Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

44 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER No. 4 1944 C.B.C. Talk on Visit to Normandy and Brittany By John Grierson Two Sundays ago I was driving in a jeep from ■*■ Britanny to a Canadian encampment near Caen. This was the day before the great Canadian breakthrough from Caen toward Falaise. Going south in the morning, we had kept to the main roads through Bayeux, St. Lo, Ville Dieu, Avranches, Pontoison to the very shadow of St. Malo. They were stiff with convoys of trucks and guns and tanks and what seemed a hundred solid miles of armoured might — rumbling like the wrath of God through the gentle countryside to the front. Air Command was complete. The dust of war spread a fine white powder over the apple trees. To-night we were keeping to the country lanes. It was one of these beautiful evenings which everyone who knows France will remember to the end of their days — the old, quiet Normandy of rich cornfields, large cows and large horses, straight scraggy hedges of poplar, elm and willow, quiet ready streams, orchards, soft gray farmyards — and as we sped along, a mere mile or two outside the terrible tide of war, the contrast seemed strange and unreal. There were the people we used to know, taking their evening walk, en famille, dressed in their best Sunday black. The cows were in the fields. The geese marched with stately waddle across the road. An occasional finely-chiselled chateau with its walled garden shot a graceful salute from the 17th century into the evening light. But there was a deep connection, too, between this peaceful scene and the war beyond, for as we passed, each and every group stopped on their way and took off their hats and waved to us frantically, and the children were held high up in their parents' arms and waved too. This jeep of ours, with its great white star, was in its very minor way, a symbol of liberation. Destruction That is the dreadful paradox in France to-day. The armies are smashing their way through the French towns and villages, and cannot always take account of the things they must destroy. Caen is in ruins. St. Lo is a pile of rubble. The centre of Avranches has been torn out. The people have lost much. They have lost their relations and their property. In the worst places, they have to build their life again from the very foundations. And yet, as I saw it, their liberation so dearly paid for means more to them than anything else. In the north, amongst the ruins, the reaction is a trifle subdued as in all humanity you might expect. In the south, where the Americans have swept quickly through without so much opposition, the reaction is delirious. It has been so delirious that in many places the people have rushed out to meet the oncoming Americans even before the Germans have gone from the other end of the street, and they have been shot at and killed by the Germans in the very moment of their freedom. I spoke to many who were sad, but to none who were not eager and friendly. Down in the south they lined the main roads all day long. One had the impression that they felt a compulsion to salute each and every vehicle that passed through. They used the two-fingered sign of La Victoire. Everybody did. And every man that could do so, paraded the old steel helmet of France, as sign and symbol that the warrior spirit of France needed only this occasion to assert itself in its old glory' The name of de Gaulle was on the people's lips, everywhere. I found these things vastly moving, and so I think did every soldier. There was an air of simple, deep understanding between these common people from different lands, that after all the mistakes and misunderstanding of the past, I never expected to see. Here, some Canadian soldiers were helping an old woman retrieve scraps of bedding and furniture from her ruined home. There, a homesick soldier from the prairies in his time off was giving a peasant a hand with his crops. On a doorstep, and I assure you, not for the cameras, another soldier sat nursing a baby, to remind him of his own, back home. A field kitchen in a farmyard cooked for its troops right alongside a Frenchwoman with an outdoor fire preparing her mid-day meal. A Canadian correspondent sat on the wall of a millstream tapping out something for his newspaper, while a small French boy with puckered forehead looked over the correspondent's shoulder as he typed. Soldiers washed their clothes happily and sang by a hedgerow, while only a hundred yards down the road the women at the village washing-pool chattered and beat their clothes to death in the time-old way. You will not wonder if I bring you back this message from one of the towns I passed through. There the people were kind enough to give me a meal, and I tell you cheerfully that it included a French omelette as big as a house, with local cider to wash it down and a fine de maison. But what was perhaps more wonderful was that in the midst of it a group of local people came to the door. The leader asked was it true that I had just arrived all the way from Canada. I said yes, it was, and he made a speech and everyone applauded and he asked me when 1 got home I please say: Que Ies francais aiment bien les Canadiens (that the French are very fond of the Canadians). Before I went to France General Stuart told me that I would be carried away by the spirit of the troops. I found that it is a proud thing to be part of a victorious Army, but a prouder thing still to be part of a liberating Army. We have obviously entered upon something more than a military operation. We have entered upon an international crusade and I only hope we shall forever keep it that way. War organisation But this itself could not have come about without the complex organisation which modern war demands. The other most vivid memory I have of France to-day is of the cool, precise preparation and planning at Canadian Headquarters — of the disposition and timing of bombers and fighters, tank brigades and infantry, of the vast supply columns of shells and bombs, oil and food, bridge parts and assault boats, bulldozers, steamrollers, cement mixers and telegraph poles, and a hundred other complicated and crazy gadgets which I knew nothing about. They have made a deep-sea port in the short matter of a week or two from the bare sea-swept beaches on which we landed. Miles of deep water harbourage have appeared by magic, in what must have been one of the most gigantic feats of engineering ever undertaken by the British Navy. The weight of material that pours off the transport ships by day and night is on a scale that defies the imagination. It pours over the roads and occupies in many places every hedgerow and every field. Somewhere there is a master plan, moving it, the men and the machines, to a pattern of action and a time-table of achievement. All I can say, as a layman, is that everything seemed to know where it was going, and was going there fast. . . . For myself, I come back with the thought of France more dear to me than ever. I have seen a statue to the future of France stand up unharmed from a heap of ruins. I have looked out again from the top of Mont. St. Michel. On the wall beside me a German notice said achung. ACHTUNG, THE ENEMY IS LISTENING. It was the last remainder. For the guns were booming over the bay where the citadel of St. Malo was falling, and everywhere I looked from that mighty cathedral, France was French again. NEWS LETTER ONE SHILLING VOLUME 5 NUMBER 4 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER stands for the use of film as a medium of propaganda and instruction in the interests of the people of Great Britain and the Empire and in the interests of common people all over the world. DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER is produced under the auspices of Film Centre, London, in association with American Film Center. New York. Owned and published by FILM CENTRE LTD. 34 SOHO SQUARE LONDON W.I GERRARD 4253