DEJA VU

The Longest Day - Part 2

[In this month's Déjà Vu column, we bring you the second part of Andrew Shaindlin's journal of his recent trip to Europe on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. The first part appeared in the September 1994 issue. More articles following the theme of "History" can be found in the January 1994 issue.- Ian]

May 5, Thursday

A rainy day our first in more than a week. Normandy is no less beautiful in the spring fog and drizzle. The cows stand in pastures, indifferent (ca leur est égal). The apple trees have blossomed, promising cider to come, and the grounds of the chateau are lush with flowers and trees, some of whose trunks are still scarred from shrapnel which penetrated their bark in the summer of 1944.

Villages like Arromanches, hard up against the beach which the Allies code named Gold, evoke the sincere gratitude of their citizens toward the Americans, Brits, and Canadians who liberated them from Nazi occupation. The street signs here have little American flags permanently painted on them and every other street and square seems to be named for Montgomery or Eisenhower or some other icon of the D-Day landings.

The most American place in Normandy, however, is the American cemetery in the hamlet of St. Laurent. The entrance is guarded by an enormous sculpture entitled "The Spirit of Youth" which depicts a physically exemplary male in the classical style, rising from the sea. Presumably he is climbing from the waters of the English Channel and will soon startle and frighten the Occupiers into flight, followed by submission. He is naked and fifty feet tall enough to conquer even the most disciplined Nazi.

I think that this cemetery, overlooking Omaha beach, tells a story which reveals the hyperbolic lie represented by the statue. Looking over the now calm and empty beach, one remembers that there are almost 10,000 Americans (mostly young boys) who despite their "spirit" were blown to smithereens, drowned, or even bayonetted in the effort to control this stretch of shoreline and the surrounding farmland. Another 14,000 bodies have been brought home by their families to be buried in the United States. The ones who did survive didn't do so because of any spirit which animates American youth. They survived thanks to dumb luck mixed with determined aggression. It's easy to glorify the victory of "light over darkness, good over evil", but this was a success at an incomprehensible if somehow necessary cost in pain, suffering, and death on both sides.

The cemetery also reminds me of our lecture the other day about the military mind. In the discussion on that subject, I mocked the rigid protocol which engendered a thousand pages of contingency plans for the funeral of Harry Truman. That kind of thinking, of planning, surfaces again here at St. Laurent. No line, it seems, is straighter than the line described by a row of white marble crosses at St. Laurent. Punctuated only by an occasional Star of David, the lines are impossibly perfect, the markers impossibly vertical, uniformly white.

As frightening as this proposition might be, I think it is safe to posit that Canadians need not fear American anschluss, or the kind of lebensraum gathering exercise that Hitler practiced in the Sudetenland. We, unlike post WW I Germany, have enough space available to satisfy the needs of our own "infinite breeding" program for at least the next several generations.

May 6, Friday

Claude Monet was a Hemingwayesque character with nothing but free time on his hands, and (ultimately) too much money for his own good. But his personal excesses turned out to be mostly harmless, and indeed have delighted those of us lucky enough to visit his Giverny home on a lovely spring day in early May.

I'm not talking here about his mottled, hazy paintings of monstrous green murk (Les Nymphees, or waterlilies). His original work is conspicuously absent from this lovely and simple 19th century country house, about 50 miles northwest of Paris. Rather, his genius here comes in two more scrutable forms: his collection of hundreds of Japanese prints by the likes of Hiroshige and Hokusai; and his marvelous flower gardens and water garden. They call it his "Japanese" garden, but I could identify only three asiatic touches a stand of bamboo, a Japanese bridge of sorts, and a dwarf Japanese maple. But it doesn't matter at all what you call it. It's a beauty of a charming kind. When old Claude died he had nine gardeners doing the dirt-digging full-time. The color and the atmosphere delight the eyes and the mind, and I find it easy to forget his "impressions of sunrise" and concentrate here on my own impressions.

It's worth adding here a favorable mention of the newish (1992) American Museum, just a couple of hundred yards from Monet's back door. The museum impresses. Modern but eminently modest, the exhibition space is all about the artwork. Whistler, Robinson, Childe Hassam, Cassatt....All of Monet's American friends are here, wonderfully collected, arranged, displayed; and it whets my appetite for the museums in Paris, which we now approach.

I once read that at the worst of Germany's most depressed economy, the mark was literally not worth the paper on which it was printed. In the heart of Paris today, it's almost impossible to find something that's worth the amount you'll have to hand over to buy it. A taxi driver tells me it's the dollar's fault, for having such a lousy exchange rate.

May 7, Saturday

After a relatively straightforward morning tour of the city I feel reoriented. Incredibly, it's been nine years since I was last here. Since we hit Cherbourg I've been satisfied with my communication skills, and feel fairly comfortable (if not totally confident) approaching Parisians and chatting them up in French.

At 11:30 a.m. I abandon the tour and dismount the bus at the Quai d'Orsay. I'm curious to see how the French have succeeded in transforming a disused train station (Gare d'Orsay) into a first-class museum. Once inside, I realize that as incredible as the architectural conversion might be, it is nothing when compared to the museum's contents.

