Ilkya chapter 1, NON STOP
June 6, 1994,Le Molay Littry at 7 :08 am
The landing would be peaceful. At least set and planned to be. Nothing compared with the one, a half century ago, which saw the springing of the US airborne troops out of thick fog and tumultuous waves, of which a great number of volunteers had been released from Texas jails, condemned for swindling, rape or murder, set free on the occasion to legally kill at war or die in action, sent to combat as a future rehabilitation in the society they had offended. Black trash from Chicago, Hispanic trash from Florida, white trash from the Appalachians, a third-class society thrown to the from lines, the same way as the Senegalese soldiers had been sent to the Ardennes in 1914 : by their frightening appearances, their faces more grimacing than the effigy of the abominable TU, the Maori divinity of war to whom the priests offered the roasted heart of their enemies, the paratroopers had spread terror among the German defenders and confusion in the French civilian population of the area. The German had warned the people that the invasion, if it ever were to happen, would be led by hideous hordes of crazed inmates. The men of the 115th regiment of US parachutists had shaved their heads and gave that way a convict-like mask to their faces. Colonel Robert Sink, commander of the 506th PIR exclaimed before his troops :” I forgot to tell you that the Fritzes warned the coastal civilians that the allied attack would be led by American paratroopers, all sentenced and psychopathic, very identifiable with their completely or almost shaved heads.” These Rambo avant la lettre, coming directly from the Waka-Hoa Polynesian ritual, without the Ray Ban’s, tank tops and bandana, but carrying an etched hunting knife strapped to their calves and ammunition belts around their muscled torsos, had their heads polished and smooth, tattooed with demoniac serpents, Vedic arrows and lustful symbols, painted in pomegranate red, charcoal grey or with scorched cork and ornamented with a strand of hair straightened by a dried gel, straight as a Mohawk tuff, colored arrack green or royal yellow. For a long time, however, their shadows had gone back to their cells or had been turned into a dust of bone which the gods like to hoard or in smoke of enigmatic omen. The survivors of the butchery would be today replaced by crinolines of rare and whitened hair, dishevelled as if radiated by a gust of mistral, receding hairlines or unwanted tonsures, hairstyles of senile olp folks brought out from hospices, V A hospitals or dilapidated last-stage care facilities. The wild grin of those new crusaders who went to rescue the sacred lands of the ideal democratic spirit, the land of Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot and Tocqueville, showed sharp teeth, abraded like marble, set between packets of flesh drooling with invective, revenge and the desire to slit throats.
Features disfigured by an anthropozoomorphic symbiosis had given way to rubicund faces of Gargantuesque-like people, veined with blue, with flat, turgescent whitish noses stained with acne rosacca, a sculpture of Time, of family history and comfort obtained at a high price, each swelling of their faces represented as many fruit, vegetable and foliage gathered in the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style.
Le landing would be, this time, very well managed. Indeed, Normandy was not a province that knew long periods of peace. Anything but. Since the well-measured and regular steps of the Romans coming from the South, passing by the unholy row of the Norsemen arriving suddenly by the sea of the cold and misty lands of the North, the numerous conquests and reconquests of the dethroned or foreign kings and the magnificent armada gathered across the other side of the English Channel, the region’s soil had been treaded by brutish soldiers, trampled by hordes of hooves, tainted with the chaotic retreats of carriages and overcrowding of fugitives and the injured, spread with manure, ploughed by the chains of tanks and the land ravaged by deep scarifications, became soaked with blood of which reflections stained the apples of Autumn groves. Fertile through the process of human decomposition, this soil had become the atavistic orchard of Europe.
Helmets, casques, halberds, swords, arrows, crossbows, armor, catapults, javelins, pikes, spears, double-edged rapiers, breastplates, tunics, machine guns, flamethrowers, bazookas, cannons, were nothing more than fabulous museum collection pieces, hung on the walls in neighboring castles or piled in Memorials to depict past ages. At dawn, the radiated flow of berets, Midwest farmers’hats, headbands and garrison caps would give the coast a slow moving equinoctial roll of clothing.
