[silverdog]

Thanks for the info about Vercors.

I wish my French was one-tenth as good as your English. I agree with you that this Franco-American flame war is way out of hand. French politics are so byzantine that Americans will never really understand them. And most Americans have forgotten about the battles of the Chesapeake and Yorktown.

We tend to remember WWII and forget who helped us win our own revolution.

[Atlantic Friend]

Well, our fallen soldiers lay side by side in almost every battlefield where they fought - should they rise from the grave, THEY would probably tell us to bridge our gaps. After all, the British or German or Iraqi bullets that hit them really didn't care about national differences.

I think our political leaders should remember Chesapeake and Yorktown, but also Normandy and Strasbourg, the Liberation of Paris, the bloody close combat in the Argonne and the fight in Southern Iraq in 1991. Or the common fight in Afghanistan, and the joint action in Haiti.

I wish most French leaders would be brilliant enough to be byzantine ! Alas, most of the time they don't make any sense at all and they wriggle out of their responsibilities through heavy spinning. De Gaulle would be appalled at what they've done with his legacy - he would be appalled at having Chirac appointing himself as de Gaulle's heir, above all.