A few days ago I was in the company of thousands of young Americans in a field with sea views extending to the far horizons. Though it was late October the sky was clear and blue and though the Americans were young and visiting a foreign country they were quiet and ordered.

In fact they were too quiet: too ordered. They were in neat rows, one next to the other, in ranks as far as the eye could see. A stiff wind fluttered and cracked the causes they served and still serve, France and The United States, and though it has no flag – freedom.
I was at Colville-sur-Mer, the big US cemetery behind bloody Omaha beach, where farm boys from Kansas, Miners from West Virginia, and street-wise New Yorkers lay in ordered rows beneath the soil of Normandy.

Every one of those Crosses and Stars of David represented a young man, but also a mother and a father, sometimes a brother or a sister, a wife or a child whose life would never be the same. Thos young men had probably never heard of Europe before Pearl Harbour or of Normandy at New Year 1944.

We went into the museums. We heard sad voices read from final letters: letters full of the minutiae of life, asking of girlfriends, football teams and brood mares; letters that look forward to a life that would never be.

We went on to Dead Man’s Corner where a young Nazi aristocrat had fought off the 101st with experienced and motivated troops whose average age was seventeen and a half. This suggested to me that some were as young as fifteen or sixteen in 1944 and had been three or four in 1932 when Hitler was voted into power. However disgusting their cause they were hardly responsible for it and one can only the feelings of a school-boy looking skyward to see thousands of parachutes, everyone bearing a young man determined to kill you.
Or think of the mother who had voted for the Nazis thirteen years before! Would she ever forgive herself?

Anyway my point is, as a Brit, and a middle-aged one at that, is that our generation doesn’t fight wars: it just starts them, and that my continent has little room to preach or to hold the moral high ground when we, the Europeans, started the two bloodiest wars ever.