Postscript

War and peace

P. J. Kavanagh

Paris r‘riving up the Cherbourg peninsula 1.....,towards Paris you come across the D-Day landing-places, 'Utah Beach', `Omaha Beach'. These are now decorated with shell-shattered tanks clambered over by small boys, and barnacled aeroplane engines rescued from the sea. It is hard not to think of the man who was sitting behind that engine. Standing on the beach looking out to sea, it is hard not to remember what it must have been like for the men in the landing-craft, making their slow, exposed approach to a defended beach. At Riva Bella there is a small war museum and the photographs of Allied soldiers receiving their final briefing before they set off are not of the 'cheerful Tommy' variety. They look strained, and old. They had to jump from the landing-craft into the sea and must have been wet for the first few days. There are few miseries like sodden khaki. We know now that wars are fought by men who are ingloriously uncomfortable, frightened and tired but, as we wandered round the room looking at German and Allied equipment and uniforms, and of British soldiers crouched behind walls that still stood nearby, my 14-year-old compa- nion was thrilled and I was more than usually interested myself.

Why? We know it is all terrible nonsense. Last week Gerald Priestland told me that his experiences as a war correspondent had made him become a Quaker, and the lamented Rene Cutforth was for a time all but insane at the end of the war. So, war is bad for those who survive as well as for

Naturally I nominated the gems' lavatory in Leicester Square.'

The Spectator 5 May 1984 those who die. We know this, but there was I with my son, as intrigued as he by the machine-guns, the uniforms, the bullet- holed flags. It makes me think there may he something in these school 'peace-studies against which Sir Keith Joseph has set his face. They can be politicised and perverted

i

but it does seem as though the idea of peacefulness has to be more or less ar- tificially implanted, that it comes no more naturally to most of us than, say, the idea of chastity. We have been at it a long time' admiring war. We stopped off in Bayeux to look at the tapestry (vaut le detour) and there it all is: the trees being felled for the invasion, the arrows flying through the air lovingly worked in warm-coloured wool. In Paris this morning, in bright sun, I noticed that the walls near Notre Dame are studded with blue plaques in memory 0' people shot at that particular spot in

is 1944'

It s possible to be in two minds about these plaques: such people should be com- memorated, but their names, placed ap- parently at the site of their deaths, put back an iciness into an air that up till then had been blessedly warm. The plaques insisted on doing this, as Bonnard insisted one the opposite, that the world was warm with 0l: oured light. There is a huge exhibition 01 his paintings at the Centre Pompidou. Y°11 go up five flights in a plastic tube like an1 in- testine and enter a room filled with pathri; tings that celebrate the arts of peace: importance of chequered tablecloths an furniture and always domestically, th.e

.

bodies of women. Above all they Celebrate aawparyo fromm i promising, ngy,o ufruitful, glimp sleadnctir through hththaet ofealfieln: door of a softly toned, infinitely Pact"- room. And at the Marmottan in is Monet, violently determined he shoUla the shifts in the appearance in difference catch some of the peace of his water-bleat lights and seasons of his little JaPalle"4 bridge. A defiance of blue plaques an° shell-shattered tanks? Two sides of thee sound tired. same coin? All reflections on war and peace

Pas"' there

room.

one thing did strike me. I was on way to a lunch at which some French ad I ministrators would be present and when met them they all seemed charminglY, strilt_

„

tingly, proud of themselves and their Pos.'. tions. Their English equivalents would ha'', something about befemegt ,bauntudph_wmatilliorriusr,e.d1 have no idea which way is best, but I sit dently saw that those blockhouses and sun dently

at Calais and Dover would never be us-

ed ed again, we would never again be at each other's throats (there were Germans, t0c''. the lunch). There will be no More blue plaques. There may, of course, be worse, but for the first time I felt wholeheaT,' about Europe, about the 'Commun,12,,e Perhaps Bonnard and Monet had 0';‘,.. their work, for I happily agreed with m hie ministrateur of Nantes in his u"'''hink hI condescension, estimation of his own importance as 1.

isincenabsisotnracwteidtblymaginreee. , exquisite ill