Some ten miles from the shore, the small town of Le Molay Littry was waking in the drizzle. Provincial was the word that fits best. It was nestled in the middle of the Norman bocages and serviced by narrow and winding roads snaking between stone walls and hawthorn hedges. Indeed the small town was on the verge of reliving a new human tide. A peaceful one, unlike in 1944.
All the local commerce was grouped around the big square shadded by quiet rows of plane and horse chestnut trees in the summer : a huge outdoor mall with various shops selling junk, sundries, souvenirs of the famous landing and many more imposing shops where one could buy miscellaneous electric appliances well behind the technology found in Paris, eclectic household equipment that the windows displayed with the fervor of relics put in a shrine and functional clothing cut out in some workshop on the rue du Sentier. Grocers’ boutiques stuck in the middle.
In just one morning, housewives cover the whole square, shopping bag in the hand, calculator in the mind, reluctance in the conscience. The butcher, the deli merchant, the baker. While passing, they glance at the well-decorated store fronts in the Parisian style, touches of coquetry found here and there in fashion magazines but without conceding to the well made up myths of the Ferraud’s or Versace’s.
Feigned atmosphere which appears to be so provincial and hardly stiff : from the modest people to the important citizens, everyone mingles. From the very first minutes of wandering past the shops, a deep feeling of serenity, of enveloping calmness invades the tourists who slow by sheer instinct. All the locals seem to know each other so well that their greetings appear simple and frank, but are actually intertwined with social sense. Everyone bumps into each other, kisses each other, echoes of good manners which will be only futile and in vain, pledges which are not said because they are etched in features and bearing.
Also provincial but the humility of the small town to forget its bloody moments, the glorious reliquaries or horrific scars of France’s History. Everyone has his role. For rural France, that meant to bleed, to suffer, to groove its land of infected cuts, such as the trenches of Verdun, to relinquish its taxis in the Marne area in order to protect Paris, to receive terrible wounds as the massive destruction of Caen, to be used as a springboard for a glorious conquest, which will add a new laurel wreath to the nation and a necklace of skulls and disfigured faces around the alluring and conceded Capital, those provincial servants mutilated in combat, similar to the one worn by Shiva during the rites of passage in her honor.
The stakes of the Aïnus tribe to which these indigenous peoples, ancestors of the Japanese pithecantropi, attached the skeletal remains of the animals and the enemies they had killed metamorphosed into presumptuous arches whose heavy and long legs carry the name of dearly paid victories as so many sepulchral relics. Those monuments stand for divinatory healing and ritual sanctuaries in order to keep the meaning of honourable offerings in the heart of every citizen of the nation. The memories of the bright ambition are grandiose , but the victims who sacrificed their flesh and blood to raise the mausoleum have no place in the cenotaph as in the Paleolithic era. The winning generals no longer dare to feast on the shattered skulls as the remnants of prehistoric demonstrate. Human progress came through it.
Crushed, pillaged, muffled, savagely beaten, witnessing its beautiful sites disfigured, resisting to the end, viciously punished for wearing a cross on one’s chest, burnt for following another dogma, sold and their voices silenced, conquered and ridiculed, their customs and dialects trampled, exploited like in Venice where the people served as wooden piles deep in the mud to raise the princely palaces, ploughed to the bone to keep the shame alive, abandoned like an old barren whore, deserted by utopian dreams and a certain attraction megalopoilises, humiliated by the sneers of citizens coming from the enlightened City, rights ignored, thus was and will be the fate of Provincial France.
On the contrary, to spared Paris, the monuments on which the names of the crippled and conquered cities will be engraved, the monopoly of the patrimony and the power coupled with honor.
