Early hours of Sunday morning. Lu is not feeling well and has spent most of the day in bed being sick/grumpy. I meandered around in the morning and then went and played pool with H for a little while before coming back home to do the good hubbie thing and look after Lu.

Got some take-away which was bloody awful and we both have sick stomachs now. Got a couple of DVDs out – Star War II – Attack of the Clones and Charlotte Gray. AOTC was dreadful – Lucas should have shot for writing those love scenes between future Darth and his little Princess. He cannot write people dialogue for shit. And all those proto-stormtroopers with Kiwi accents. Very, very weird.

Charlotte Gray I had no idea what it was about – I picked it up because Cate Blanchett was on the cover. Great film. Quite sad. Probably surprised a few people about what they thought really happened in Occupied France and how horrifically the French collaborated with their German occupiers. Not many people realise that the Resistance was a series of small, splintered groups often with different ideologies and objectives. Their biggest enemy wasn’t always the Germans either but other French people who supported the occupation and willingly betrayed them.

Though I’ll never forget those little plaques on walls in France that remember the 35,000 or so people who did fight back:

“Here in 1942 three unknown Resistance fighters were executed by the Gestapo” or “Here in 1943 brothers Antoine and Jean Leopold, aged 16 and 18, were executed by the SS in reprisal for Resistance activities.”

Of those people who did fight back many were tortured murdered by the Nazi’s and Vichy government – people like Jean Moulin, Marc Bloch, Charles Delestraint, Frederic de Jongh and hundreds of others.

On a similar train of thought I visited the French Museum of the Army in Paris years ago and they had an exhibition about the history of WW2. This is my slightly tongue-in-check version of what they said:

One morning the French army rolls up to the frontline and says “Sod off you Krauts – you’re not invading us!” After a bit of postering the entire Army decides they’ve shown those Germans what for and meander off for a well deserved coffee and bagels. Whilst they are having breakfast the evil Krauts invade through Belgium and take most of the bloody country. Fast forward a few years and the French Army comes back from their bagels and notices the Germans and then single-handedly kicks them out of France with their tail between their legs. Oh yes and there were some other people around – Amercians and British – but really it was the French holding up the majority of the effort.