The 40's

Readers invited to revisit a Verdun united by war, grief and pride                                                                                                                            MIKE BOONE, The Gazette                 Published: Wednesday, November 01, 2006                               Who says you can't go home again? Historian Serge Marc Durflinger did it in print. And tonight he'll be back in person. Durflinger was born in Verdun and spent the first 37 of his 45 years there before moving to Ottawa to become a staff historian at the Canadian War Museum.                                                           He expanded his doctoral thesis into Fighting From Home, a portrait of the social and cultural dynamics of Verdun during the Second World War. Durflinger will be launching the book this evening at the Verdun Cultural Centre. The historian teaches at the University of Ottawa and lives in the Gatineau hills. That's a long way from the Wellington St. triplex where he grew up in the middle flat: "The best place if you're nosy, the worst if you're private."                                                                            In the preface to Fighting From Home, Durflinger evokes 1940s Verdun, inviting readers to imagine 70,000 working-class residents of almost exclusively French or English origin, living "on top of each other, in nearly identical two- and three-storey tenement flats, where everyone knows everyone else's business" in a rectangular six square kilometres, bounded by the river and an aqueduct.                           Verdunites, he writes, had a "rough uniformity of experience and an unmistakable sense of geographic distinctiveness." His book is a study of how they responded to "the greatest military conflict the world had seen." Durflinger was at home taking care of his 2-year-old son when I phoned yesterday. The historian is good at multitasking: He changed Maxime's diaper without missing a beat in our conversation.                                                                                                                      "I'm a Verdun guy," he said. "When one turns a sense of self into an academic subject, it's a win-win situation. "I was learning about myself, my own past and my city's socio-economic structure. Having grown up in a bicultural household - English-speaking father, French-speaking mother who chose his given names - Durflinger discovered the Britishness of wartime Verdun. In 1941, English was the mother tongue of 58 per cent of that city's residents, 17 per cent of whom had been born in the British Isles.                                                                                                                                                                     Durflinger still remembers the names of expatriate Britons who were widows and grandparents when he knew them. "I felt a kinship with the past," Durflinger said. "Someone said the past is a foreign country. This project gave me the opportunity to reclaim it as my own."                                                                                  The process of reclamation led Durflinger toward an interesting conclusion. Regardless of language, religion or intra-class distinctions, more than 6,000 Verdunites - including flying ace George (Buzz) Beurling - fought in the war, in Europe and at home, "as much out of a sense of local identity as national patriotic impulse."                                                                                                                                            "Through shared experiences of bereavement but also a fierce determination to show the distinctiveness of Verdun and its positive influence on the outcome of the war, it unified Verdunites across cultural divisions," Durflinger said. Some fought for the Kings, Mackenzie and George VI. All, proud expat Serge Durflinger points out, fought for Verdun. Serge Durflinger will launch Fighting From Home at the Verdun Cultural Centre, 5955 Bannantyne St., tonight at 7.

mboone@thegazette.canwest.com

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2006