Normandy, like many other regions had its share of torture: dismantled by the Romans, Vikings, Franks, Normans who traversed this welcoming land, settled and gave birth to descendants, the roots of Contemporary France, in the fields of generous grass. Then came the devastating cycles of fights between rivals on each side the Channel to revenge an outrage, by the incursion of William the Conqueror determined to tame the difficult Albion. Hastings was avenged but the conquerors were chased by a young virgin. Back again to save the aristocracy in jeopardy. Beachhead of Europe that many dreamt of mastering with landings. Up until the D Day landing of 44 when watercrafts with strange labels from abroad bearing the letters LCVP ( Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel), flat bottomed boats transporting 36 men or a jeep and a squadron of 12, LCM ( Landing Craft Mechanized ) a floating platform on which trucks, bulldozers, half-tracks, armoured tanks were packed or LCT ( Landing Craft Tanks ) massive DUKW barges called DUCK by the Marines stuffed with tanks, ammunition and fuel, all these plywood-like craft had replaced the Northmen’s solid oak ships. Over 20 000 of these crafts were produced by the New Orleans’s factories of the self-taught engineer Andrew Higgins, a true genius in naval construction.
Another outflanking was forming close by during this cold morning that the sun would have trouble dragging out of its nebulous torpor. The previous bombardments had not had the same resounding impact and had not made as much noise as those of 1944. Nevertheless, they succeeded in frightening the locals. They had left their homes by carloads and fled along the roads as in an inescapable exodus. Advise proclaimed strong and loud from the Prefecture had encouraged them to exile themselves the time of the ceremonies. The media atmosphere was enough to spark the brouhaha, the repercussions of the event that was brewing had had more of an effect than the nosedives of the “ jabos” on the eve of the 44 landing. Perverse, sly, powerful like a spring surge of sea, the wave of information, mediocre and vulgar exploding radio and TV programs, forced the indigenous population to take refuge behind their closed shutters or with family, beyond the restricted area. Because all the region that reached from Le Mollay Littry to Vierville-sur-Mer, along the coast had been enclosed by a gigantic and impenetrable security barrier.
The intersections of even the tiniest roads, cracked local roads, paths descending to the beaches or walkways following fissured cliffs were swarming with men in blue Gendarme uniforms, beige outfits of the French army and those in olive drab of the American MP’s. Behind the colourful prickly bushes, near the farms crushed under the weight of centuries, against the shabby and dilapidated brownstone cottages decorated with odd openings, around the large villages protected by waste lands, a thick network of secret agents were prowling in search of a disturbing clue. One had to show papers in order to access different levels of closed-off zones. The magic key which allowed one to pass through this highly protected realm, was an access card distributed sparingly by a few governmental organizations or semi-official associations. The modern skeleton key called “ the one which allowed to get close to kings and queens” by the famous French journalist, Léon Zitrone, was a press card. And if one had pinned the red ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur on his lapel, all the officers would hurry to excessive scapes and bows.
Like a mushroom springings out after a warm shower, the calm village had been invaded by the ochlocratical parasite rummaging the four corners of the countryside with pencils, microphones and telephoto lenses in search of a last survivor from the aerial attacks preceding “operation Overlord”. As a kind of climax at the end of a journalist’s career, the commonly known “ scoop” was sought as a rare species that hasn’t been “seen on TV,”, a sort of night larva like a ghost from ruins that metamorphoses into a splendid butterfly with the half day as in a Norman tale. Worse than vultures on a shredded corpse abandoned by hyenas, they would cut his soul into pieces, extract the faintest memory, the poor victim, stewed in the juices of journalistic jargon, thrown into the arena of information gatherers, imprisoned by the Press cartel, broken by the media grinder, would think of June 6th 1944 had been , in reality, less terrifying than this anniversary.
The main village square was already gleaming with cars, small trucks and other vehicles unloading more and more visitors in celebratory attire. Then a convoy of buses filed into the main street finally to line up under the trees. The entire region was cordoned-off and forbidden to ordinary people. Le Molay Littry was turning into a selection booth, the heart of the security system that filtered guests for ceremonies on Omaha and Utah beaches or the American Colleville cemetery.
The official measures were exceptional given the variety of Statesmen and their staff present at the D Day ceremony. The gathered guards and the corps of secret agents coming from various states were ready for action.
