For the integrity of democracy this was the worst of weeks and the best of weeks. Fresh-cut flowers laid on the graves of D-Day heroes were barely beginning to wither when the misbegotten whelp of Mosleyism got its first seats in the European parliament. In London, Gordon Brown was shedding ministers like leaves from a tree attacked by death watch beetle. I was in Dublin beside the oily Liffey for the Writers’ Festival. There, I quickly discovered, the Irish were confronting their own demons, every bit as corrosive to public faith in their governing institutions as the expenses scandals in Britain.
To mangle Tolstoy, while every economic boom is the same, every economic bust implodes in its own peculiar way, throwing up gobs of squalor in its wake. In Britain we have long told ourselves that, while we may be a bit frayed at the edges, by God we know how to run a parliamentary democracy. But now the culture that gave us Gladstone versus Disraeli has sunk into the taxpayer-funded dredged moat where bottom-feeders lurk in terror of the exposing hook and line.
In Ireland the capacity of the moral bog to swallow public trust may be even more profound. The official report, published last month, on the maltreatment of children in Ireland’s “Industrial Schools” was all anyone wanted to talk about in Dublin. From 1940 through the 1980s, tens of thousands of children were victims of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of lay staff and teachers in institutions run by Christian congregations. In its dry understatement, the report is one of the most horrifying documents of systematic social cruelty to be published since the war. Children dispatched there by the Irish courts as “unruly” were treated as feral beasts, beaten with instruments designed to inflict maximum pain.
The betrayal of public trust amounted to a horrifying collusion between church and state to look the other way. Lay perpetrators would be reported to the Gardai but seldom prosecuted, and members of religious orders known to have committed atrocities on their wards were dealt with within the church. But now all the sweaty procrastination has been swept away in a great tempest of public fury, not least because Irish tax-payers are going to have to foot the €1.3bn (£1.12bn) bill for reparations to traumatised victims. This is the collateral damage of great social and economic implosions. When one kind of public credit – the assumption that investment trusts are not frauds; that commercial banks can actually cover their obligations to depositors; or that the people’s representatives aren’t slurping at the public trough – comes apart, the entire social contract can unravel at dizzying speed.
Which was a good reason to go to Normandy for the 65th anniversary of D-Day and register the unequivocal good of which democracies are equally capable along with habitual acts of infamy. Historical commemorations are always tricky things, never more so than in the case of great battles. Those who fought them often tell us who didn’t how hard it is to convey the reality in narratives, be those reports a day or a half century later. And so we euphemise. Military history maps with their arcing arrows trap the unbearable reality of dismembered boys within a code of antiseptic graphic conventions. Those little shaded boxes shadow-box with the truth.
Added to this is the muffling effect of ceremonious decorum. But in this particular case, expectations that our new American Pericles would soar above funerary platitude ran the opposite risk of turning the occasion it into yet another exercise in Obamania. Posters in the window of the local tourist office featuring Potus in cool threads and proclaiming – apparently the idea of the mayor of the city – “YES WE C(AEN)”, only added to the foreboding.
The biggest invasion was by re-enactors. On the evening of June 5, the front at Grandcamp-Maisy, between Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach, had D-Day-vintage Jeeps in tan paint parked opposite the sea wall. Inside the Brasserie du Guesclin, Frenchmen and young women impeccably uniformed for 1944, tucked into their foie de lotte marine and turbot grillé. From GI uniforms there came, disconcertingly, voices that hailed from Bremen or München-Gladbach. It’s a well-meant gesture against oblivion, but somehow deaf to the music of time. Most of the re-enactors – in their late 20s and 30s – are too old, their trousers too sharply creased, too fabulously buff to impersonate the skinny kids of D-Day, in the grip of animal instincts of self-preservation. When it comes to the bidding of memory, less is more.
Later that evening, I stretched out on a wooden chaise in a Norman manor house garden, fleshy roses blooming on the limestone walls, and let the emptiness carry me back to the tens of thousands packed in the transport ships 65 years ago – trapped, panicky and seasick – on the bobbing tide while Eisenhower decided it was go; to silk parachute gear dropped over the heads of tow-haired quarterbacks from Milwaukee. As the first stars came out, a wind soughed through the Normandy oaks and then, suddenly, the fading horizon eerily flared and the stillness was struck by the dull boom of fireworks from distant Utah Beach. But the dogs of the Calvados didn’t know the noise was innocent thunder, and yipped and yowled as their forebears did all those Junes ago.
Weather was a famous obsession of the D-Day planners, forcing Ike to postpone the landings by a day. But the meteorological gods were kind to the veterans, many in wheelchairs, some magnificently spry and upright, crowding into the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. So the sun shone on the affable curls of Tom Hanks; the band struck up “Moonlight Serenade”. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” followed, rendered with such mournful beauty that our hearts were already in our mouths. Anticipation hung in the air along with Potus’s chopper which, heralded by rotor wind, spun eddies of new-mown grass over the heads of the crowd, finally descended.
Speech Idol then got under way with Nicolas Sarkozy delivering a blinder, full of unembarrassed poetic passion; summoning up images of 20-year-olds on their ships caught in silence; silence hanging as well over the German machine gun nests that awaited them. Was this Sarko, invoking the tears of parents bidding their sons farewell? Was this the gigolo of the Elysée forcing us to see bodies rolling in the soaking sand? Evidemment. The peroration was even more astonishing coming from a successor of Charles de Gaulle, as Sarkozy laid a rhetorical bouquet of heartfelt gratitude on the graves of the dead and the heads of the living.
So truth, in the tragic genre, had against the odds, already been spoken, and was only briefly forced to take a backseat to gung-ho platitude when the Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper quoted a soldier whom, he claimed, couldn’t wait to get to Omaha Beach. Gordon Brown rallied with a moving vision of the liberating armada but then scuttled it with large invitations to honour their memory by Making the World a Better Place. Exit Thucydides, enter Hallmark Cards.
As usual it fell to the Historian-in-Chief to get to the heart of the matter: asking why D-Day still meant so much to us. It was, he said, the sheer improbability of success. However appalling the cock-ups of that day, this could not be true when the immensity of American and British industrial smash-machine was brought to bear against the overstretched Reich. But Obama’s second answer nailed it: that, for all the imperfections and flaws of the Allies, the absolute moral clarity that bound together the men of June 6, the obligation to resist and uproot a regime that had been fed on the appetite for “subjugation and extermination”, radiated a redemptive glory over the human condition. Mirabile dictu, decency is possible. And such historical outcomes said the Historian, summoning his own inner Tolstoy, do not happen according to any grand historical design. They are merely the aggregated acts of countless individual human agents who for one moment were lit by the simplicity of moral purpose.
So, when you are all losing your cornflakes on the unedifying news of the day, just hold that imperishable event close, honour the wrinkles that were once just 20-year-olds trying to make it to the end of the beach and, while they were at it, made the world a better place.
Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor
