Memento mori

Yesterday, when coming out of the voter registration office in the town hall, we paused to look at a long, wooden-framed vitrine which filled all of one inside wall of the mairie and continued quite a distance around the next. Behind the glass, inside almost Victorian oval card frames, were hundreds of photos of Antibes' "glorious dead". Many of them were clearly from families which had lost several sons at a time in more than one conflict, in a dreadful generational continuum of grief. Quite a lot were also very local names, still to be seen on shop fronts and written on the sides of tradesmen's vans. One wonders how many families still bear the scars, nearly a century later, particularly of the bloodletting at Verdun.

War memorials are everywhere in France, usually sculpted with a creepy pomposity, but the image you normally see in village squares is of a heroic bronze, marble, sandstone or even cement poilu, advancing, mud-free and ungassed, towards an invisible enemy whilst beckoning on those behind him, sometimes at the eager beck and call of an ambiguous female figure - Death or Marianne, it makes no difference. Here, though, there were just photos, like in Italian cemeteries. Somehow it brought it all to life, the death I mean.

Amongst the serried ranks of young men posing stiffly in uniform were photos of entire families of Jews deported to the Lagers. The casual happiness of these family snaps, taken at weddings and picnics (probably the only surviving images), contrasted with the victims' awful but as yet unknown fate, whereas the soldiers knew once they donned uniform, and as they solemnly sat for the photographs, that their job was to be cannon fodder.

The very latest photo, in exactly the same format as the very earliest, was of a young serviceman recently killed in Afghanistan. There was still space in the vitrine for more...