Still half asleep with back aching from the long voyage from the other side of the Atlantic, the former US soldiers of the “Big Red One”, of the Second, Forth, Twenty-ninth Divisions or the extremely rare survivors of the 116th Regiment walked slowly toward the cafes on the town square, trying to seem alert for the occasion. They filed into bars and cafes wrapped in heavy raincoats, thick fur-lined jackets, wearing decorated berets, hats and forage caps and followed by their wives. The journalist’s bold eyes could recognized the Scots by their Glengarry, the Americans by their stature and the Englishmen by their moustaches. Differentiating them was futile. Through their retirement, manners and by the banter of their open camaraderie they all reflected the moving events of the stellar twilight of their lives. The day belonged only to them despite some ridiculous and upsetting incidents that they had to endure the week befor, when some pompous bureaucrats, who, sent by an obscure and useless French minister from the heart of Paris, tried to evict them from their hotels on the coast in order to relocate free big-bellied sycophants and blasé parasitic civil servants. Before the Veteran’s outcry and the threat of boycotting the commemoration which was turning into a farce, the guilty and unscrupulous administration wavered. Everything was back in order.
Piled into cafes, these courageous and sickly ex-soldiers who had escaped from Hell, drank slowly, enjoying a boiling cocoa or bitter coffee as if partaking in a ceremonial peace pipe. Their elbows brushed against their neighbours’ ribs so much so they were squeezed against each other in the narrow room that left ample space for clients even in the best days of the tourist season. But they didn’t care. They had already live this type of situation while they were squashed worse than sardines into the landing barges crossing the rough-watered English Channel. The treacherous waves pushed the water craft side ways, making them pop like corks only to brutally plunge into the hollow of the waves. Lieutenant Charles Ryan of the Eighteenth Regiment, First Division, described the over-crowded LCI – Landing Craft Infantry – in these words: “ A metal box designed by a sadist to transport soldiers on water while creating in them a feeling of nausea and total degradation which will bring to them a rage which throw them on the beach in such anger that they destroy, devastate, kill everything in their way. The devilish machine combines the movement of a toboggan, the taming of a wild horse and the ride of a camel. “
Despite having pills shoved down their throats before the departure, all of them had been victims of horrible seasickness. They vomited on each other, releasing their breakfast on their sleeves, legs, hands and on the packs of the others who did the same in return. Even the most resistant in the 191 LCT cracked. A thick layer of mucus and undigested food which covered the bottom of the boat, floated like a giant jelly fish, slid following the movement of the eighteen-foot waves and made the men flounder. At one moment one of them lost his denture in his barf bag. Distressed by such a catastrophe, the miserable guy plunged his hand in his own secretions, pulled the precious object out and put it back into his mouth without wiping if off. The infectious odor of the collective vomiting made more than one pass out. But they had no way out, no possibility for a gasp of fresh air. The least of evils was to get used to it. If only they had been trained for such a shock. The six-month training they had to face at Slapton Sands took place only in nice weather and on calm seas so that the men would not be traumatized!
Operation Hell was launched. A leaded, seal mound hanged over their heads heavier than a granite tomb stone. For most of them, this was the prelude, a glimpse of what was to follow on the beaches of Vierville ; there were already hunched over, Nazca mummies at the bottom of a pit and they were aware of it. They were just waiting to be put in the grave. Their throats , dried from the lozenges that they had sucked just before jamming themselves against the side of the boat, burnt to the point of screaming. Their retinas swallowed up the entire eye enough to render them blind. Many men had the impression on being on a roller coaster. Prisoners of their harnesses, they were being thrown from a high vertical wall toward a speedy descent followed by an immediate ascent, their brains plastered to their skulls, spinning in both directions, abruptly shooting upward only to plunge again in an infernal cycle. Contrary to carnivals where the most audacious take a second roller coaster ride, on this day of the Apocalypse, even the strongest of men would not get another ticket. This time it was not three minutes of horrific cries and of accelerated heartbeats but more than ten hours of being tossed on a furious and swelling sea.
