Stains upon the Reich's monument. The Belem, the last metal-hulled frigate in the fleet. The pens are long and terrible.

Come and see. And so he did.

We went and got our guest, turned down his bed, acquainted him with the garden. After he had eaten oysters, had a nap, startled the cat sleeping in the vines, we took him downriver to another town. Would the Germans of 1941 be surprised to see the communist unions demonstrating before their submarine pens? From afar they seem to be just another ship under construction. Upon seeing them, the guest quotes General Patton. Fixed fortifications are monuments to mankind's stupidity.

They are certainly monumental. There are still traces of the builders everywhere. There are rusted casemates and firing slits for machineguns. The history of France writ large, writ lapidaire, in stones too heavy to ever be dismantled. Shipyard workers played a sharp game of echo-haunted roller hockey in the shadows.

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