Robert Boulanger's song

Robert Boulanger You constantly wonder why I always hammer on the cause of veterans, from all countries, all the time. It is because war is not merely a story of men, it is a story of adolescents. Take a senior high school class or a classical college at the time, in Montreal, Quebec, or elsewhere. Give these students helmets, kepis, berets, a nice little brown military uniform of happiness, and there you have our soldiers. We take the small photo for the National Defense register, and, truly, we avoid sending it to the mother, except at the end of a precarious moment. It is always those under twenty who pay the heaviest price in wars. The eyes that stare at you in the photo I placed above my song belong to a seventeen-year-old boy, Robert Boulanger, who left his native Quebec against his parents’ will, to help liberate Europe. At eighteen, struck down by a bullet to the forehead, on the beach at Dieppe, as a prelude to the landing. What an affront. Franz Gockel, the German soldier who held Omaha Beach on June sixth, nineteen forty-four, was about to celebrate his eighteenth birthday, machine gun in hand. He returned for sixty years to the beach to exorcise his ghosts and mourn his comrades, all buried in France. That is why I am never consoled. Had I been Robert’s father, I would have much preferred to hold him in my arms in an embrace, to celebrate the biggest fish caught while fishing, or his skill in righting an overturned boat. I was inspired by the text of Jean-Pierre Guéno in Paroles du jour J, published by Librio.