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| the souls, while Georges
would take over as the midwife of nations. The only obstacle for
Georges was his difficulty with foreign languages. His grades in
English were abominable. I insisted, therefore, that he get involved
in European affairs as soon as the war ended. Living outside of France
would give him the necessary linguistic practice.
The three of us even made a date for a post-war rendezvous: ten minutes after the end of the war, in New York, at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway. Though our plans worked out to a remarkable degree in later years, there was a slight delay in our New York meeting. In 1947, during my first year at Princeton, Georges came to the United States to study at Harvard, and I picked him up at the pier in New York. That Summer he came to visit me in my church in Louisiana and we explored the bayous together in a Jeep. After he went home to France with an American wife I saw him in Luxembourg where he was the Chief of Staff of Monnet, the builder of Europe. I saw him again, several years later, in London, where he was Chief of Mission of the Common Market, in charge of bringing England into the European fold. He did it by making about two thousand speeches, in English, everywhere they were ready for him. Georges is now president for Europe on the Trilateral Commission, and he comes often to Washington, where he never fails to reserve an evening to compare notes between the midwife of the Washington souls and the midwife of the European nations. Somehow the dreams of the two Lycéens of 1941 have been realized. During 1941 the supply situation deteriorated considerably, as France had to turn over much of its food production to the Germans. There was generally hardly any meat, but this was not the case in our family. We even had more of it than we could possibly eat, though we could at no point share it with anyone else because of stringent regulations. My father, holding a patent for reducing bones and other animal products to ashes and thus to fertilizer, had become the city "knacker" (équarisseur). His job was to oversee the destruction of all meats not proper for human consumption. Often, however, he received animals, usually horses, which were fundamentally in good condition, merely too lean to be sold. These choice morsels went to our kitchen, where we became sated with meat. It was indeed third-rate, but certainly better than none at all; the rest of the population had only a few grams of meat each week as per their ration cards, and this only during the particular week when the coupons were valid. Both my brother and I were
active in the church and in the student group at the Lycée.
Upon finding out, however, that his two soldier parishioners (age 21) had
never been confirmed, Pastor Westphal was shocked. Since he had no
intention of giving us a special two-year course of catechism, as the church
discipline required, he simply authorized us, without ceremony or special
celebration, to come to the Lord's Table. He did not even give us
a certificate or a paper. We just came forward one Sunday and received
the bread and wine with everybody else. I have always liked this
broad-minded approach to most ecclesiastical problems in the French Reformed
Church and have practiced it many times in my own ministry. |
