Sezanne,
Unknown artist – © Newspapers.com, reproduced with permission
This small French town of Sezanne is one of those places — like Crewe — that you are always passing through but somehow never get to know.
Three routes nationales converge on it like the spokes of a wheel. Stand in the middle of the dusty little Place de la Republique and you can take your pick.
You are exactly 111 kilometres east of Paris and 456 west of Strasburg. Drive 71 kilometres north to Rheims and you are in the champagne country. Due south and south-by-west the roads lie open to Orleans and Dijon.
Which means, in a sense, that Sezanne stands at the crossroads of France. Just as, in a quiet, modest sort of way, it could claim to stand on the cross-roads of history.
There was a strong-point here in the days of Roman Gaul.
It was destroyed three times — by Thibault of Champagne in the twelfth, by the English in the fifteenth, and by the Burgundians in the seventeenth centuries.
In 1814 it was occupied by the Russians, and in 1870 by the Prussians.
In 1914 it provided Marshal Joffre with a grandstand view of the Battle of the Marne. In the summer of 1940 it watched Rommel’s panzers rumble through; and four summers later woke up to welcome Patton’s Americans.
Nowadays, like a battle-scarred old pensioner it prefers to drowse in the sun, shuddering every few minutes as another truck driver takes the sharp left-turn into the Place de la Republique, grinds his gears, and roars on to Paris.
My apologies to the town’s Union Commerciale, Industrielle, et Artisanale, who beg me to:
“Visitez Sezanne. Ses Monuments. Son Industrie moderne. Ses panoramas incomparables.”
But I am not here to study the solid, rocklike grandeur of the parish church of Saint-Denis — which in any other country but France would deserve the rank of cathedral.
Nor am I here to visit the glassworks or the locomotive repair sheds, or the two sawmills, or the place where they make French chalk for half the tailors of France: nor yet just to sample the Hotel de France’s far-famed “coq au vin de Bouzy” (which my Guide Michelin advises me is worth a detour).
I am here to see how France honours a small-town hero.
His name was Rene Benoit. He was born here in Sezanne. And he was only 28 when he was killed trying to rally what was left of his company of colonial infantry caught in an ambush in Indo-China.
They brought his body home last year and he was buried with full military honours in the little cemetery on the hill.
And then the town paid his memory the supreme compliment. They named a street after him. There it is for all to see: Rue Capitaine Rene Benoit. In death the small-town boy who is remembered in the Café du Commerce as a “good type” who played a wicked game of billiards receives an honour usually reserved for ex-Prime Ministers and retired Presidents of the Republic.
I queried this at Saturday lunch in the Hotel-Restaurant du Lion D’Or, a solemn meal attended always by the town’s elder statesmen and presided over by a former Mayor who is also a retired regional director of the Department of Bridges and Highways, and therefore a man of importance.
It was the ex-Mayor who answered me.
“Perhaps, monsieur, there was nothing very special in the way he died. We old men who remember the Marne and the Somme knew that it was a good death, as death is understood in war. But then, we thought, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen have died that same good death. And what are they now? Just so many forgotten names on a thousand mouldering war memorials.
“We wanted Rene’s sacrifice to be somehow different. We wanted it to serve as an inspiration to his own generation. So that for the next 10 years or so a man would look up at that name on the street corner and say to himself: ‘I remember him. We did this or that or the other thing together. He was a good type. But somehow I never thought of him as a hero. He was such an ordinary sort of chap. Just like me, in fact.
“Perhaps it is different in England? Yours is a proud nation, too — who is not quite so proud as she was? But perhaps you have been spared the humiliation — the awful feeling of frustration — that follows when a great nation begins to find that she is not really so great after all?”
I said that even in England we are learning these things…
In a moment there was silence round the table: a silence suddenly broken by the rusty, hesitant voice of the oldest man in the room.
A little bent old man he was with the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre in his button-hole and one empty sleeve pinned neatly to his coat.
“When I was a young man we talked always of ‘la revanche’ (revenge). We were brought up to believe that Germany was our natural enemy and that we must sleep always with a gun under the pillow, as it were.
“Well, we had Germans billeted here during the war. And to our surprise they behaved like human beings. Then we began to hear and see some of the things that were happening in Germany. Old hates die hard, but the world has shrunk since I was a boy and we see things clearer than we used to. One of the things we see is that it’s no longer just a case of good Frenchmen and bad Germans but of men and women who must somehow learn how to live together if they are to live at all.
“Here in France we are beginning — slowly and painfully, it’s true — to learn that lesson. But I am worried, monsieur. We are a proud people. We are not used to going cap in hand to beg for favours. We cannot live on humble pie for ever.”
On Sunday afternoon I went with Rene’s widow and mother and brother-in-law to visit the grave itself.
Most of the town seemed to be there, too, dressed in stiff Sunday-best, enjoying the warm spring sunshine and the view across to the wooded slopes of the Grand Morin and beyond to the vineyards of Champagne.
It was a cheerfully formal occasion. For the French maintain a passionate interest in the formalities of death. Family pride demands that the monument to the dear departed shall rival, if it cannot outshine, its neighbours.
Rene rests in good company. For this is a military cemetery, too. Near him lie infanterie de la ligne, chasseurs d’afrique, and Marocaines who died before he was born.
There, too, are the British dead of World War 1 — 200 of them: their neat white headstones stiff on parade, keeping themselves to themselves under a simple English cross and a hedge of English yew.
Private Willis of the Cheshires, Piper Macdonald of the Seaforths, Corporal Goodall, of the Yorks and Lancs.
Tom Goodall was only 19 when he was killed on that July morning in 1918. Strange to think that had things been different he might have been a grandfather now…
As I walked back again into the town I noticed the flag over the post office was flying at half-mast. Some local dignitary passed away no doubt.
But to me it seemed to be a symbol of France still mourning half-forgotten far-off things and battles long ago.
Reproduced with permission
© 2024 Newspapers.com
Jerry F 2024
