ONE television news image from last year haunts me: it is a French legionnaire being carried on a stretcher, apparently, with spinal injuries from a sniper attack in Bosnia. His Polynesian face was expressionless; his dark eyes alone glowed with fires of anger. What would be his future? Would it be in the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, which was built more than 300, years ago to house old or injured soldiers?
The Invalides is attached to one of France's most fascinating museums, the Musee de l'Armee, which is as interesting for what it excludes as what it contains: they tell us a great deal about mythology of the French identity. For the man who is the heart and the soul of the museum, who is its hero and its inspiration, is the man who brought ruin to France, to its armies, and to countless peoples across Europe and to the very rim of Asia - Napoleon Bonaparte.
Myth is the most amazing creature; nobody is greater proof of this than Napoleon, and no event is as immune to, popular historical analysis as the event which enabled him indulge his megalomaniac fantasies, the French revolution. Even Irish hearts grow soft at the mention of the French revolution, though it brought about the extinction of Irish influence in Paris and the muder of many of the most celebrated members of the Irish community. In their loyalty to king and creed, foi et roi, the Irish exiles were butchered.
Irish Victims
The living Irish were not the only Irish victims of the terror and the mad year zeroism which consumed France, and which was to be the model for every totalitarian experiment ever since, from Lenin to Pol Pot. The great monasteries of France were levelled as cruelly and as wickedly as any of the degradations in Ireland by Cromwell and Henry VIII - and many of these institutions were founded by that extraordinary band of Irish missionaries who spread Christianity through the empire of Charlemagne and beyond and all were sold off as rubble to local speculators, their communities butchered or dispersed. Yet despite this deplorable record, many people think fondly of the French revolution and the tyrant which followed; that tyrant remains the inspiration for the French army, though he led it from calamity to disaster to virtual extinction.
As you might expect, the Musee de lArmee, is a superb testimony to the army of Bonaparte, and to its royal predecessors. It contains thousands of the most dazzlingly beautiful military uniforms, of lancer and dragoon, hussar and cuirassier, musketeer and halbardier; and suits of armour of quite spectacularly brilliant and elegant design. We tend to think of the arms race as being an evil invention of the 20th century; but here is proof of the vast investments all states have always placed in military hardware.
Lifetime's Earnings
The armour worn by a medieval knight must have been worth the lifetime's earnings of a dozen peasants and more; and through the 18th century, the French army requipped its soldiers with fresh muskets, of elaborate design and beautifully made, every two years. The deplorable truth is that mankind is most pioneering and inventive when developing techniques of death, although of course, we lie about this in archaeology. We call the flint devices found at the sites of austropilethecus africanus "tools". They were of course weapons for beating out the not very large brains of our fellow austropiletheci.
If ever we need proof that mankind is addicted to violence and to the means of inflicting it, the Musee de l'Armee provides it, as it provides also valuable insights into the role of mythology. For though the armies of the many Louis who governed France merit hall upon hall upon hall, the great military events of French history barely merit a mention. The first World War and second World Wars are accorded just a couple of rooms, and the calamitous events in Algeria and Vietnam receive no mention at all. They apparently have been airbrushed from the collective military memory in the way the faces of Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were removed from group pictures during Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union.
Unbearable Cost
The truth is that some events, are so painful and the consequences so enduring that they cannot be honestly contemplated; and the wars of this century have proved to be so for the French. The first World War was won at an unbearable cost, from which France could, never recover and never will and the other wars, all after effects of the Great War, were lost at hideous cost to both the French and more, significantly, their enemies. It is a history of suffering which nobody could contemplate without unbearable pain. Better still to lose oneself in fantasy in the superbly appointed imperial theme park of the 18th and 19th centuries; history as entertainment and delusion amid the massed ranks of flintlocks, matchlocks and arquebuses.
Of course, lives were led and lost to create that delusion lives we know nothing about. One of the few Irish artifacts in the Musee de l'Armee is an odd flag bearing a green saltire upon a what appears to be a cross of St George. It was apparently the banner borne by the clan Carthy when they gave their loyalty to France after the Treaty of Limerick. And in the far corner of the museum is the uniform of a British commando, as worn by a member of the Free French Forces in 1944; the name of that young French commando, we learn, was a Lieutenant MacCarthy. The same family?
The Hotel des Invalides is still a military hospital. As we left the Musee de l'Armee, we could see young soldiers on crutches hobbling in the sun. A mother consoled her large fat son, paralysed from the shoulders, in the wheelchair in which he would spend the rest of his days. Her fingers ran down his face which was contorted with grief. And in a near by wheelchair, his, head resting on a braced chinrest reserved for the totally paralysed, was my Polynesian. He was laughing at some joke. May he laugh all the days that God sends him.