Tuesday 11 November 2014

Paris bulletin 8 2014


Le onze novembre, a bright, clear day. I picture all those hundreds of uniformed men and women milling around Westminster, and the old men in wheelchairs, the gnarled old men their chests heavy with medals, their legs useless. Saluted and saluting.
Living where I do in Paris, I have no sense of how the remembrance of ‘the Great War’ - the war that was supposed to end all wars but only set the scene for all the others since - is marked officially. I’d have to go down to the Champs Elysees, not far as the crow flies, but as I feel today, a world away.
Until the end of this month there is an exhibition of Great War photographs at the Gare de l’Est - portraits of the last living poilus (squaddies), images of landscapes and objects, taken by Didier Pazery. It’s both inside the station itself and on the railings outside that station which, more than any other Parisian station was the bridging point between the fronts to the north and east and ‘back home’.

Among the photos is one of an old Senegalese man. He’s standing outside his home, a tin- roofed hut with grass walls.
Abdoulaye N'Diaye outside his home
 
There is text alongside each of the photos. Here is an extract from what his says:
Abdoulaye N’Diaye, born 1894, conscripted into the French Army in 1914. Wounded in Belgium but continued to serve in both the Dardanelles and the Somme.
“I was woken at dawn. “Soukoundou, the son of your uncle has been forced to join the French army. I didn’t hesitate. The next day before sunrise I saddled my horse and I went to find Soukoundou. I got him released in exchange for signing up myself. My uncle and his family had always been very good to me. I was strong and fit.
“When we got to Thiaroye, near Dakar they put us into uniform and then we were taken by boat to Morocco where we carried out a number of missions. One day they told us that we were to go to the white man’s country (le pays des blancs) where a war had broken out. I never saw a white man, until I was in my teens.
“The white man’s country was deserted. The Germans had blown up a bridge so we had to cut our way through the undergrowth like we would do in the bush. That’s when I found the body of a woman. She was dead but her little baby was still at her breast. The horror of that sight has stayed with me to this day. It was my first corpse but I saw many more after that.
“France forgot us once we weren’t needed any more. France had promised that we would be recognised, that our efforts would be rewarded, our losses would be recompensed, but she didn’t keep her promise for years after and when she did, the pension we were paid was very small.”
At the end of last month I went to see ‘Of Men and  War’ (directed by Laurent Becue-Renard), in le cinema du Pantheon at the top rue Victor Cousin in the Quartier Latin.
                                                               
 It’s a little over two hours long and documents a series of therapeutic sessions with a group of American veterans (from Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam), and some interviews with their partners/families. Mostly you’re with these angry, depressed, incoherent men. Big strong men, sheltering behind dark glasses, talking, shouting, weeping, cursing the horrors that they can’t dislodge from their minds – the dismembered comrades, the eviscerated babies, the body parts to bag up, the explosion that rips apart the armoured car ahead of yours ...

The Sarajevo wind
leafs through newspapers
that are glued by blood to the street;
I pass with a loaf of bread under my arm.

The river carries the corpse of a woman.
As I run across the bridge
with my canisters of water,
I notice her wristwatch still in place.

Someone lobs a child’s shoe
into the furnace. Family photographs spill
from the back of a garbage truck;
they carry inscriptions:
Love from... love from... love...

There’s no way of describing these things,
not really. Each night I wake
and stand by the window to watch my neighbour
who stands by the window to watch the dark.
Goran Simić  
(English translation David Harseni)

.. if in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest,
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Dulce et Decorum, final verse
Wilfred Owen