A BORDERLAND:

     Most of this story is based on actual events, checked easily enough in public records, but memoir is a notoriously unreliable genre, particularly when it relies on a child's memory. So, I tagged the tale as Historical Fiction, but before I begin, I wish to describe its location, the lovely French Province of Lorraine, an invasion route perhaps favored since the days when Homo Sapiens began its outbreeding and conquest of its local Neanderthal cousin. Much later the Mongols came by, from the farthest away I believe, but many eastern European tribes or conquerors traveled that way for one simple reason, it was easy going.

     Lorraine's relief is modest.  The province has nearly flat Champagne to its west and leans east on the easy slopes of the Vosges mountains, a chain of ancient, eroded mounds that drops onto Alsace, the narrow plain that borders the Rhine, itself a substantial river running from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea past the Netherlands harbor of Rotterdam.  To Lorraine's north, the rugged, forested ridges of the Ardennes are not easy to traverse and to its south the steeper Jura mountains and the Alps were nearly impassable to the migrants of yore.

     The northeastern fringe of Rome's Empire crossed Lorraine.  A cousin of my mother, a dowser, helped find the ruins of a Roman bath in a town a few miles from our family's village.  East of that border a Germanic people, the Alemanni were a harassing concern to Julius Cesar's legions, but when the Empire disintegrated, it was the Visigoths who devastated the region on their way to conquering Spain.  The list of local conflicts and traveling conquerors was long before the Prussian Emperor's forces invaded and appropriated Lorraine in 1870, but the defeat of the Kaiser's hordes in the First World War returned the Province to France.  Finally, Hitler's Wehrmacht occupied Lorraine again after its victorious blitzkrieg of 1940.

     Many have heard of Saint Nicholas, the kindly distributor of toys for children at Christmas time, but more obscure is his legendary rescue of the three small children an evil butcher was salting in his shop on the sly in Lorraine.  Many bloody conflicts were fought for control of an independent province that did not become a vassal of the French Kingdom until 1767. Conquering ⁰pleaders are usually painted riding stallions on hills overlooking battlefields, but a Duke of Burgundy, last seen on foot with sword in hand in the Battle of Nancy was found three days later, stripped naked by thieves and half eaten by wolves.  The birthplace and residence of warriors like Joan of Arc and Charles De Gaulle are popular destinations in Lorraine.

     Perhaps this history of violence has something to do with a saying about the natives of the place: "Lorrain Traitera Son Prochain" (A Lorrain will treat [badly] his fellow man.)  In my childhood days, and perhaps now still, every household had a rifle or two, carefully oiled and wrapped with its necessary ammunition, hidden in an attic or a barn for the next war.  As children we nosed here and there in old trenches and gun emplacements to score rifle and machine gun bullets, even two artillery shells that we dismantled for our fireworks extravaganzas on back roads.  Just out of the village we had a range behind an abandoned house where we practiced our skills with one of the rifles mentioned above.  After a complaint (bullets aren't always stopped by the trees or branches of a forest as we wrongly thought) the gendarmes came and confiscated our toy.  No consequence followed, the weapon came from the attic of the village's mayor and his grandson had filched it.  It was all a lot of fun, with no recorded casualty except for the minor burns a cousin suffered later while trying to fire a Tchekoslovakian pistol loaded with a bullet that did not fit quite right in the chamber.

     THE DAY I DID NOT DIE

     Until I passed that deadline, I was convinced that I was to die in an Aston Martin before my 30th birthday.  I certainly had chosen the right instrument for the occasion, this was before James Bond mind you, but my stepmother may well have saved my life.  "You will never own an Aston Martin," she told me.  It was not an encouraging statement to a kid yearning for fast cars years before he could consider a driver's license, but that was the way it was in France in those days.  The son of a bus driver might dream of a tin can Citroen like his father's, but British sports cars weren't in the cards.  My stepmother was right, I never owned an Aston Martin.

     I did however experience instances of life-threatening events on a scooter, as passenger in car wrecks and in later life while employed in the four-season harvests of commercial fishing, but the closest I bought the farm so to speak was on a twenty-sixth day of February, one month past my first or second birthday when a bullet came up through the floor and grazed my crib before escaping through the roof to parts unknown.

     In my family, stories of the past weren't favored over holidays gatherings unless they were about hunting or farming or blessings like my survival episode.  The story was told and re-told but I don't recall if the incident occurred in 1942, or 1943 and there is no one left in my family old enough to ask.  Anyhow, it was in the period of World War II when German occupation forces were quartered over the northern half of France.  In a small village in Lorraine my mother was the one teacher at the schoolhouse and thus was provided residence on its second floor with me, my sister and my grandmother who did the babysitting.  A small detachment of soldiers was quartered on the ground floor and one fine afternoon some yoyo set out to clean his Mauser and accidentally fired the round that could have killed me.  Fate intervened, I slept through the mishap, end of story.

     Some sixty years later my mother wrote about her traveling by train in May of 1940 to 'say goodbye' to my father who had been mobilized and mustered with thousand other conscripts in anticipation of the threatening war.  I am pretty sure they were separated, and their divorce was pending at the time, but she went and found him in a garrison city where a semblance of order may have been the best possible option there.  World War One had killed one out of five men of military service age, number two would probably match that number; a goodbye was certainly in order.  It took me several weeks after I read the letter before it dawned on me to match the dates.  May to January equals nine months.

     My mother also was a child of war.  She was born in 1916 of what we will call a dalliance between my grandmother and a young Artillery Captain who was bound to serve in Verdun, one of the killing fields of World War One.  He survived, but never knew he had a daughter.  An uncle of my mother died from the mustard gas destruction of his lungs while she was growing up.  Looking for glory in the family history I found in her village's civil records a relative who died of dysentery over the siege of Sebastopol, in the mid 1850s.  As recorded in the church marriage records of 1770, our earlier known ancestor was probably a Nordic mercenary granted land as reward for his service in conflicts over Lorraine's independence.  Me, I got lucky.  I served in Algeria without harm and when I came to the states I got a draft card like everyone else, but I wasn't called. It was Vietnam time.

     THE GREAT GAME

     It is not my intention to reflect on the psychological harm I may have suffered over my lifetime association with wars near and far, but presently, I would like to ask the many readers of writings about household trauma, depression, chemical intoxications and other maladies of our times to think about the images that keep appearing on our TV screens.  As I write, Ukraine has taken prominence over the images of Taliban fighters packing heat in the street of Kabul.  I haven't known of any serious discussion about whatever happened in that disaster beyond the scoring of political points, the whining about all that equipment abandoned in the sand and the making sure that the few million dollars of Afghan funds still at hand be distributed to deserving beneficiaries in the USA.

     The Great Game was popularized in 1901 by Rudyard Kipling with his best-selling novel 'Kim.'   The term had been coined by a British diplomat in 1840 to describe the moves by Russia and Great Britain over one's interests in India and the other's fear of conquests in Central Asia in the early 1800s.  Afghanistan, through no fault of its own, happened to be in the geographic middle of the 'Game.'  Although the term was made obsolete by an Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907, it returned to its popularity when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, but fell back to obscurity after the commitment of armed forces there by the US government some twenty years later.

     No political commentary is intended here, only a simple observation.  The Taliban fighters walking the street of Kabul today may have been on the receiving end from modern armies' artifacts for over forty years.  Their leaders were born when Elvis Presley was starting out and the Rolling Stones were sucking their thumb.  Their children will soon be playing with much better gear than my cousins and I once dug out of old military sites.

     Most important, is there somewhere a writer or two, or better two thousand, who will put to rest Rudyard Kipling's inane notion of an honorable destiny in the rivalry of great powers?

THE END

NOTE: This story's cover photograph is of the author and his sister behind the schoolhouse that was their domicile in 1944.  Their mother took the picture in what was left of the garden.