Andrew Vine: Eyewitnesses to the heroism and the horror of war fade slowly into history

Every summer its 200 residents turn out to see the Union Jack draped from the tower of their medieval church and remember with gratitude the Yorkshiremen who arrived amid violence 70 years ago and left peace in their wake.

The village’s name is Crepon, and the Yorkshiremen who hold such a place in its heart are the soldiers of the Green Howards who stormed ashore shortly after 7.30am on D Day in 1944.

By mid-afternoon that June 6, they had liberated Crepon from four long years of occupation, and in so doing, one of them earned a unique place in the history of the Second World War.

He was Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis, whose bravery as the Green Howards fought their way up from the invasion beaches and into Crepon, just inland, was to see him awarded the only Victoria Cross of D Day.

A memorial to the Green Howards stands at the entrance to the village, and the bronze figure at its centre that represents all the men who fell in freeing Europe bears a striking resemblance to Sgt Major Hollis. The people of Crepon ensure that the memorial is immaculately kept, and every June veterans of the regiment march past it before joining the villagers in the square.

But as the years have passed, the number of veterans who fought for Crepon and everywhere else along the Normandy coastline has dwindled. The Normandy Veterans Association has announced that this year will be the last time that they make the pilgrimage across the Channel to honour their fallen comrades.

Time has thinned their ranks, and even the youngest of the men who were there on that historic day are in their late 80s.

Only 20 years ago, the association numbered more than 16,000 men. Now there are just 600 or so, and many are simply too frail to make the journey to Normandy’s beaches.

Once the commemorations are over, the association will officially disband in November and lay up its standard at a service at St Margaret’s Church in the grounds of Westminster Abbey.

Inevitably, the announcement brings with it a sense of sadness, another reminder that a generation to which we all owe so much is gradually fading from view. The acknowledgement of that is also there in the reports that the Queen’s involvement in the D Day commemorations in France will be among her last major foreign engagements as younger members of the Royal Family shoulder more duties.

Remembrance of D Day will continue, of course, as the years pass but the immediacy of personal testimony, the ability to hear a person who was there bear witness to what he saw and did, to see what is in his eyes as he recalls can never be replicated.

The generation that fought the First World War is already lost to us, and for all the good work that is being done in marking the centenary of its start, we are the poorer for no longer being able to sit and just listen to the men who knew what it was to be in the trenches.

Such testimony is startlingly revealing and profoundly affecting. More than 30 years ago, a veteran of the Great War, then a very old man, told me of the worst moments of his life as every man around him died as they went over the top during one of the murderous battles on the Somme.

He was an articulate, educated and softly-spoken man who had long before learned to cope with the memory of what had happened, yet never found peace over it. The horror in his eyes as he recalled it was as eloquent as his words.

The men who fought in Normandy would have recognised that look, for they saw horrors too, like the veteran who talked to me at length one afternoon of how he had been plagued for years afterwards by flashbacks so vivid that they left him sweating and shaking.

Then there was the old soldier who recalled so movingly how he knew his life had changed irrevocably when he killed his first man, in the countryside beyond the D Day beaches. In the blink of an eye, the enemy that had been so terrifying was now so pitiful.

The voices of both those men have been stilled by time, and we should mourn their passing for they, and thousands more like them, could tell us volumes about the true nature of a conflict that is slowly but surely receding into the pages of history books and the archive films of television documentaries.

There is a risk in this year of so much remembrance, when anniversaries crowd in – the First World War, D Day, the airborne assault on Arnhem, also in 1944 – that some sections of the public will feel that they have soaked up more hours of war than they can bear, and start turning away.

They should not. It is too late for the veterans of the Great War to witness our gratitude for their sacrifice. There is still time for the survivors of the Second World War to see it. Like the people of Crepon, we should be determined to show it.

Andrew Vine