy, coarse, polluted quality that I remember from some time I once spent here during November. The best way to summarize it is to say that should one stop to blow his nose, the handkerchief comes up black. It's the accumulated airborne soot of a thousand diesel lorries careening in endless circles around a thousand cobbled sidestreet roundabouts. The green spaces in this city provide a kind of respite from the urban oxygen of Westminster.
Sitting in Regent's Park, watching the inhabitants of the city, I'm suddenly aware of a subrace of British men, a race of mutant giants striding on their way to meetings at the Home Office, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, the Old Admiralty, the Reform Club. They are a type of extreme vertical ectomorph best characterized in popular culture by the comedian John Cleese. You know them. They're too damn big. Their feet are huge, awkward barges, impelled by the conserved momentum of legs five feet long. Pell mell down Pall Mall, they wear striped bespoke Bond Street suits and their heads, invariably topped with uncombed thinning hair, bob and teeter chaotically above crane-like necks. And no matter what amount they seem to have spent on the tailoring of their suits, their shirt collars are always uneven and their ties knotted too loosely. Their average height is six-foot six. They're harmless, yet vaguely unnerving. They're English, they're too big, and they're coming from all directions.
Then there are the French women. If you look carefully you can spot them. They aren't obvious in their appearance the way we Americans are. Americans look...well, they look American. The French women have what the French call un look . Their three primary characteristics are the mystery of their age (is she 25, or 40?), the shortness of their skirts, and the fact that they wear hats and manage not to look silly. Rather, they look...well, they look French.
The tour group is three hours late arriving from the US. I've come over independently a couple of days in advance. Good god! What if our troops had been delayed three hours back in '44? We'd all be wearing lederhosen and swilling Bavarian lager. . . .
The group in question consists of alumni from two Ivy League schools, accompanied by a professor from each school. Each faculty member will lecture to the entire group four times. The itinerary calls for a couple of days in London, then by motorcoach to Bath, Devon, Dorset, and then a Channel-crossing by ferry. Finally, in a kind of Overlord for weaklings, we'll re-enact the breakout for ourselves on into Paris, fifty-overladen American tourists, trying to get a feeling for that longest day. I'm not one of 'them.' I'm a staff member at one of the two schools, along for the ride to act as "host" for my school's alumni. In the end, the group arrives, listens (fighting back jet-lagged sleepiness) to an introductory lecture on the "Difficulties of the Second Front" then has a welcoming cocktail party before turning in for a 16-hour sleep.
It is seventy degrees, dry, and quintessentially English on the grounds of Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, a few miles from Oxford. Today's highlight is a kind of private "audience" with Charles George William Colin Spencer- Churchill, brother of the 11th Duke of Marlborough and cousin of Sir Winston Churchill. Lord Charles, as he is known, is personable enough. After we've seen both the public and private apartments, Lord Charles regales us with suitably witty and essentially sincere recollections of his cousin Winston.
We make our way to Bladon nearby, to look at Churchill's grave. I'm more interested in seeing the resting place of Consuelo Vanderbilt, first wife of the 9th Duke of Marlborough, and Lord Charles' grandmother. The private and public spaces of the Palace have on display at least four portraits of this striking beauty. Three of the four are likenesses by John Singer Sargent, each notable for a different reason and Sargent's authorship means that Consuelo's beauty may well have been idealized and exaggerated by the artist.
The first instance is a charcoal sketch about 9 x 14 inches. Dated 1907, the sketch plainly shows Sargent's excitement at the exploration and discovery of a new, beautiful subject. The second is a formal commission, an enormous stereotypical Sargent family portrait in oil. Clearly, again the painter has lovingly rendered what was for him the true subject of the work. The background is all but non-existent, a murky slathering of brownish black, seemingly applied with a six-inch house-painting brush. And in an attempt to cover up for the obvious lack of attention to detail in the subject of the Duke, Sargent has compensated by casting the Duke's head in a luminist glow as if his head had been targeted by a single shaft of sunlight. The ruse very nearly works. But not quite.
