I've tried to send this image of the cover of my new book to various friends, but it often doesn't work (I suspect they are using a PC...). So here it is for everyone to see. A prize for anyone who can spot the problem with the photo on the front cover... If you click, you should be able to see a larger version.
In W H Auden's poem "In memory of W B Yeats", he describes how "the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse".
I just learned of the death of an old friend and comrade of mine, Bill Ford. Bill could be infuriatingly pedantic (not surprising - he was a translator, after all), but he was incredibly generous, and great company. I spent many afternoons watching rugby round his and Helene's flat in Paris, drinking beer and eating saucisson sec. For five years we worked together incredibly closely, trying to build the small left-wing group he'd founded in France, Pouvoir Ouvrier. He eventually dropped out in 1989, and I think the last time I was in contact with him was a few years ago when I sent him a copy of a review of the English-language edition of the memoirs of his father-in-law, Paul Steinberg. The proof that we were completely out of touch is that he died in July, and I only just heard about it. There was an excellent obituary in The Scotsman (reproduced here), probably written by his pal, the BBC journalist Gordon Brewer. I learnt quite a bit from this, including that he was a close friend of Gordon Brown, although their politics could scarcely have been further apart! I must now find the right words to write to Helene. Ciao, Bill. I told you the cigarettes were bad for you.
[This is an article I wrote for the LA Times. They liked it, but felt it didn't make enough of a point to be worth publishing. You decide.]
65 years ago today, one of the first blows that led to D-Day and the Liberation of France was struck. At 2am on 13 March 1943, French Resistance fighters led by dissident Communist Georges Guingouin used stolen dynamite to blow up a railroad viaduct – the first large-scale action by the Resistance.
Guingouin’s small band wanted to disrupt the forced transport of young Frenchmen to work in Germany, made obligatory under the Labor Conscription law. One Nazi bright spark predicted that labor conscription “would, by itself, disorganise the army of resistance”. He could not have been more wrong.
During the previous three years, the Resistance had been built slowly through a series of local initiatives. Initially, de Gaulle and the tiny Free French forces in London were scornful of these small groups of civilians who were producing underground newspapers and daubing slogans on walls. De Gaulle remained unmoved by the terrible risks involved in carry out even such simple actions.
But London came to realise that the Resistance could provide an important base of support to the eventual Allied landings, on condition that it was disciplined and under the control of the Free French. Having united the various resistance groups and assured their loyalty to de Gaulle, London wanted the impatient Resistance fighters to wait until D-Day and the arrival of Allied troops.
Labor conscription changed the careful calculations made by the Free French and the Allies. Faced with the prospect of going to work in Germany for two years, many young men simply took to the hills. And then they looked to the Resistance to feed them, protect them, organise them and arm them.
A new word soon entered the French language, a Corsican term for mountainous scrubland – maquis – describing both the place where the groups of men where living in the mountains, and the groups of men themselves. With amazing rapidity, the maquis soon spread throughout the country. Guingouin’s group – the first of the maquis bands – soon swelled from less than dozen to over 2,000 strong.
Thanks to the Nazis’ new policy, the Resistance changed from being a tiny minority that produced propaganda, into a much larger force, actively supported by the population. What the maquis still lacked was appropriate weaponry, in sufficient quantities. Stolen dynamite was not enough.
Supplies eventually arrived, through the bravery of the agents of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), who were parachuted into France and ran intelligence and sabotage circuits – Churchill said their role was to “set Europe aflame”. After D-Day, links with the maquis were made through three-man “Jedburgh” teams, composed of agents from SOE, the US Office of Strategic Services and from Free French Intelligence.
By the first half of 1944, Guingouin’s group controlled a huge area of the countryside around Limoges. After D-Day, the 20,000 strong maquis harassed German divisions storming north to attack the Allied troops in Normandy, delaying their progress and gaining valuable time for the bridgehead. After the war, decorated by both de Gaulle and King George VI, and thanked by Eisenhower for his contribution, Guingouin briefly became Mayor of Limoges before eventually returning to his peacetime job of a schoolteacher. He died in 2005.
The Nazis called the Resistance “terrorists” because they blew up railway bridges, shot German soldiers, and on a few occasions even planted bombs in cinemas frequented by soldiers. For the Nazis, Resistance fighters had no right to prisoner of war status because they were civilian combatants. They would disappear without trace into the hell of the Nazi prisons, where they were treated with terrible brutality – from beatings, through water-boarding, up to a bullet in the back of the neck. It is one of the sharp ironies of history that a decade later, having won their own liberation, the French adopted similar policies faced with the Algerian independence movement.
Now, the struggle of the Resistance is self-evident, and the Nazi characterisation of their actions as “terrorism” seems outrageous. This shift in popular perception of political movements has occurred many times – in the past, Margaret Thatcher and many other world leaders described Nelson Mandela as a “terrorist”.
All of which raises the question: as history rolls on, which of today’s “terrorists” will be transformed into “freedom fighters” or even beloved statesmen? Will the insurgents fighting against the occupation of Iraq be widely perceived as heroes, legitimate opponents of an unjust and brutal violation of their national rights, using whatever means are necessary to liberate their country? Given the deliberate targeting of civilians, as part of an apparent plan to foment civil war, it seems probable that at least sections of the insurgency will be forever beyond the pale. Only history will tell. And that, of course, depends who writes that history.
The Zoological Society of London has given me the Thomson-Zoological Record Award for Science Communication, for my book The Egg and Sperm Race (published in the US as Generation).
I am very proud of this, and extremely grateful to the ZSL!