So what could be the problem of being piled haphazardly in the back of a shabby café, cooled by a slight breeze, in a small Norman village ? The presence at their sides of the Nibelungen of the greatest Armada the world has ever created perked them up, fired up their arteries. Their blood was flowing as smoldering lava; the ghosts of combat and the echoes of butchery fuelled their weak lungs, despite the lack of air space. Their lips moistened constantly by gulps of coffee or beer or by a nervous tongue endlessly reeling off uninvited stories of their common experiences. They attempted to rack through their curding memories, to knead their knotted guts in order to bring back Joe from Brooklyn, street wise Bob from Alabama or David fresh from his synagogue in New York. A smooth front, clear, which became a phantasmagoric vision, rosace corroded by age, shrunken by time, sprung out in one second from its sarcophagus.
Everything had been so quick, so horrible that after their return to the farm, the office, the factory, for months or even years, they isolated themselves in order to forget. They had won, for sure, but at what price ? Haunted by vivid flashes, the friend with his arm ripped off by a shell and projected like that of a stuffed doll to the top of one of the many stakes planted by Rommel’s troops all along the beach, a brave guy whose nicer profile was lying flat on the sand while the other side was cemented to the steel of a tetrahedron, the pal from the crossing with whom one had kidded around, the trunk plugged on pebbles because his legs lay further down the beach. Each one had toasted with the Grim Reaper before seeing him moving away under the luxuriant rhapsody of canons barking at a horizon on fire, shredded by the worst of storms. A glass raised in honor of the “ ultima forsan “, perhaps their last hour. They had stock piled in the darkest depths of their emotional closets the photos of horror, repeated many times since, as they would have done with Dear John letters. For them, the break in their youth, the end of their innocence. They had locked the skeletons in the closet. Like Bluebeard from the European fairy-tales, they knew that anyone who would put the key in the lock of the secret dungeon would pull it out dripping with blood. So they had hid it in a very dark corner of their subconscious. The entire panoply of unbearable images had been flung to the bottom of a well : the pierced forehead, shattered jaw, teeth riveted to the brain, the carrier of a flame-thrower and a gas tank burnt alive by the explosion of his equipment, the officer severed in two by a stream of machine gun, the captain with his bloody stub showing the way, the twenty-year old lieutenant sobbing and trembling in a crater, his pants wet with urine, smeared with diarrhea.
The dull life filled with minor incidents had taken over again. The family back home, happy to pick him up in one whole piece, had plotted to bring him back to everyday life. Wedding, children, career, the tedious and stay-at-home cycle of a now family man getting back on a track broken only for a short while.
The anniversary was a return to the heart of darkness, the climax of international recognition. Almost all had hesitated for fear of catching in the net of their memories many hideous remnants from their war like fishermen bringing back an abandoned shell threatening to destroy their boat. The swirls of the Styx were able to make them plummet into the flames of Hell. They had gone as raw recruits at the age of innocence when one thinks more about short skirts than private’s kits, full of virile strength, full of dreams, smugs on their faces, always ready for a fight, eyes sparkling with the pride of taking part in the adventure, gulping glory en endless thirst, they had come back, their souls shattered, they had aged twenty, a hundred years, witnesses to the worst, of the most inhuman the world had to offer. The hardest for them hadn’t been going into combat under unthinkable conditions, towards those beaches riddled with mines, in muddy waters up to their waists, combat uniform impregnated with sea water, salt, blood and vomit which itched them to death and weighed them down to the point they could hardly walk, scared of the idea of falling over since their seventy pound kits would never have allowed them to come to the surface or to escape from deadly shots of German pockets, but the hardest was to survive. In their eyes, it was an orgy of luck, a feast of chance, maze of existence, unfair. Upon their return, they would suffer alienation for a long time, a term which defines anyone who is “ different”, different from the group. They had gotten out with difficulty from a centrifuge that the least of mortals will never know.
