Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Shame on those who dishonour the fallen

(Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

I’ve been in Bayeux this week. Not to admire the tapestry but to plant a cross on the grave of Private Thomas Bintley, one of the 4,144 British and Commonwealth servicemen who lie in the immaculate cemetery on the outskirts of the town.

Bintley parachuted into Normandy on the night of 17 August, one of a small team of SAS troops, and three days later he was killed in a skirmish with German troops. A local man was made to dig the Englishman’s grave and while he did so, he later testified, the Waffen SS ‘danced on the corpse of Bintley’.

Having found Bintley’s grave I walked among the forest of white headstones, a rare British pilgrim in a summer unusually quiet for battlefield tourists. A couple of inscriptions caught my eye, such as the one on the headstone of 20-year-old Lt. Peter Manton, MC, of the Royal Armoured Corps:

‘A Splendid Comrade who died that England might live.’

When that generation is gone, I foresee a great change in how we remember our war dead

Not far away lay lance sergeant Harry Cotton, killed on D-Day while serving with the Devonshire Regiment. His inscription was from his grieving mother:

‘He died for Britain and the honour of his race.’

In the three decades I’ve been visiting Commonwealth war graves cemeteries in Europe, for the first time this year I experienced an emotion other than sadness. It was a bitter resentment against those who this summer have broken cover and revealed how they truly feel about their country. Boris Johnson believes it’s a ‘cringing embarrassment’ of being British that makes them want to do away with ‘Rule Britannia’ and Winston’s statue; you’re too kind, Prime Minister, and wrong. 

These people are driven by a deep hatred of Britain and that includes the men and women who gave their lives fighting tyranny in the 20th century.

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