Barbara Presnell: In France, every day is Memorial Day
My husband, Bill, and I are sitting in a restaurant in Verdun, France, in a tiny café called Romeo and Giulietta. The only person here who speaks English is a matchstick of a woman with hair too black to be natural and tattoos scrolling her arms, but she’s older than the other servers and seems to be in charge. It’s a cozy place, tables only inches apart, and on both sides of us are couples deep into conversations we can’t understand. We think we’ve ordered two large pizzas exactly the same, because of a communication failure between us and the French-only blond-haired server. We’re sipping water—still, not gas—from a glass bottle and drinking Coke.
Back home, when I’ve told friends we’re going to Verdun, the typical response has been, “What’s in Verdun?” Who goes to Verdun? Lots of people, if we understand correctly our French B&B host, Ricardo, a fresco artist with an obsession for Scarlett Johansson. But in the two years since he’s
operated his B&B, called “La Maison de L’Artiste,” he’s only hosted two other Americans. “This is good,” he tells us. “I need to practice my English.”
In 1916, Verdun was the site of one of the longest, bloodiest, and most ferocious battles of the first World War, when France fought off a German attempt to move into this country and overtake Paris. Casualties were severe: 300,000 people died over ten months of fighting. The town itself became a battleground, and outside the city proper, villages were completely leveled. Many of those were never rebuilt. At the Verdun battlefield and memorial site on the west side of town, remains of those villages, along with deep trenches and sites off-limits to visitors because of the potential for explosives still in the ground, are visible to tourists like us driving through in cars.
A few years later, in 1918, fierce fighting again erupted around Verdun when American forces joined with other Allied countries to stop the German invasion. My grandfather was one of those American soldiers, was in one of those trenches.
We are here in this place with one purpose: to find the gravesite of my husband’s cousin, Lt. Samuel Reeves Keesler, Jr., who was shot down over Verdun in October 1918, captured by Germans, died two days later, and is buried at the American Cemetery in Saint-Mihiel just outside of Verdun. Tomorrow, we’ll head out in our rented car into the French countryside, roadsides lined with brilliant yellow fields of colza and more cows than we can count.
But tonight we are exhausted. The knee that has been plaguing me since we began this trip is throbbing, and Bill is well beyond his “witching hour,” when he needs food desperately. I’m resting my elbow on the table, wondering if I’ll be able to walk back to the car, thankful for what I hope will be one more good night’s sleep, when something familiar tickles my ears. I perk up, pay attention. Then I hear it, clear as if I’m back in my college dorm room, that familiar, American voice I so love belonging to none other than Lesley Gore.
“It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to,” she sings over the speakers. “You would cry too if it happened to you.”
Lesley Gore’s popularity in American culture was technically before my time, but I inherited a vinyl album of her greatest hits from my brother. In college, when we should have been studying, my roommate Nancy and I would drink too much, put Lesley Gore on the stereo, and begin to sing, loud, jumping up on our beds, holding pretend mikes, laughing, throwing back our would-be1964s flip-curl hairdos, making such a racket that dorm neighbors from up and down the hallway would bang on our door and tell us to stop. We loved it.
During the years that Lesley Gore—Jewish, feminist, and lesbian—was singing of heartbreak and teenage angst, young men were plodding the jungles of Vietnam, fighting a different foreign war. Despite her success as a seemingly mindless blond party girl, Gore was in reality an activist whose song,
“You Don’t Own Me,” became an anthem for women’s rights groups across the country. I wish I’d known her whole story in the 1970s when Nancy and I were jumping on beds and singing. Instead, I was embracing the teenage American girl in me, and mocking the very social expectations I was owning for a night.
Does anyone in this restaurant, I wonder, in this war-wrecked and rebuilt French village, have any idea who Lesley Gore was or understand the words she is singing or her place in American culture? One other couple is staying at La Maison de L’Artiste, and over croissants and coffee the next morning, we talk about the war. At least, we try, because they don’t speak English either. Through hesitant and awkward translation by Ricardo, we learn that their grandparents were also part of the French effort to push back the Germans. As we leave, headed off in search of Saint-Mihiel, the woman says, in clear English, “Thank you.”
Thank yous are everywhere. At the Butte de Montsec memorial site, which resembles the Lincoln Memorial and sits high on a hill overlooking Verdun, the English-speaking guard, who explains with regret that there is no bathroom yet, since the site is still under construction, tells my husband, “But there are woods. If you go down the hill from the monument, you will see.” Bill is grateful.
And later, at the cemetery, we are greeted enthusiastically by the superintendent, who joins us at the gravesite with flags both French and American and is genuinely glad for our visit. Groundskeepers are busy preparing this site of over 4000 graves of American men and women for a Memorial Day celebration. “Even the ambassador is coming,” he tells us, proudly.
Back home this weekend, Americans will be flying flags and decorating graves, but mostly, they’ll be enjoying backyard barbecues, beer, and opening day of swimming pools. We share more than Cokes and Lesley Gore with our European brothers and sisters. To this American, there’s something saner, slower, and more gracious about our neighbors across the ocean. But when I stepped off the airplane, back on American soil, I have never been so glad to be home.
So, God bless us all, the heroes and the forgotten, the ancestors and the aggressors, the children then and now, the historians and the clueless. On all continents, in all countries and neighborhoods, let’s work for peace, let’s accept everyone, let’s live together. Let’s do it for all the Sam Keeslers who, unlike me, never got to come back home.
