IRISH MY ERSE!

This was published in The Irish Democrat in November 1986

WHO'LL WRITE THE HISTORY?

When Kaiser Bill's boys were trampling on Little Belgium, goes the story, a German statesman, when asked what History would say of  them, answered -" WE'LL write the History"

Perhaps the story is the invention of a servant of  the Kaiser's cousin.. The one in London, whose guns were to shell Dublin and whose goons were to burn Cork. But I like it, for it didn't occur to the statesman, (or the story's inventor), that if Kaiser Bill won his war, scrawlers and crawlers from the plundered countries would save German historians the trouble, by doing the job for them.

Anyhow the Kaiser didn't win. His commanders surrendered their armies, guns and fleet in November, 1918 in a clearing in the Forest of  Compiegne, nortth of Paris. I was there a few months ago. It's a good place to muse on the processes by which history is written. And re-written.

In the centre of the clearing is a huge stone tablet inscribed in French. It commemorates the capitulation of the criminal German Empire to the peoples it had attempted to enslave, and the return to the French motherland of the two green fields, Alsace and Lorraine, which had been snatched by the Boche in 1870. (My translation is only partly literal, but it doesn't misrepresent the spirit of the inscription.)

There's a small museum with hundreds of photographs of the 1914/18 conflict, a few machine guns and small arms from the period, and, in pride of place, a gleaming Pullman railway-car.

The Pullman, its desks and chairs, are arranged exactly as in November 1918,but with cards to show where the victors and the vanquished sat. In a glass ashtray is the butt of the cigar smoked by the Allied Generalissimo, France's Marshal Foch, before he admitted the German commanders to his presence.They had been left cooling their heels for some hours before being asked the superfluous question of the purpose of their visit.The Boche had his nose rubbed in the merde. Not only was there the suffering of the past four years to avenge.There was also 1870, when the Germans had the gall to proclaim their Empire in the Palace of Versailles, the show-piece of France's "Sun-King", Louis XIV, and a succession of scarcely more modest French rulers.

Primary school-children come to Compiegne by the coach-load, shepherded by their teachers., to relish the great deliverance of that day in 1918.But there was a sequel in Compiegne that might easily be missed by the casual visitor or the young school-child.The inscribed tablet is not a monolith. It's a mosaic.

The tablet was blown to pieces in May 1940, and was not reassembled for some years.The Pullman, and Marshal Foch's cigar butt have been reconstructed by a process not to be used again until, after the Last Trump, our bones and ashes rise again as promised in  the Scriptures. You see, they perished in an air-raid, in Germany, where Hitler had them removed as a prize. First he had taken the Pullman frm its museum in Paris, back to that same clearing in Compiegne. That time it was the turn of the French to have their noses rubbed in the scheisse, as their dignitaries were left to cool their heels. Then Marshal Petain  surrendered France to Hitler's mercy. Germany occupied the coast and all strategic cities, including Paris. A collaborationist French government, led by Petain, administered the rest of France, and some of her colonies, from Vichy.

The story of Vichy France is not edifying, and it seems, in the interest of civic virtue, today's young citizens learn half-truths, and little white lies.In 1942 the struggle for the soul of France, in the person of a cynical and worldly police chief, was reflected in the Hollywood classic "Casablanca." The film is re-shown every other month on one TV channel or another, probably by popular demand. For me it improves with each viewing.

The last frame of "Casablanca" has the police chief pouring himself some mineral water. He drops the empty bottle in a wastebasket, and, spying the Vichy label, gives it a damn good kick, as he forsakes the collaborator's role for one with the Free French.

There's a bit of a struggle for Ireland's soul now in progress. London's Irish Club plays host to Ruth Dudley Edwards' "Confessions of a Revisionist". Apparently there's no contrition there, nor plea for absolution. In Dublin, Patrick Cooney, Minister for Education, sends a directive to teachers that they must tell their pupils that the IRA is the root cause of all violence in Ireland.

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