Worse than the agony of a deported because even in the most sadistic concentration camp where horrible polypus swarmed , never had there been so much blood, shreds of skin, pulverized members, punctured skulls than in those few hours of the landings. The waves were red, the sand and rocks were red, jugs of blood poured heavily. They had known the climax of disaster that made them skirt schizophrenic and catatonic symptoms and lead more than one to commit suicide. Others had fallen into a melancholic depression, a delirium of persecution or an uncontrollable illusion. And with a sleepwalker’s footstep, haggard, had they not deliberately stepped forward toward the enemy’s fire ? Their buddies, powerless, unable to hold back those crusaders, those fakirs full of madness, with intense pupils injected with atropine, had to shoot them in the legs in order to make them lie down. They had then felt a guilt which would make them accuse themselves of cowardliness later on since they searched refuge behind an obstacle. The hostilities completed, they had to make a clean sweep in order to find a seeming psychic stability once again. They were satisfied with speechifying, like Sieyes : “ I lived though it !” Ands the words of Tennyson might have haunted them : “Cannon to the right…” in his poem, “ The charge of the Light Brigade “: Cannon to the right of them/ Cannon to left of them/ Volley’d and thunder’d / Their’s not to reason why/ Their’s but to do and die.’
With a careless finger like that of a cold Nazi officer who chooses the victims for reprisals or the gas chambers, God had eliminated eight out of ten young soldiers and offered them to his Minister of War whose hearse was never short of work. Better than Head Quarter’s oration had foreseen. They had been told that nine out of ten would not come back. A guy named Charles East had watched his neighbour on the left then the one on the right in the barge and had thought: “Poor fellows.” How invulnerable he thought he was in the “Dog Green” area.
The chiefs in command had not dared either to believe that there would be only one sole survivor out of thirty men of a LCT because he had been delayed due to his equipment weighing more than one hundred pounds: rifle, explosives, mortar, ammunition, rations and wireless radio. Though the agenda had been set in this way, no ranking officer had told them that the first charge, the exordium of the landing, would be composed of sherpas of the expedition, exhausted by the burden and that the survivors of the second of the following attacks, loaded with less, would use arms and provisions taken from the dead in order to push back the German defence. Sacrificed to the glory of the Nation, sacrifice to exhibitionist ambitions to a handful of deacons. They were the “ Meriah”, raised to be immolated. While the high priest, satrap, provost, henchman of death raises his dagger, the witnesses of the Khondh tribe in India sing :” We sacrifice the enemy…we sacrifice the Meriah…The gods need many offerings! Durga eats, Durga eats everything!” Once satisfied with the children thrown into the den, Poseidon will leave the villagers in peace until the next convoy of Hesiones!
How could they explain their immortality to their relatives ? Would they not meet their sycophant ? Each survivor of such a drama denotes a weakness in their behaviour. Had they fought, in prima instantia, like lions, like fallen heroes? Had they not shown evidence of some sort of cowardliness? Had they done their best to save their fellow soldiers, their buddies ? An insidious question that will tighten their stomachs on the ships going back home. But as a whole, hadn’t they been the rituals victims of a fight that was to be the last, the panacea against the Evil of Humanity, the supreme right of Christian Universality?
On the contrary, today, the password was different from General Eisenhower’s “Let’s go”. They didn’t have to go anymore. It was their choice. They had come back in a stage whisper, pilgrimage to celebrate a great victory over fascism.
The two small cafés overflowed. There was no more room. Already the redundant storyteller mixed with the easy-going adversary, the common guy sat in front of the fearless, the foxy dodger showed off with his imaginary exploits. Gestures became lively and agitated especially at the sight of a uniform or a cap that brought back memories of long ago. A contact after a rough combat with a neighboring unit, a glass shared hastily in a lost bivouac, an instant of rest in a quieter place far from the front filled with never-ending questions: “Where are you from ? Which battalion are you from? “ Thus started the enumeration of titles and listing of regiments. Faces tanned, bloated, eroded by hard work, swollen from gluttony, bulbous like beer mugs and almost the same color as stout brighten a wide smile at the sight os a cap recalling an acquaintance. Underneath the cap, wrapping a fat Bouddha, a jacket tight to the point of ripping at the seams, kept with care in a plastic wardrobe bag with a piece of cedar to fight against moths, and brought out recently for the unique occasion like a cult object. On their chests, walls of metal and ribbons earned on the European front, symbols of the miracle of staying alive in Tartarus. A miracle not due to the foolish courage of these young men in their twenties sent off by politicians and generals’whims in search of victories in the hellish war but simply by a rude chance that the picky Almighty gaoler from the Underworld could explain. Why, they all asked themselves, at least once a day when the night sky was nailed to the ground and they were still bent over, overwhelmed at the bottom of a repulsive foxhole or behind a ridiculously low wall, why were still breathing? Why did they still have their members when the one with whom they had shared a bitter cigarette before rotted already in a trench or had been urgently transported by a team of rescuers, two stubs instead of arms? They were like living witnesses emerging from another military holocaust receiving the gift of not being the victims of a piece of shrapnel in the head. Miserable strong men in rags once they had escaped from Sheol, God knows how, if anyone does, from the blazing abyss where the stabbed sea eagle haunted, flying from the sacrificial altar.
