Bush salutes his fellow Boy Scouts
March 21, 2005
January 18, 2009: Astonishing discovery: Sarkozy and Obama were in the same scout movement as Bush and Berlusconi!
December 2011: Pope Benedict XVI makes a mistake with the scout sign!
Even though the reactions following the launch of this page prompted me to add a preamble, I feel it necessary to clarify. First, readers are reminded that, when confronted with any information or message, they must think for themselves above all. The second point is to emphasize that humor can be used to draw attention to facts that might otherwise belong to a different context and carry a far different weight. In these times when the freedom to inform risks vanishing at any moment, it's not useless to start training ourselves to:
- Write between the lines - Read between the lines.
Perhaps to write between the lines, you use a
mesographer.
Perhaps to read between the lines, you use a
mesoscope.
Iwas a scout when I was a kid. For a street kid like me, penniless and accustomed to the asphalt of Rue Jean-Baptiste Dumas and the Porte de Champerret in Paris, it was my first contact with nature. At the 54th Paris troop, the atmosphere was somewhat peculiar. Today, one might say the troop was "coached" by far-right individuals. But back then, I knew nothing about politics. We were a "raider" troop. This was during the Indochina War. Other scouts wore Canadian-mounted police-style hats, staffs with ribbons, long shorts, and high socks. They played games where they pinned scarves to their belts, backs, trying to steal each other's. We wore green berets, dressed in khaki, and conducted "raids." During camps, we were made to "parachute." We were woken in the middle of the night and loaded into a truck for a Rambo-style mission. From a truck moving at moderate speed, we were "dropped" from the back and tumbled head over heels. Then, in pairs, we had to follow a compass course all night, equipped with gear from American surplus. We had khaki flashlights, khaki canteens, and knives with 20-centimeter blades (other scouts had Swiss Army knives). At eleven years old, we crossed rivers completely naked, with all our gear strapped to our heads. We knew how to cross ravines by felling a tree with an axe in minutes and placing it as a bridge, or rappel down a rope. At that age, I could quickly chop down a tree twenty centimeters in diameter, build lashed bridges, and set up tents in trees six meters high or on stilts. Incidentally, I could also apply splints to a broken leg, tie a tourniquet, and without flinching suture a wound.
The troop was coached by a troop leader named Claude and by a priest, Abbé Vicat, with gaunt cheeks, the kind who rarely laughed. In fact, we never laughed at all. Nowadays, one might say we were there to suffer. Well, I loved nature—mostly that. But later I realized it wasn't really necessary to wear such a grim face while camping or doing sports.
We were made to do "drill," meaning marching exercises, Marines-style, with "half-turns while walking," etc. We sang strange songs, like:
The street belongs to whoever walks it
The street belongs to the white helmets' flag
Against us, hatred
Against us, shouts and curses
Trampling the dark mud
Come the white helmets
Ionly learned years later that this song came from the German Panzer division that swept across France in 1939.
You can find this German Panzer division marching song at:
http://ingeb.org/Lieder/obssturm.html
or:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-_ixdAzAAY&feature=related
MP3 version:
http://bian.ca/refer/obssturb.MP3
(original version)
Reused by the French Foreign Legion (the white helmets), Chilean troops, etc.
Notice the skull on the collar lapel. Very fitting.
Making a brief detour into the internationalization of military marching songs, I recall that when I was drafted into the Caen-Carpiquet base for my military service in 1961, all the cadets from the grandes écoles were gathered there. Naturally, we were subjected to this song, as well as others straight from Nazi troops. There was one with a line like "For you, Véronika, Ah, Ah, Ah..." and many others. Imagine the faces of our Jewish classmates. And in the grandes écoles, they are legion (as one of my friends back then said: we all have a bit of Jewish blood, otherwise we wouldn’t have studied!).
Ididn’t take long to find the original German lyrics. When the young lieutenants commanding our sections (tiny polytechnicians) started singing these marching songs, they were somewhat taken aback.
- But what is this?
- Sir, wouldn’t it be better to sing them in the original version?
The base command insisted we sing the French versions of these Nazi songs. We offered traditional French songs instead. Refused. A standoff. Punishments piled up. Cadet officers were confined to base. But the entire class stood united, out of solidarity with our Jewish classmates, and the command eventually gave in.
Back to my scout experience, I found it curious, whenever we passed through villages, that the locals would close their shutters as we went by.
Finally, in this somewhat strange atmosphere, I explored the Rochefort caves, spelunking, and navigated rough seas on a corvette near Benodet. I remember images that closely resembled those in the film "The Crab Cannons," when you see the corvette diving into the waves during a storm.
It was a welcome change from asphalt and games of steering toy boats through gutters.
At every camp, we had "losses." That is, a large number of kids were "evacuated to the rear"—meaning their parents came to pick them up, often in poor condition. I'm surprised that back then, they didn’t just finish off the ones who couldn’t be transported. Looking back, it's astonishing we didn’t have any deaths. But let's say this training served me well later when I became a safari guide in Kenya.
What I remember most is the scout salute. See drawing A on the following page.
Normally, this allows former scouts to recognize each other in the street or on the metro. Sometimes I see people who look quite athletic and think, "Maybe they were scouts?" So I make the sign. But since I never had much success, over the years I eventually stopped.
There are plenty of scouts around, though. The Pope, for example, was also a scout. Proof: he makes sign B. That must correspond to the Vatican scouts. Since I’ve never been present at his public appearances, I couldn’t see whether other scouts from his troop responded to him.
In fact, if you look closely, many people do...