The Bayonne Diaries

Saint Jean Pied-de-Port

Ramblings

To think that hobnailed boots had marched, one goose-step after another, across this bridge on which I stood over the Nive to the citadel of Saint Jean-Pied-de-Port, is a chilling thought. Armies march, that’s what they do and the last time they marched into this hub of Basque resistance was in 1940.

I don’t know what I’m talking about. I mean to say that I wasn’t there. I look over this landscape and it is impossible to think that any army could hold territory here…. But they did, and they did it with a brutality that is hard to imagine in Europe since then. But it has happened in Syria… it has happened in Iraq & Afghanistan to some degree… and it is happening in Ukraine as I sit comfortable in beautiful area of France that was once occupied.

Occupied is a strange word for it. The occupied in an occupation aren’t employed or busy in the sense that they are occupied. No the occupied are oppressed. Oppressed is a better word for what happens. Ideas described as total war makes it easier not to confuse terms. 

Across an ocean from the USA it is another world that we haven’t seen in our home since the 1860s. We are disturbed by minor inconveniences and our social disintegration can be attributed to the luxury we can take for granted. I don’t think Europeans can afford that. 

Total war is the best way to understand the NAZIs and total war is also best to understand the Resistance. War is a horrible thing that is engaged with a brutal force the Islamic terrorist of the later 10th century grasp too. Not even with the most oppressive regimes it fails unless followed through all the way and all the way means genocide. Each child that survives the massacre of its parents, its brothers, its sisters, uncles, aunts, and grandparents… each of these don’t forget and will not submit. And so it goes on from one generation to another. Geneva Conventions and rules of engagement are but speed bumps in such matters.

 Look at Putin’s army in Ukraine. He will not stop until he is assassinated or dies of the bile of his contempt.

I have no plan about how to write about this but I am compelled to write something of this region. It pains me to add more to what I’ve already written. Some of the fiction doesn’t match the reality of the landscape. How would my appraisal of the Maquis during the war years compare to what I see. I want to commit these places to memory.

Shit, I don't know what I'm talking about.