The final and most evocative treatment of the transplanted American socialite is dated 1914, and is another simple 9 x 14 inch sketch. Done in soft charcoal, there is no intermediate shading. The only smudging is to grind the powder into the blackest black, for Consuelo's penetrating eyes, latin brow, and stylish hairdo. The portrait is casual, consistent with the others, but above all it is intimate. Whether Sargent really connected so strongly with his female subjects, I do not know. He was in such control of the medium that I wonder whether he just made the connection seem that real and that strong.
As we cluster about Churchill's simple tomb, Lord Charles appears again, in the corner of the churchyard. It's as if he had wheeled about upon leaving us at Blenheim, taken a single giant step, and reappeared in front of us here in Bladon, two towns away. He reads affectionately a poem written about Churchill after his death, and we're quiet for a short spell. Then he thanks us and disappears again.
Lord Charles Spencer-Churchill gives the impression of a straight-arrow English aristocrat--not quite an upper-class twit who potentially harbors some harmless eccentricity, like believing that any illness can be cured, if only the sufferer would drink enough water.
Churchill, of course, is genuinely upper-crusty. On the other hand, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein is not, despite his title, which sounds impossibly lofty to the American ear. Montgomery is the only child of that larger-than-life British military hero, General Bernard Montgomery, known universally as Monty. Monty gained well-deserved fame for outfoxing the desert fox himself, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel in the North African campaign. Monty's son, who inherited the honorary title which commemorates the destruction of Rommel's Afrika Korps at El Alamein, readily admits to his very middle class background. But what Lord Charles lacks in the way of stereotypical twittish mannerisms, the current Viscount Montgomery actually affects and compensates for.
Over an elegant private luncheon at the vaunted Cafe Royal in London, Montgomery addresses our group. He's actually pushing for us to buy "his" upcoming biography of his father. It is not really his book, any more than it is a biography. The cover announces that it was written by Alistair So-and-So "with" Viscount Montgomery, and it covers just the years 1944-1945.
Montgomery is, in any case, a definite Type A personality, and as he relates anecdotes about his father his lower jaw recedes, and his upper lip recoils to reveal a large front teeth. And instead of laughing, he snorts and hiccoughs his way through his talk. Nonetheless he is mostly genuine, quite entertaining, and not overly-long with his remarks. Maybe I'll buy the book...no, probably not.
A word on quipping and punditry. Shaw and Wilde are well-known as having set the standard against which all witty ripostes must be judged. But let me put in a good word for Sir Winston Churchill. It seems everyone in London has a "favourite" Churchillism. Some representative samples:
or...
or...
Not deep; but one can't help feeling that Sir Winston's sense of timing, delivery, and facial expression were finely honed.
6:30 pm
We enter the Houses of Parliament. We are the guests of Sir Fergus Montgomery, Member of of Parliament from the Labour Party. Sir Fergus regales us with bawdy puns, fond recollections of his first visit to the states in 1959, and his general unhappiness with the personal and ad hominem nature of the bitter exchanges so common in the modern Parliament. Of course, he may just be bitter from 15 years in the Opposition.....
Stonehenge looms over a gentle rise by the side of a highway, like a Stone Age rest stop. Much to my dismay I have the same feeling here today that I had during my first visit, six years ago. I can't clear from my mind the ending from Hollywood's version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. But I resolve to put Hardy and Nastassia Kinski from my mind, at least until Dorchester when I can contemplate the Mayor of Casterbridge. I do take solace in the complete lack of development in this area. If Stonehenge was in the US, I'm quite sure that visitors would be able to take advantage of a meal at the nearby BurgerHenge.
Bath in the Valley provides an opportunity for lunch with our local guide, Esther. She and I sit in Demuth's, an excellent vegetarian restaurant behind Bath Abbey. For two hours we exchange personal theories, covering everything from the neolithic roots of anti-feminism to the merits of graduate level education in various countries. I thoroughly enjoy our conversation, but it leaves me with only an hour or so to poke around the side streets of old Bath.
