'Falling toward history'

 As is only right, there have been many programmes on television and radio to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day and the subsequent operation that eventually brought about Victory in Europe – all of which will soon have passed from living memory. One three-part TV series stood out head and shoulders above everything else – D-Day: The Unheard Tapes, which ended last night. This showcased audio tapes of D-Day reminiscences made, not long after the event, by survivors from the British, US, Canadian – and German – armies, as well as French civilians and resistance fighters. The tapes had been digitally remastered, and sounded as fresh as if they'd been recorded yesterday, and – a risky technique, but one that paid off brilliantly – they were lip-synched, perfectly, by young actors who bore some resemblance to their real-life originals. With only minimal and useful interruptions from historians, the result was an extraordinary level of intensity and intimacy, which grew as the series progressed and the individual stories deepened. This was a remarkable, and deeply moving, piece of television. If you didn't catch it, do seek it out on the BBC iPlayer. 
   A matter of weeks after D-Day came the 21st July Plot, one of many failed plots to assassinate Hitler (Wikipedia lists no fewer than 42) and the one that came closest to achieving its object. The leader of the plot, Claus von Stauffenberg, took a briefcase full of explosives to a conference at the Wolf's Lair, and placed it next to Hitler, but someone unwittingly moved it behind a table leg at the last moment and Hitler escaped with singed trousers and a perforated eardrum. Four people died, but none of them was Lucky Adolf. In a fine poem collected in My Sad Captains (1961), Thom Gunn commemorates the failed plot...

Claus Von Stauffenberg
of the bomb-plot on Hitler, 1944

What made the place a landscape of despair,
History stunned beneath, the emblems cracked?
Smell of approaching snow hangs on the air;
The frost meanwhile can be the only fact.

They chose the unknown, and the bounded terror,
As a corrective, who corrected live
Surveying without choice the bounding error:
An unsanctioned present must be primitive. 

A few still have the vigour to deny
Fear is a natural state; their motives neither
Of doctrinaire, of turncoat, nor of spy.
Lucidity of thought draws them together.

The maimed young Colonel who can calculate
On two remaining fingers and a will,
Takes lessons from the past, to detonate 
A bomb that Brutus rendered possible.

Over the maps a moment, face to face:
Across from Hitler, whose grey eyes have filled
A nation with the illogic of their gaze,
The rational man is poised, to break, to build.

And though he fails, honour personified
In a cold time where honour cannot grow,
He stiffens, like a statue, in mid-stride
– Falling toward history, and under snow.