In November, in this small corner of France called “le Perche,” the last leaves are falling and even the sky seems tired of holding itself up. A thick gray pall covers the earth. The month started this way, with what the French call, “un vrai temps de premier novembre,” appropriate weather for All Saints Day, November 1st, rain, low clouds and damp.
Two weeks later, as I sit at my desk, rain continues to fall. Good for the earth, say the farmers, hoping for rain right through to Christmas for their summer-parched fields. Folk wisdom claims that’s what’s best for next year’s crops.
November is also the month when the thoughts of the French turn to death. Americans remember their dead on Memorial Day, originally a day to commemorate those fallen in battle. Today both the graves of veterans and family members are decorated on the last Monday in May. The French travel to cemeteries on November 1st, their “Memorial Day,” and place big pots of yellow, orange or purple chrysanthemums on family tombs.
In the United States, on November 11th, the country honors its veterans. When I was a child, we called this date “Armistice Day,” to mark the end of the first World War. In France, “le 11 novembre” could not possibly refer to anything else. That war’s major battles were fought on French soil, blasting entire cities and villages from the face of the earth. The French nation lost one third of its economic wealth, and nearly 7.5 million acres of farmland were declared unfit for crops. At the war’s end, fields were littered with unexploded shells alongside corpses of horses and men.
Ten million died in the conflict, 20 million were injured. Many soldiers were disfigured or lost limbs, unable to return to “normal life” after the war. Many bore psychological wounds that dogged them for life. At the war’s start, the French government drafted more than 7 million men; between 1.4 and 1.5 million of them died. Civilian deaths throughout Europe were between 5 and 10 million, which includes those who died in the Russian Revolution and the Armenian genocide of 1915.
These mortality figures boggle the mind. That is why Ernest Hemingway, in A Farewell to Arms, his great anti-war novel about World War I, could write, with irony, “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.”
And the list of horrifying figures goes on: 3 million widows, 6 million orphans, many abandoned, some exploited, as was the case of British orphans shipped to Canada as cheap farm labor after the war.
This year November 11th marked the centenary of the end of World War I. It was a day of solemn celebrations in Paris. After marching up the Champs Elysées, 72 world leaders gathered beneath the Arc de Triomphe, where an eternal flame burns in honor of France’s Unknown Soldiers.
At 11 AM, the exact hour of the signing of the Armistice 100 years before, President Emmanuel Macron recalled the terrible sacrifices made by French soldiers for the nation. He reminded French citizens of their patriotic duty to honor those men and the universal values for which they fought: liberté, égalité, fraternité.
On this same day opened the Paris Peace Forum, an international conference whose goal is to seek multilateral solutions to war and crises throughout the world. German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave the opening speech, followed by those of President Macron and UN Secretary Antonio Guterres. President Donald Trump was conspicuously absent.
Back in le Perche, I commemorated the centenary in a more intimate way. In the town of Rémalard, equipped with a fine theater, I went to see a play based on a French young-adult novel, l’Horizon bleu by Dorothée Piatek, with illustrations by Yann Hamonic. It is the story of Pierre and Elisabeth, both elementary school teachers in a small village in northern France at the beginning of the war. On August 1, 1914, when the order for a general mobilization is given, Pierre is drafted and must leave home. This marks the beginning of a separation that will last more than four years.
Two actors, Martine Salmon and Karim Feddal, have deftly adapted the story of Elisabeth and Pierre for the stage, choosing excerpts from their letters, acting out significant events with powerful simplicity. On one side of the stage, there is a teacher’s desk, on the other, a wooden school bench. In between, a screen where illustrations from the book accompany the actors’ words and actions. There is also music, not of the period but of today, a rhythmic background uniting 1918 and 2018.
Thanks to Martine and Karim, Elisabeth and Pierre are close to us. We share their pain and despair, their courage and strength. We experience the war, not as abstraction, but as real events in the lives of people like us: the death and filth of the trenches, the loneliness, the necessity of carrying on to stay alive.
Every village in France, no matter how small, has a memorial to local soldiers who died in World War I. No family remained untouched. That was 100 years ago.
Today, soldiers and civilians continue to die in terrible wars, wars of proxy, such as the one going on in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia attempts to limit Iranian influence in the Middle East. Orphans wander in refugee camps, cholera spreads among the general population, civilian casualties are high. A documentary where Yemenite children speak to each other about this war provides a series of poignant, at times unbearable, testimonies. I provide the link to the French version, but another with English subtitles can be found on-line: Les enfants et la guerre (Kids and War), directed by Khadija Al-Salami https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRb01Y6WmZg
In President Macron’s November 11th speech to the French nation and the world, he encouraged patriotism and condemned nationalism as the “betrayal” of patriotic values.
President Trump considers himself a “nationalist.”
France’s General de Gaulle, a model of integrity, had this to say on the subject: “Le patriotisme, c’est aimer son pays. Le nationalisme, c’est détester celui des autres.” Patriotism means loving your country. Nationalism means hating other people’s.
Patriot or nationalist? In this dreary, dying month of November, we should give the matter some thought.