Four-and-a-half hours later I emerge, cross-eyed from staring too hard, giddy from emotional overload. I've forgotten completely about D-Day and the French resistance (though I'll come back to them later). I remember the phenomenon experienced by certain visitors to Florence mostly unmarried women between the ages of 18 and 25. In the presence of "too much art," they become light headed and sometimes swoon, often fainting away right in the Duomo, or at the foot of Michelangelo's David.

I'm not going to faint, however; in fact, I feel exhilarated, although my feet are tired. I grab a bite to eat at a cafe in Rue de Grenelle, and head off for the Palais Tokyo, Paris' miniature answer to New York's MOMA.

It's a hot, sunny day Saturday in Paris, and I arrive in a sweat. The courtyard of the building is of granite, with various levels facing in a few different directions. Under a prominent sign declaring "No Skateboarding Allowed" about 80 teenage boys carom chaotically around on skateboards. The little piazza stinks of urine and with all the bodies flying about on the pavement, I marvel that the city hasn't dedicated an ambulance to this site. But, at least while I'm there, nobody gets hurt, though everyone seems to be falling down.

As if to verify my admiration for the collection at the d'Orsay, I pay a ridiculous amount (about $8) for admission to an exhibition on the development of a handful of Dutch painters at the beginning of this century. The admission fee doesn't even entitle me to see the permanent collection. That's another $5. Half-way through the installment, I'm already fed up with Mondrian and de Stijl.

But I feel as though I have indeed verified what I suspected namely, that for me the humanistic landscape and especially the figurative art of the mid-19th to early-20th century strikes a chord that isn't reached by these northern European painters' and planners' attempts to reduce their surroundings to overly simplistic, stylized vertical and horizontal elements. All painting must be artificially constrained but these gentlemen constrained their constraints, arbitrarily limiting their media and it's potential for truly free expression, and by the time I leave I'm yearning for Seurat to appear and to speckle pastel points in the white space of one of Mondrian's compositions "in black and white with red."

May 8, Sunday

49 years ago today Admiral Doenitz, the Nazis' leader of the day, saw the light and surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, ending the war in Europe. Today I wander up the Champs Elysees, in anticipation of a parade or something suitable to mark the occasion.

A polite gendarme tells me there is to be no parade, just the ceremony underneath the Arc de Triomphe. "Parade!" he says. "Wait until July 14th for your parade!" The ceremony today includes M. le President de la Republique, Francois Mitterand, who ambles back and forth under the Arch, now speaking gravely, now pinning medals onto ancient heroes of the Resistance. I can see him from a distance, looking very small indeed. I wonder if he finds it ironic (as I do) that many of the old soldiers being honored are dropped off at his reviewing from chauffeured Mercedes Benz sedans?

The horse guard is impressive, moreso in fact than what I've seen in London. The Parisian "chevaliers" have a bit more, um, esprit de corps and elan than their British counterparts. Whereas the Brits seem to succeed in a striking military display of equine precision because the horses are absolutely obedient, the French seem to succeed in spite of each mount's efforts to break the symmetry. Sashaying out to one side, then the other, high-stepping and dipping their manes, these golden ponies are sassy little showoffs whose spirit lends flavor to an otherwise ordinary display.

The scene on the Place de L'Etoile reminds me of something, but I'm not sure what. Later, seated in a cafe just down the avenue, I remember: for all the world it was a scene straight from Frederick Forsythe's Day of the Jackal. I'm convinced that when I develop my photos of the celebration, I'll be able to see the assassin himself on a balcony overlooking the scene, rifle pointed squarely at the President.

Granted, there were no Napoleonic Dachaus, no 18th or 19th century version of Mein Kampf. But the blind, aggressive nationalism of Bonaparte, his single-minded struggle for total, glorious imperial autocracy which led to the deaths by freezing, starvation, or battlefield murder of tens of thousands this makes one wonder what it was that compelled the French to continue their adulation to the degree manifested in his magnificent tomb at Les Invalides.

Another strand in the web connects Mitterand and Napoleon. Each was short, each wore his hair in a mediocre comb-over, and neither really had lips. But both wanted to invade English soil (so did Hitler, by the way). And where the little French emperor and the sociopathic Austrian failed, Francois Mitterand has succeeded, if only in a pyrrhic way. Two days ago I sat in my hotel room and watched as French and British television broadcast live coverage of the Channel Tunnel's official opening. It will be months yet before passengers can line up in Calais, drive onto the train and drive off in Folkestone 35 minutes later, wreaking havoc by forgetting to drive on the left. But for now, the Queen of England and the President of France have made the first crossing. It's only a matter of time, say the head-shaking Britons, before an army of diseased, yapping papillons and poodles makes its way through the "Chunnel" and starts spreading rabies in Britain bringing the island nation to its European knees once and for all. Once can almost hear John Major: "We will fight them in the parks and on the sidewalks, we will fight them in the kennels and the Chunnel...."

