In Europe

leave for Auschwitz with 700 prisoners. A little more than a week later, de Gaulle was welcomed by at least a million cheering Parisians. What is forgotten is the hundreds of thousands who had enthusiastically welcomed Pétain only four months earlier, when he visited the city on 26 April, 1944 to commemorate the victims of war. Of 1.5 million French public officials, only around 30,000 were ever penalised in any way for their collaboration, including their assistance in the deportation of Jews. Papon, the Jew-hunter of Bordeaux, was able to build a new and glorious career in post-war France; he became the chief of police in Paris under de Gaulle, and ultimately even a cabinet minister. In 1953 almost all of the collaborators were granted amnesty. By 1958, fourteen former Vichy officials were already back in the French parliament.
    After a series of complicated manoeuvres, de Gaulle was finally able to make his triumphal entry into Paris on 26 August, 1944. ‘Paris, Paris abused, Paris broken, Paris martyred but Paris liberated by her own people with the help of the armies of France!’ he shouted, with characteristic rhetoric. And everyone cheered, even though not a single French battalion had taken part in the heroic landings on D-Day, even though de Gaulle himself had not worked on the preparations, even though only a single division of the Free French Forces had fought along with the total of 39 in Normandy, and even though only a small portion of the population of Paris – according to reliable estimates, no more than 15,000 men andwomen – had taken an active part in the Resistance. None of that mattered. De Gaulle's conceptual France had won, and after 1945 would even oversee one of Germany's occupied zones.
    For what France needed was a grand historical account, to get back on its feet again and to redefine itself as a nation. The Resistance, the Maquis and the Free French Forces made great sacrifices. But all over the country the war cemeteries are full of ‘perfidious’ Englishmen and ‘decadent’ Americans, ‘dirty’ Jews and ‘stinking’ Spanish refugees, and countless Poles who were never given credit for a single victory.



Chapter FORTY-FOUR
Bénouville
    Cigarette Break
The skirmish was suddenly over.
We stopped to roll a smoke
and the Germans did too and
so there we stood,
insane, across from each other –
barely on our feet still.
‘Cigarette break,’ someone said hoarsely.
The German nodded understandingly: ‘
Ja, Pause. Sofort!
’
We sat down, them and us, in the grass
five paces away from each other;
we laid our rifles at our feet
and plucked
tobacco from our bags.
Yes, the things one sees in war!
Pass it along, not a soul in hell
will believe you. Then calmly, silently
– cautiously looking each other in the eye –
we ground out the final roll-ups, they their cigarettes,
and the same voice rasped, raw and bloodshot:
‘End of cigarette break!℉
Yuri Belash, veteran, Moscow

    Normandy. The 84th Field Company of the British Royal Engineers at Sword Beach on the morning of 6 June, 1944. The two men in the foreground, a worried-looking soldier and a shouting corporal, are already walking on the sand. It may be the last picture ever taken of them, for the chances of survival on Sword Beach were at that point slim indeed. But it is the foreground of this first invasion photograph in particular that tells the story like a medieval painting: the landing craft in the morning mist, the men wading onto the beach – one bent double, another being helped along, a third running.
    Ernie Pyle described the situation two days later: ‘Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead.’ Beneath the waves lay hundreds of trucks and landing craft, often with crew and all, that hadn't made the beach. Of the thirty-two amphibious tanks, twenty-seven had sunk like bricks in the rough seas. The beach was covered in wrecked vehicles, and an entire set of office equipment had even spilled from one tracked vehicle, complete with hanging maps and crushed typewriters. ‘There is nothing left but the remains: the lifeless rubbish, the sun and the flowers, and the complete silence,’ Pyle wrote. ‘Everything was dead – the men, the machines, the animals …’
    Now I am walking those same beaches. All that is left to the naked eye are the concrete remains of two floating harbours, plus dozens