The men were overlapping each other at every table, united like fingers of a hand. Amongst them sat a few women as if lost, sometimes even stupefied to be in such a place and for whom the conversations appeared Greek as soon as the Veterans were talking about weapons and strategy. Because they were discussing seriously. Filled with nostalgia and immersed in a latent pain, words were inferred with a subdued hesitation and a strong resentment towards their hierarchy who had led them to believe that the airborne and marine attacks had pulverized everything and that their landing would be a picnic, just a walk in the park. A Veteran of the 115th Regiment was telling the story of their officer who had made the following speech to encourage them:” When you reach the coast, nothing else will be alive on the beach! A piece of cake!” Thus appeared the intense emotion, the rattle of disgust that the survivors of the greatest landing in the history of humanity were feeling. Thanks to the beer and sometimes a brandy, tongues were loosening and the morbid contents of the early conversations were becoming quickly humorous, even delirious. One could wonder if, during the bloody butchery, crucifixions against the rocks that they had such a hard time to forget, they had lived schoolboy memories, in those days when laughing and tricks were a must. That seemed true when one heard them bursting out in a resounding and hilarious laughter which shook their slackened and deformed bodies.
At one table, a gang of four broke out in a glairy belly laugh while remembering “ Axis Sally”. “The whore of Berlin” who, with her sulphurous, sultry, velvety voice tormented the guys from the Midwest to give up combat. Lots of GI’s used to listen to her whispered comforting words and sweet nothings between the latest tunes. They roared with laughter when she exclaimed: “Why fight for the Commies? Why fight for the Jews ?” But sometimes she gave a message that made their hair stand up on the backs of their necks:” Hi to those of Company C of the 50th. I hope that you had a ball in London last week! Oh, I forgot, tell the Mayor that the clock on City Hall is three minutes late!” And she was right! And she could be so cruel :” Tomorrow your blood and guts will grease the axles of your tanks!” One of the guys asked the others: “ What ever happened to our Axis Sally at the end of the war? “ A short skinny fellow, whose cheeks had been chafed by an electric razor said:” Well, Midge Gillars, the infamous Axis Sally did twelve years in the pen then died in Columbus, Ohio where I live! A little star back home!”.
Deep inside they knew that today was their last stand, the last scrutiny of a time long ago that would be forever sent back to the stone pages of History. So, watery eyes were brightened with a final flame, a small candle at the bottom of a lamp that they would have lit at their martyry.
Each survivor in his own clumsy, embarrassed, cathartic but ab inno pectore words was relieved by his cleansing campaign : Gold, Juno and Sword for the old guys of the 21st British Army under the command of General Dempsey. The campaign added to the long list of English victories such as Crécy, Trafalgar, Waterloo that had already been inscribed in golden letters on the pusillanimous continent which seems to endlessly scoff at them and want to destroy them. Next to the English, there were the Americans and the Utah, Omaha operations, dear places in their country, particularly quiet sites that had substituted Vierville-sur-Mer or St Martin de Varreville on the maps of Normandy and that had known hardly any war except for a few skirmishes with the Indians. The intrepid 29th Division under the command of General Omar Bradley took rank next to the conquering regiments of Gettysburg or the sacrificed of El Alamo, in their eyes a miraculous victory of Good over Evil.
And the television channels would have a field day. Transforming this banal day, a flat recapitulation of an historical event into a rude, exceptional media exploit became essential in the infantile, stubborn and sordid battle of ratings. An unique opportunity for a commemorative ceremony, which already implied the stature “ of a great turn in History”, it was all the more sewn with intense emotion and strong affective force because Eastern Europe and the ethnic and religious explosive climate in Ex-Yougoslavia were the media focus.
The coincidence of events – which in reality was not one, since regularly, monotonous like a metronome’s swing, Europe plunges itself into a devastating conflict – gave considerable dimension to the memory of a “ Past Event”. That day could have been just the gracious parade of an embalmed mummy that from time to time the high predicators take out of the palaeographic morgue, carrying it to the grinding of hand rattles, to the racket of pans like during a folkloric Burgundy feast, or a celebration of the sun in Inka times, under the mischievous gaze of the laughing Themis, to the chant of a De Profundis and to the oration of Inclina Domine aurem tuam, in order to boost a semblance of credibility of their own existence as Heads of State, and displaying in front of mesmerized eyes of the servum pecus . But this vile fornication would be only a retort to the present circumstances : the rise of a movement accused in France of Fascism neighboring the terrible agony of a European country in the former Eastern zone.
Television had well prepared a kind of thrilling fair on the long term in the same way as the Arcadian opening ceremony for the Olympic Games. One had to wallow in wealth, to stamp one’s feet in amazement, one had to hit the public strong because the competition was cut-throat between the channels and the supranational ratings that were as merciless in their chastisement as the orders the sergeants barked at their troops. One lost point was like a decimated division: the cost became much to extravagant and the clientele was going to show reluctance. No channel had skimped on the budget, transporting and installing tons of electric material from across the ocean or from the main European capitals. Everything like fifty years ago, Headquarters in full force had surrounded themselves by experts of all kinds , the most knowledgeable correspondents, senile retired generals with their promotional badges, eminent historians who knew all the spiciest details of that time. Without anyone’s knowledge, by telepsycho processing, the hypnosis would attract, at the helm of prime time news, the people who would corrupt themselves in a divinatory meditation. The specialists, magicians of falsified parabola and of easy sketches, had filled their hands with all the right cards. Armed with a relentless curiosity and an infallible, aseptic and well computerized method of research, the almighty media detectives had raided the military archives, ransacked, classified and decoded unearthed ends of cracked film, never seen before, hidden for a half century in piles of dust, to make a long story short and to quench the audience’s thirst with preposterous imagery, refined but still quite often brutal, broadcast and commentated by suit or dress wearing Sphinxes privileging overstatements, long wind apostles of Donquixote-like prose and to remind them what this exceptional moment in History really was.
Tremendous virtual fire works planned to the very second. The sublime gratitude of conquerors who had destroyed and buried Fascism and patronized forever a new world order, an eternal peace, a permanent status quo. But with the regularity of the seasons and century old menses, secretive History refused to declare herself a senile spinster locked in the attic. Like a gypsy, she always succeeded in escaping from the place where demagogues wished to imprison her, those, at one time, had not forgotten to rape her in order to secure their power over the poor woman whom they had wanted to tame. She would run away, spitting fire here and there in the most unexpected regions, which set villages and towns ablaze once again. She had too much of a sweet tooth for fiery destruction and tantalizing, bloody situations to be manipulated.
By this grey and humid day of June 6th 1994, the conquerors in a fervent outburst of rediscovered camaraderie, of seldom shared memories, were going to remind the common people of what was, in this half century year old dawn, the ethereal apparition on the horizon filled with artificial haze, thousands of cuirassiers, torpedo boats, cruise ships, coasting vessels, everything that could float and transport men in its sides: Viking ships turned into barges.
But under the hulls shaken by foamy waves, against the bow being thrown around like an ominous cork, the sarcastic sea had not changed. She breathed with her mood swings, her chaotic coughs and her cold sweats that no man in the world has yet been able to master. And during that morning, like fifty years ago, her capricious undertow could not care less about those narcissistic dynasts struck with discursive flatulence who had cast anchor a few cables from the shores called “ Bloody Omaha”.