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DESECRATION OF GRAVES

By SIMON HUGHES

SICK French yobs daubed a swastika and vile anti-war slurs at a cemetery for 11,000 British troops.

The showpiece cenotaph at the graveyard in Northern France was smeared in red paint with the words: “Dig up your rubbish. It’s fouling our soil.”

Other slogans at the Etaples cemetery near Boulogne included “Death to the Yankees” and “Saddam Hussein will win and spill your blood.”

And the vandals wrote “Rosbeefs go home” — the French insult for Brits is roast-beefs. Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush were also branded war criminals.

The graffiti was discovered by a shocked gardener and spotted by around 80 visitors. It was cleaned off the same day.

Roy Hemmington — spokesman for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission — said: “We are deeply offended. This is the strongest language and most vile graffiti I have witnessed at a war graves cemetery.

“The suggestion that the bodies of soldiers who died for France should be dug up is particularly foul.”

Most soldiers buried at the cemetery were defending France at the Somme and Ypres during World War I.

Another 122 are troops who died fighting the Nazis in World War II.

Among the dead are a winner of the Victoria Cross, 217 holders of the Military Medal and 69 holders of the Military Cross.

A number had been awarded France’s top military decoration, the Legion d’Honneur.

Roy added: “Almost every British regiment has war dead here. This insults just about the entire British Army.”

Anti-British feeling has been whipped up in France since President Jacques Chirac refused to let the UN back action against Iraq.

Last night Jim Kelleher, chief clerk to the Royal Fusiliers Association, said: “No sane person would do this. It is a disgrace. I have family buried in France and if I could get my hands on whoever did this I’d bury them too.”

Jeremy Lillies, of the Royal British Legion, added: “It is distressing.”

The Sun’s Military Adviser Major-General Perkins said: “It is despicable.”

Appalled local MP Jacques Lang said: “It is an attack on the memory of the British and American soldiers who contributed to the liberation of our soil.”

Police captain Thibault Martin added: “It is sick and cowardly.”

The shocking news comes as a new poll reveals that a third of the French want SADDAM to win the war.

A massive 78 per cent of 1,000 people in the poll by French newspaper Le Monde disapproved of the Allied action.

But 16 per cent “really wish for” a Coalition victory — while 37 per cent said they would prefer one.

A thought that has now occurred to me:

What if the British had stayed home and the Americans never gotten involved in saving France during WWI?

1. The lives of millions of British, French, American, and German soldiers would have been saved.

2. There never would have been a Treaty of Versailles, never would have been a Weimar Republic, never would have been a NSDAP, and Hitler would have never amounted to anything more than an utterly obscure, failed artist.

3. Thus, the lives of tens of millions more people would have been saved, as WWII would have never happened.

4. The rapid defeat of France in 1914-15 would have surely been followed by the rapid defeat of Russia in 1915-16. Would Lenin and the Bolsheviks still succeeded? Or might the victorious, non-desperate Germans taken a more conservative approach in dealing with its Eastern front? Most likely, Lenin would have never been given his German-enabled ride in the sealed train from Zurich to St. Petersburg, the Bolshevik revolution would never have happened, Stalin would never have happened, the famines and purges and Gulags would never have happened, and many tens of millions of Russians and other former Soviet peoples would be alive today.

5. Which means that Mao wouldn't have happened either. Maybe another hundred million Chinese lives spared.

6. Which also means that N. Korea wouldn't have happened, the Korean War wouldn't have happened, and whatever nuclear nightmares we still face in the future would not have happened.

7. And it also means that there would not have been a FRENCH Indochina, and thus unlikely a Ho Chi Minh, and certainly not a Dien Bien Phu, and thus not a Vietnam conflict, and thus 50+ thousand young Americans would be alive today instead of having their names inscribed on a wall.

8. And it also means that there never would have been a Khemer Rouge and a 3 million + killing field in Cambodia.

9. And who can even begin to speculate how very different the history of the Middle East would have been. The great irony is that the one thing that would most likely have been different is that there never would have been an IRAQ! And thus there never would have been a Saddam Hussein. And thus there never would have been wars in 1991 and 2003. Yet more lives.

The entire world has paid a very, VERY high price for the preservation of French sovereignty, nationhood, and pride. Much too high a price, in retrospect. Why anyone should feel the least obligation to pay them even a moment's attention, let alone anything that costs money or blood, is beyond me. They are owed nothing, absolutely nothing whatsoever.