Happy Fourth of July
Fourth of July Picnic, Rogers, Arkansas ca. 1904
Here in the United States, we’re heading into the July 4th holiday–a holiday that expands or contracts depending on where in the week in falls. It’s also a holiday where the meaning of what we are celebrating is often lost in the celebration itself.
In the past I’ve used this post to remind all of us of the ideal which stands at the core of who we are:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This year, I’d like to remind you of another quotation from our history, the words written on the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! “
Over the years, we’ve had trouble living up to both ideals. Over the years, some heroic figures have fought to keep them alive.
Picnics, fireworks and barbecue are nice. Civil rights are better.
Road Trip Through History: The Falaise Pocket and The Long Legacy of Battle
The final day of our tour of Normandy was spent on the critical engagement known as the Falaise Pocket or Falaise Gap, Between August 12 and August 21, Allied forces, including exiled Polish forces who had taken refuge in Britain after the Germans invaded Poland, encircled the German Seventh Army in a pocket around the city of Falaise.
Unlike many of the operations of the Battle of Normandy, which are often told in terms of the heroic actions of small groups or individuals in the midst of chaos, the events of the Falaise Pocket lend themselves to clear descriptions of troop movements. Allied troops surrounded 100,000 of Hitler’s best troops in a pincer movement: United States forces moving south and east while British, Canadian, and Polish forces moved in from the North. The delay of American troops created a brief opening, the Falaise gap, through which some 50,000 German troops fought their way free. The two thousand man 1st Polish Armored Division captured Hill 262, in the middle of the bottleneck, and held it against overwhelming odds against German forces for two days and nights until relieved by Canadian troops. It was a thrilling story, even though I am not generally a fan of military history reduced to troop movements.
After driving through the Dives valley where the battle of the Falaise Pocket occurred we stopped at a small private museum, the Mémorial de Montormel, located on a hill overlooking the battlefield. The museum told the story of the battle in three different forms: on a contoured table map with lights representing the various troops movements,* in a brief film, and as a personal narrative told by the museum director while we stood at an enormous picture window looking out over the valley where the battle occurred.
The director’s account brought the battle back to the human level, and reminded us that even liberation leaves horror in its wake. General Eisenhower described the events at Falaise as “one of the greatest killing grounds that any sector of the war has ever experienced… forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap, it was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.” The museum director made it clear that the effects lasted more than forty-eight hours. He described land cloaked first with a layer of black flies and later with a white layer of maggots. It was two years before the people of the Dives Valley could plant crops again because the ground water was polluted with the corpses of dead men and dead horses.** Twenty years later, contractors were still removing scrap metal left from the battle. I can’t say it too often: war is ugly.
*I thought it was excellent. My Own True Love thought it was confusing. Just so you know.
**We tend to think of World War II as highly mechanized, but horses still played an important role and died in battle. More than 10,000 horses were killed in the Falaise Pocket alone.
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Before I abandon the invasion of Normandy for other historical topics, I want to recommend a museum on the other side of the Channel which deals with the invasion from another perspective: the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth. The museum does an excellent job of portraying both preparations for D-Day and the invasion itself, but it is not “just” a military museum. A significant portion of the exhibit focuses on social history of the period, looking at bombing raids, women in the workforce, black outs, evacuation and rationing as experienced in Portsmouth. I was particularly taken by the oral history element of the museum: the museum not only provided book after book of first hand accounts for the visitor to read, it also played recordings of those accounts in the relevant sections of the museum. The centerpiece of the museum is the Overlord Embroidery: a 272-foot long embroidery commissioned as an answer to the Bayeux Tapestry. Pretty spectacular.
Road Trip Through History: The Bayeux “Tapestry”
I played hooky from the tour on the second day devoted to D-Day because I wanted to visit the Bayeux Tapestry,(1) (Which is actually a work of embroidery. Just saying.) The group was scheduled to see the tapestry several days later, but I was sure I would want to spend more time than was officially allotted. (I’m almost as fascinated by needlework as I am by history. ) I am so glad I did. If truth be told, I would have happily made a third visit. Because, wow!
I have read a great deal about the tapestry over the years. But nothing had prepared me for the real thing. Plates don’t do justice to the skill of the needleworkers or the power of the images. And quite frankly, I was never able to get a feel for the scale of the work (224 feet long and 20 inches high, more or less.) Made with only ten colors and four stitches,(2) the work is both historical document and artistic masterpiece. The central panel tells the story of how William came to conquer England, focusing on the actions of Harold Godwinson in Normandy that lead to the Battle of Hastings. The battle itself appears only in the final scenes, appropriate because in this version of the story it is the end of the narrative. An upper border includes Latin text describing the action below and Roman numerals that mark the transition to each scene. A border on the bottom edge is filled with the embroidered equivalent of marginalia: tales from Aesop’s fables and details of daily life in eleventh century Normandy.
The images manage to be both stylized and realistic. (In fact, the boat building scenes are a major source for students of medieval navies.) Realistic details bring events to life: it never occurred to me to wonder about how soldiers got from the boat to the shore until I saw images of Harold Godwinson wading barefoot through the surf in France. (If you look closely, you’ll see that the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans have very different haircuts. The Anglo-Saxons wore their hair relatively long; the Normans wore their hair in a modified Mohawk.(
The museum itself is well designed. The tapestry is exhibited in a darkened, climate controlled room designed to protect it.(3) You walk its length with an audio tour that narrates the story as told in the tapestry, linked to the scene numbers that are part of the embroidery. Displays upstairs explain the construction of the tapestry and put it in context. An excellent film tells the story of William’s claim to the throne (4) and describes the conundrums surrounding its construction. (We don’t know who commissioned the work or where it was made.)
In truth, the tapestry, er embroidery, could have been hung along the wall of Bayeux Cathedral, as it was for two weeks each year for centuries, with no modern display aids and I would have been entranced.
1) And a local bookstore and a pair of shoes that had screamed my name every time we walked past them in the store window. The bookstore visit was a success—bookstores in foreign countries are eternally fascinating as far as I’m concerned. (What English language books do they carry? What do the covers of my friends’ books look like in a foreign edition? Plus the cookbooks, the children’s books, the history books, all the other books…) The shoes were a bust—they didn’t carry my size. Story of my shoe-shopping life.
2) Stem stitch, chain stitch, split stitch, and a variation of satin stitch known as “Bayeux stitch” LINK? (In case any fellow embroiderers are reading this, it is a variation of laidwork.)
3) Making me wonder why France would even consider lending the tapestry to England. The mere act of moving it would cause damage.
4) Told from the French perspective, Harold Godwinson is a usurper and an oathbreaker.