The real question is whether it's the British who have more to fear (from a rabid modern version of 1066), or the French (from a civilian version of 1944)?

I leave the museum and continue east and arrive, on purpose, at the Pompidou Center. You've seen it it's the building with its entrails on the outside. Inside is a dreary main level with no direct natural light and not enough artificial light, a variety of related but confusingly distinct exhibitions, to which admission is available in bewildering combinations, at unacceptably high Parisian prices (L'orangerie had the decency to charge a Sunday admission of only $5, instead of the usual $8).

I visit the free parts of the museum and then escape into the daytime. Along the Seine I enjoy scanning the bouqinettes, those little green kiosks which spring up in different parts of the city on different days, selling different types of things. Today's weekend Rive Droite version seems focused on books, though I notice several extensive collections of late 1940s girlie magazines.

I know that the tour group, having had the last of its faculty lectures, will have tonight a farewell cocktail party, as previously planned and noted in the itinerary. But I'm in no hurry to get back, as I find myself enjoying my walk, which has become longer than I had expected it to when I left the hotel this morning for the parade that wasn't a parade. I'm tempted to stop in a cafe one last time, but I don't, for now it's getting late.

Another question that has nagged me until now is why Americans insist on reading the menus outside of cafes. After looking at only three or four, they would realize that all Parisian cafes have the same menu. Well, the menu is there for one reason and one reason only: to give Americans (who can't speak French) the opportunity to screw up enough courage (while pretending to read the menu) to go in and sit down in a cafe where the French (who won't speak English) will serve them.

Thus reassured, I go out and spend about $45 on an average dinner, a $25 meal in my home city in the northeastern US. But the conversation is good and it gives the two weeks a sense of denouement, of "wrapping up." I like that kind of closure because it provides a reference point at which you can stop merely travelling around and start thinking about where you are actually headed, in the literal sense.

In this case, I'm headed home.

Closure?

So what about D-Day? Is there a correct way to remember it? Will there be a time to let it fade into the realm of the purely historical? The Germans no longer celebrate their victory in the Franco-Prussian War (as far as I know); other specific military victories become generic, an excuse for a day off from work Veterans' Day, Memorial Day, and in Rhode Island, Victory Day (celebrating the Japanese surrender in August, 1945).

There may not be a correct way to commemorate the operations in Normandy, other than what each individual sees fit to do. But there may be correct reasons, personalized markers for specific needs the memory of a family member; the generalized, reproachful remembrance of Hitler's near-psychotic conduct; the invocation of the inane, destructive and regressive habit of warfare.

There may also be reasons to not remember this particular event, reasons to avoid the television specials, the phony scripted sentiment of Dan Rather and Peter Jennings, the sale of souvenir Overlord soap collections, the endless churning of French soil to erect another traffic circle named after General Eisenhower. The most compelling reason to leave D-Day in its global context is the fact that focusing on a single campaign, a single battle, really (in this case) a single day, all detracts from the fundamental reasons why there was an invasion in the first place. In their undoubtedly well-intentioned efforts to honor those who served and somehow to re-illuminate the basic nature of this kind of armed struggle, the mass media and the "experts" (and therefore the public) may have focused the spotlight too narrowly.

World War II, as a piece of military history and as a mediocre standard for professional diplomacy, cries out to be ingested in its entirety by those who would understand it or try to learn from it. Can one explain Overlord without discussing the question of the second front? Comprehend Churchill without reexamining the question of Europe's "soft underbelly"? Is there a meaning to the occupation of France which sets it apart from that of Belgium, of Norway, of the Channel Islands? And so on.

My point here is not to belittle the significance of what occurred or to urge people to forget about Normandy. But the excesses of Josef Stalin against civilians on his home front, the details surrounding the fervent nationalism of those supposedly united under Soviet leadership, the inclination of the Italians to bend like reeds in the wind (depending on whom they perceived to be winning the war), the upshot of the Washington naval conference of 1922, the belligerence of the Japanese in the Pacific, Hitler's outrageous mass exterminations all these are questions which need understanding, but which can't be neatly summed up in a single day's fighting, in a single book by a Stephen Ambrose or a Cornelius Ryan.

Like it or not, two weeks spent poring over the people and places and things of D-Day leaves one asking "what else happened?" and craving a giant context for the cleanly summarized, microcosmic holism of "the 6th of June." It may be my generation's curse that our attention span be too brief to encompass the rest, that the roles of the "great" leaders are relinquished to discrete biographical volumes; but, I suppose, even in light of the search for context, we might as well examine the D-Day phenomenon while it's here.

The succeeding years will drive the D-Day extravaganza back out on its chronological journey away from us, until the gravity of a centennial celebration draws it in again, like a military comet in a periodic orbit. And maybe, by then, the complex web of interconnected people and events and actions which we understand simply as "World War II" will be canny and comprehensible enough to be as neatly encapsulated, packaged, and "remembered" as D-Day is today.

Andrew B. Shaindlin, Providence, Rhode Island , USA
abs@brown.edu