| Defeated by sheep |
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Normandy 28 December 2004 Today, I went down to the shed in the orchard to get some bottles of wine. There is a shed and a small area of land facing it in the neighbours field, just a few metres away, where he had his sheep penned in for the evening. Each time I went to my shed, they ran back into their shed. As I came out for the last time, there were two sheep and two lambs directly in front of them, framed by the doorway and staring at me with a blank intensity of which only sheep are capable. I tried speaking to them in French and English, but their passivity if anything only increased. They uttered not even a baa. I tried them in Italian, just in case they had relatives in Torino, of the Agnelli family, but again nothing. I retired with my bottles, defeated by concentrated nothingness. The fashion in England for the Christmas decoration of the outsides of entire houses is surpassed in France by the decoration of entire villages, with lights making up, as it were, open stage curtains on the approach roads and then the entire village centre following some theme or other. In our village centre, the theme has little or nothing to do with Christmas but instead, amongst all the fairy lights, there are huge pictures or models of cartoon characters, such as Bambi, Snow White and the seven dwarfs, the Stroumphs and, would you believe it, Lucky Luke marching the Dalton brothers into prison with Jolly Jumper standing by. In Normandy, as a result of the D-day landings, there are numerous very large war cemeteries. The graves are inscribed simply with the names of the fallen. There is usually a monument as well which refers to the fallen and expresses a wish for peace. Today, I went to re-visit a very small cemetery at the side of a field a few kilometres from our house. It has only three old graves - for members of the family which endowed the local abbey - and a large monument. On the monument were inscribed the following words, each one carefully weighed: ‘Ici reposent 4 resistants inconnus, martyrs de la barbarie Nazi en 1944. Passant recueille-toi' ‘Here lie 4 unknown members of the resistance, martyrs of Nazi barbarity in 1944. Passer-by, reflect upon this.' |