In my beginning is my end

Abstract

Near Bayeux, France, the site of the massive D-Day invasion of World War II, there is a small British cemetery. It holds the remains of British soldiers who fell a generation earlier, liberating France during the First World War. A Latin inscription on the monument translates approximately as "To the fallen conquered who liberated their conquerors from conquest." When I visited it was unclear whether the monument was built by the British, which seems more plausible, or the French, which would have been a bit gauche. Nevertheless, it expresses gratitude to the fallen inhabitants of an island, England, conquered a thousand years earlier by the ancestors of the modern French, who had returned to free them from German occupation. It is a noble sentiment that tries to place the recent sacrifices and deaths into the mutual history of the two countries-no hard feelings about Napoleon and Waterloo, in other words. Of course, the ignored third nation, Germany, was not merely defeated but punished in multiple ways, particularly by heavy reparations, with the Treaty of Versailles. Not much more than a decade after the Bayeux monument was built, those reparations helped give rise to great suffering and unrest among the German people. And it led to their unfortunate turn toward a blood and soil Nazi ideology that put all three nations through perhaps even worse experiences, all over again. © 2012 Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved.