When Attila returned to Asia after his invasion of Eastern Europe in the fifth century AD, he surely could not have conceived that the moniker of his army's conquering hordes, 'the Huns,' defined by Webster as "a savage and destructive people", would one day brand children amusing themselves over the family gatherings of my early years.  Then, while adults were crowning the delights of an holiday meal with generous helpings of Mirabelle, the local firewater, 'the Huns' were catching frogs at the brook in their Sunday shoes..., 'the Huns' were spooking a neighbor's girls with a snake..., 'the Huns' had dressed up a chicken with ribbons from a sewing basket...etc.

     The epithet had been rejuvenated by its stigmatizing of German soldiers in the First World War and it had aged well in Lorraine, an eastern province of France doomed by the accident of a level topography to suffer repeated invasions.  Perhaps Homo Sapiens walked about Lorraine in its subjugation of his Neanderthal cousins.  In recorded history, the Huns, the Vandals on their way to Spain and North Africa, the Frankish kings and various imperial armies traveled or fought over the region.  Last, so far, Hitler's hordes occupied Lorraine in the Second World War.

FAMILY TIES

     At holiday times, or celebration of the village's patron saint, my family and its relatives exiled to other areas of France by career or marriage reunited to enjoy interminable samplings of home cooking and stories from which the youngsters were happily excused after early dessert had been served at the children table.  The adults' libations lasted long in the afternoons and an obligatory statement prevailed when someone poured the last drops of a bottle of wine into a glass:  "Encore une que les boches n'auront pas!"  (Another one the Krauts—the Allemands-- the Germans won't get.)  The assumption, of course, was that "les boches" were coming back sooner or later.

     The irony lay in a long forgotten fact uncovered by my mother's search of Lorraine's archives.  Her family's first recorded marriage had taken place in a Catholic Church in 1770, joining in matrimony an Andre Helle and a Marie Lallemand.  The latter was most likely a descendant from another invading horde, the Alemanni, a Germanic people successor to the Huns and redoubtable challenger to the Roman Empire's eastern border that then split Lorraine. On her wedding day Marie may well have been welcomed to a sampling of French wine on our family premises, three centuries before my uncles and cousins' revanchist tirades.

     How about this Andre Helle, you might ask. The inquiry needs further research I will leave to my heirs though the name suggests origins in Scandinavia where folks often shared that last name as residents of a farm or a fief placed under the protection of the goddess Hella.

     In another riddle my father's last name, 'Ragot', is a distortion of 'Rogwarh,' also a Scandinavian name, now most commonly found in the United Kingdom's area of Yorkshire.  Go figure.  Over the eighteenth century's Thirty Year War, Lorraine was devastated in a conflict involving many interests.  My best guess is that mercenaries in the pay of a mingling king of Sweden could have been rewarded for their services with land grants in a depopulated countryside.

     Last, 'Uhlans!,' was another epithet to brand mischievous children in my post-diapers years. Those were mounted soldiers armed with lances in the German armies of the nineteenth century, victorious in an 1870 conflict that made Lorraine a Prussian vassal.

     Much genetic interference, perhaps with the hint of a taste for violence, is suggested in this tentative family history, but really, on a larger scale, what kind of mutts are we Europeans, conquerors of Asian, African, and South American kingdoms, migrant settlers and now lords of Christopher Columbus' find, the West Indies vastness?

     HIS NAME WAS FRITZ

     In May of 1940 the latest Huns, or Ulhans, or more precisely the Wermacht's Mounted Divisions behind their Panzers, found an easier than usual path to Paris via Belgium, thus circumventing the Ligne Maginot, the French defensive installation along the Rhine river.  By the day of my birth in January 1941 France was occupied and my father was toiling in Germany as a prisoner of war.  On the home front in a small village in Lorraine, my grandmother, sister and I were lodging with my mother on the second floor of the school where she was a teacher.  A detachment of German soldiers bunked in one of the two classrooms below and that's when I found myself in the line of fire at a very young age.  I have no recollection of the incident since I slept soundly as a bullet sailed by my crib after the mishandling of his rifle by one of our guests downstairs.  So I was told in later years.

     By the fall of 1944 Paris had been liberated and the Allied Forces were fighting their way east, ever closer to Lorraine.  Bombers were passing high over our village on their way to German cities and an occasional dogfight between fighter planes would litter the ground with the gaily decorated cartridges of spent tracing rounds.  We were not watching the acrobatics however, we were underground where the sirens had sent us. There were two levels of alert, first a warning to shelter in our own cellar just about every evening, then, sometimes, a higher level screech that meant that we had to immediately seek refuge in the crypt of the church across the street.

     For convenience we had a wooden door set on sawhorses for our evening meal in the cellar, usually a garden offering of potatoes and carrots with peas or green beans from glass jars. Under a light bulb hanging from its wire, plates were set before five chairs for my grandmother, my mother, my sister and I.   And Fritz.

     I remember him as a very young man, a kid almost.  I learned later that in the closing months of the war the Wermacht had called to military service both old and very young men to garrison in places where fighting skills might not be required.  Like our cellar.  Perhaps my grandmother and my mother regarded Fritz as just another child from some farm on the other side of the Rhine and took pity on him enough to share our veggies although his uniform made him an enemy.  Everyone knew by then that troops and tanks were coming.  Fritz would be toast.

     That ordinary night my grandmother had something special in mind to crown our potato repast.  From a dark corner of the cellar she brought a quart-jar of mirabelles and set it below the light bulb.  Mirabelles are a kind of plum that does very well in Lorraine.  They are delicious fresh from the tree, in pies, jams, preserves and, famously, that local firewater.  I can still picture the glass jar of golden plums under the light, it was the last one from the summer harvest.  That's when the high alert sirens set off their blaring and we ran to the church under a roar of engines passing above. The crypt had stairs leading to the outside through a set of flap doors, opened for ventilation, or a quick exit.  Outside, a soldier with a rifle at the shoulder walked back and forth below the stars.  There were explosions in the distance.  Their sounds were random in volume and spacing, picking up sometimes in series.  Years later I was to hear them again on a direct television link to the bombing of Baghdad.  It filled me with dread.

     Eventually, the sirens blared again to let us go home.  The cellar was as we had left it, the light still on, Fritz nowhere to be seen, the quart-jar on the table, empty.

     Memories of seething anger and fury blend with the firefights that came over the next few days.  There was a soldier laid below our front window.  Why doesn't he get up?  It fascinated me.  Although my grandmother and my mother tried to keep me away from the window, I kept going back to it.  The soldier stayed there a week or more, it wasn't Fritz.  No one would touch the corpse, peoples were afraid to be blamed, if the Germans came back.  Eventually the Allied appeared in that unimportant village. They took the dead man and went on their way.

     And winter came, a particularly severe one. Much later, a country doctor from Eastern Maine would tell me he had never shivered as badly as he had in that darn place;  he was stationed some thirty kilometers from our village.  Now that the fighting had moved on, guns came out of the haylofts or the barns where they had been hidden over the occupation.  It was like a tradition in rural Lorraine, you have to keep something handy for the next one.  Old men and boys were headed for the woods.  After four years of no-gunplay-allowed, hunting was bound to be good.  I recall big fires on the snow, meat turning on spindles.  I did not care, I was longing for my mirabelles.

     It took decades for me to shed that hatred.  In school I kept drawing cartoons of fat German soldiers with bayonets on rifles standing on mounds of trash labeled KULTUR.  Years passed and one day I thought of Fritz who didn't run to shelter with his loot.  Uncaring, or ready to be blasted to smithereens he sat in the cellar, eating those fruits, savoring a taste of home perhaps, and he left the jar for my grandmother to re-use.  That's the way we did things.

I hope that Fritz survived the war, and when I read the news of some conflict or massacre, I ache for the children who will grow up with hatred in their heart.

THE END