When I first worked in France in 1984 I and my future wife visited Hagenau one chilly Sunday afternoon in Winter. Hagenau is right in the top corner of Alsace and France with a German border both to the East and the North. This is a lovely part of the world with beautiful villages in forested countryside. All the same I wondered what on earth we were doing wandering around this town where everything seemed closed on such a cold day and felt rather sorry for ourselves. A plaque revealed that Hagenau was one of those remote bits of France which remained in German hands until late in the war.
Twenty years later I happen to be watching Band of Brothers with only casual interest when they mention that they are trying to find a way of breaking down German defenses around Hagenau. Suddenly my attention is riveted on the program, this is not just television this is real history. Those young American soldiers who fought in Hagenau are now old but they didn’t spend just one chilly afternoon in Hagenau but months in trenches and dugouts, they didn’t go back as we did to a nice dinner in a centrally heated flat in Strasbourg.
Something like this brings it home just what those Veterans did for us