Napoleon is reputed to have said: "A reasoning army would run away." The same could be said of tour groups. The sunny weather and irrepressibly optimistic atmosphere of Bath on a weekend make one think about not climbing back aboard the motor coach. I proposed to my wife here in Bath six years ago, so my reminiscences of that first visit here are even more pleasant (and distorted, probably) than they might be otherwise. But like obedient soldiers, we do climb back on board the bus, an air-conditioned behemoth rumbling impatiently in front of the Abbey. And continuing on, we arrive at length in the coastal resort town of Torquay.
Life at the Imperial Hotel in Torquay is eminently bearable. The clannish omnipresence of rich people lends the necessary blasé-ness, while the Edwardian decoration and gilded resort surroundings give one something tangible to enjoy.
For reasons that are to remain unclear, we drive today to the village of Dartmouth and then to Slapton Beach. Besides the remnants of Operation Tiger, an ill-fated Allied training operation of early 1944, there is not much here of special interest. In Dartmouth, home of the Royal Naval Academy, I discover a wooded footpath which leads, after a precipitous, switching-back climb, to some farmer's hilltop pasture. Half a dozen cows eye me warily then return to their stoic munching.
As I survey the little village, nestled in a crook of the river Dart below me, I imagine that it looks today much as it did fifty years ago when over a hundred thousand American servicemen invaded Dorset and Devon, in preface to their subsequent invasion of Normandy. The entire region was evacuated of its residents and made into a military staging ground. The means by which the Allies confused and misled the Germans about the time and place of the D-Day landings are well-documented. But even taking into consideration the elaborate precautions the Allies took to that end, it seems absurd that the build-up to the Channel crossing went essentially without response from the Germans, billeted comfortably about fifty miles away.
As I stand on the hilltop watching the Dartmouth ferry trolling patiently across the river, I realize that Operation Overlord was not only historically unprecedented, it can never be repeated. Marvin Minsky said that we are in "the thousand years between no technology and all technology." As we approach the age of almost total information (albeit only partial knowledge) technology provides even the most ignorant commander with clear physical evidence of his enemy's presence and inclination. No future Hitler (or Eisenhower) will rely successfully on the fog of war to cloak his intentions.
I'm a week into my European trip. The top headlines of the week roll across my hotel television screen. Some are memorable, some not. Decide for yourself: Mandela is President elect of South Africa; Brazil plans a State funeral and declares three days of national mourning for race car driver Ayrton Senna; President Clinton is sued for sexual harrassment; Prince Charles' Jack Russell terrier, Pooh, has gone missing; and His ex, the Princess of Wales, has been photographed topless and the pictures can be yours for a half-million dollars.
A day's drive includes a brief stop in Dorchester--I do indeed find the house of Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge--and culminates in Portsmouth. This is the embarkation point for our re-enactment of the famous event, which one of our professors reminds us is "1066 in reverse."
We take in Southwick House, with its map room. It was here that fetching WRENs (Women's Royal Naval Reservists) stood confidently on step ladders, posting the various military units' positions on the map as the invasion and breakout progressed. A suitably British anecdote relates that a female Member of Parliament, stereotypically naive or innocent, was alarmed by the shortness of the WRENs' skirts. The Minister for Defence explained how the serge material was in minimum supply and that large quantities were needed for the Royal Navy's uniforms.
"Am I to understand," she is reputed to have replied, "that the WRENs' skirts are to be held up until the entire Royal Navy has been serviced?" It makes for a good English chortle and a wink over a pint of bitter....
After a visit to the unremarkable D-Day museum we hear another lecture, this one on William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings, in anticipation of our visit to the Bayeux tapestry in two days. I can't help thinking of the humorous book 1066, And All That . The summation of the book is the ultimate spoof of the Anglo-Saxon version of history, along the lines of "So William won the battle and history came to an end."
