D-Day Remembered: Day of tears and memories: Fifty years on, Clinton's tribute to veterans of Normandy spans gulf between the generations

TOTAL WAR has been forgotten for two generations now, but yesterday more than thirty thousand bemedalled old men provided a stubborn reminder of what it was like, and what it was for, and what it cost, when they gathered in Normandy to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day.

The veterans from the armies that invaded Nazi-occupied France on 6 June 1944 were joined by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, by President Bill Clinton and his French counterpart Francois Mitterrand, and by other heads of state and government, in solemn ceremonies on beaches that were stormed under German fire, in villages that were liberated, and in cemeteries where lie any of those who fought.

In a coming-together of old soldiers the western world is unlikely to see again, they revisited the breach they forced in Hitler's Atlantic wall on the five beaches of Gold, Sword, Juno, Omaha and Utah, at a cost of death for many, mutilation for more, and terrible memories for all. Ceremony made it bearable yesterday, from the dawn landing in the surf of the flags of the 14 nations whose troops took part in Operation Overlord, to the slow bugle call of the Last Post, to the march past of thousands of British veterans on the wet sands at Arromanches.

The Queen and Prince Philip, of the generation that needs no reminding of what took place, seemed at one with the day and its mood, its mixture of warmth for the living and mourning for the lost. At the cemetery in Bayeux, where 3,935 British dead lie under neat white headstones, thousands of veterans broke ranks after the morning service and surged forward to surround the couple; security men twitched, but the Queen smiled, entirely at ease.

Later at Arromanches, the small coastal town that was one of the first footholds won by the Allies, she reviewed them formally, viewing with evident pride the remarkable sight of 10,000 pensioners, medals on every chest, marching past along the drizzly windswept sands. The old comrades of the Royal Hampshire Regiment led the parade; fifty years ago, they led the way ashore. The Queen was a teenager then, listening avidly with the rest of Britain to news bulletins on the wireless.

'Those of us who were far away can only imagine what it was like and stand back in admiration of those who planned and fought for the establishment of that hard-won bridgehead,' she told them. 'It was you, and your comrades and allies fighting on other fronts, who delivered Europe from that yoke of organised barbarism from which the men and women of following generations have been mercifully free. They should remember that they owe that freedom to those who fought and defeated Nazism.'

President Clinton, of that later generation which turned its back on patriotism and derided the martial virtues, had a more difficult task yesterday in identifying with men who had fought in mortal combat. He struggled hard to do so, at a site of particular emotional resonance to the Americans, the steep cliffs at Pointe du Hoc which the US Rangers scaled with ropes under fire, taking sixty per cent casualties.

He could not be one of them, and he admitted it; and his frankness and eloquence brought it off. 'We are the generation for whom you won the war,' he told the Ranger veterans on the top of the cliffs they climbed at such at cost. 'We are the children of your sacrifice. We are the product of the nation you came home to build. We commit ourselves, as you did, to keep the lamp burning for those who will follow.' It was the voice of the Sixties, the voice of Vietnam protest, finally giving the previous generation its due.

Yet it was an emotional tightrope the draft-dodger President walked yesterday, and he came close to toppling from it when he moved on to a ceremony at Utah beach and was late; waiting American veterans booed, and feted the Republican senator Robert Dole, wounded in action.

The national leaders came together at D-Day's bloodiest site, Omaha Beach, where in two hours 2,000 Americans died in a storm of machinegun fire and shelling, and the assault faltered. They listened to recordings of Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander, giving his order of the day - 'You are about to embark on a great crusade' - and of De Gaulle, the exiled hope of France, sending his message of encouragement from London - 'The supreme battle has begun.' They heard Mr Mitterrand remind them that modern Europe owed its freedom to what General Omar Bradley called a 'thin line of khaki' which pushed the Nazis out of France. Ships paraded off shore, aircraft flew overhead, and there was pomp and there was ceremony.

Yet it was not in the national leaders and their coming together that yesterday was memorable, but in the assembly of old soldiers. Physically frail now, but immovably sure of their values, they represented courage and comradeship, but most of all they were a reminder of total war, of whole nations conscripted into armies and fighting to the death, where no one had a choice and everyone had a duty. They and their values were mocked in the Sixties; rock stars wore their uniforms in scornful parody. Yesterday Bill Clinton was not the only one from a later generation to look at them, and think again.

Arromanches parade, page 2

Price of freedom, page 3

Letters, page 17

(Photograph omitted)