5:15 am
Wake-up call. The hotel operator is smug. "Your early morning wake-up call..." Our crossing to Cherbourg is bearable. Club class seating resembles business class airline service, but with three times the leg room. Some fresh air and a pair of "sea bands" preserve my breakfast in its rightful resting place. The crossing takes five-and-a-half hours and is not uncomfortable, despite a minor run-in with a French TV crew who are lighting up their Gitanes in the "No Smoking" section.
The English learn how to smoke discreetly. Holding the cigarette down as if trying to deny the fact that they are, indeed, puffing away, they avoid looking at the cigarette and affect an air of denial about the whole dirty business. The French, on the other hand, smoke at you. They brandish the cigarette in a defiant challenge and occasionally watch the cigarette while it smolders. They have the look of a soldier who examines his rifle after cleaning it, convinced of (and satisfied by) its potential to harm someone someone else.
Hobbes might have been describing the prospects for a soldier in the D-Day invasion force when he wrote that life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Well, maybe not solitary, but for a G.I. born in, say, 1922, the war followed all too quickly on the heels of a decade of false hopes (the '20s) and a decade of extreme economic hardship (the '30s). And to be in the first wave at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 was to learn a first-person lesson in nastiness and brutishness.
Carrying fully-loaded packs which often weighed more than 70 pounds, these soldiers were shooed from the landing craft too far from shore--the crews of the craft feared getting any closer to the German gunfire. Most of them sank to the bottom and drowned; the ones who didn't were either run over by the craft or were sitting ducks for the Nazi gunners on shore.
As we disembark in Cherbourg we anticipate seeing the site of this carnage, but first we visit St. Mère Eglise where John Steele of the 101st Airborne spent four hours dangling by his parachute above the town square (which is now a parking lot). With no sense of the obvious, from April to November every year, the town puts a parachute on a cruddy mannequin which hangs, cartoon-like and unconvincing, from the church spire.
The fiftieth anniversary is now four weeks away. All over Normandy workmen are preparing. There is a feeling of resigned yet intensive desperation about their work. At first we see them polishing plaques and markers. In St. Mère Eglise some masons are replacing the cement and brick pavement at the entrance to John Steele's church. Later we see a memorial which is to be dedicated to General Eisenhower; it looks like the work is less than half-finished.
We finally realize how hopelessly the French are working to complete their monuments and preparations when we see the central island of an enormous traffic circle at the juncture of two highways, where there will be yet another elaborate memorial. Just thirty days before the arrival of the Prime Ministers, the Presidents, the Kings and Queens, this particular site is nothing but an enormous mudheap. It looks as if it were dug up and turned over for the first time yesterday. Normandy will once again be unprepared for the coming invasion.
Our French guide, Liliane, speaks English fairly well. However, there occur small crises in her conjugation which cause her to utter vaguely alarming phrases, like "So, after the Germans arrive, there will be an invasion of France. Many thousands will die." She sounds like a less-cryptic Nostradamus.
The Château d'Audrieu is a very expensive, impossibly luxurious hotel located in an impressively authentic 18th century chateau. Part of the association of fancy inns and restaurants known as Relais & Châteaux, Audrieu has been in the same family since the 11th century. It's the kind of accomodation which makes one comfortable, relaxed, and pleased with oneself for being there. My room has two sets of french doors (literally, I realize) which open onto views over the 50-plus acres of private land on the estate. Gardens, wooded trails, contented cows grazing, the village steeple which chimes every fifteen minutes....This is the world right outside. It's a pleasantly bygone world for me, and as I look around the room at the lovely antique furniture and sheer gauze curtains rippling from the Norman spring breeze, I lie down, thinking about the taste of calvados and realizing that here, at last, is a hotel where a person traveling alone can sleep in the middle of a king-size bed.
- Andrew B. Shaindlin,
Providence, Rhode Island , USA
abs@brown.edu
[Next month, the second half of the D-Day Journal - Ian]
