Robert Fisk: Dead heroes and living memories

Let us now praise famous men. I'm talking about the dead variety, of course, because I suspect we are defined as a people by the way we honour our dead as much as the way we treat the living. My dad, old Bill Fisk, used to force me to walk round the aisles of All Saints Church in Maidstone to look at the inscriptions, pointing to the moth-eaten battle honours of the Royal West Kent Regiment over our heads.

I rather liked the way we Brits did things in so haphazard a way. Churchill lies under a simple stone in Blaydon in Oxfordshire. Our poets cluster together in Westminster Abbey. Under the nave are the remains of Isaac Newton. "Mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race," it says in Latin above his grave. Three miles away, the Iron Duke commands heaven alone in his black iron catafalque in Saint Paul's. My favourite epitaph remains that of Dean Swift - he wrote it himself, again in Latin - in Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, the translation of which I owe to reader Stephen Williams:

Here lies the body of

Jonathan Swift

Of this cathedral church

The Dean

Where savage indignation

Can no more lacerate his heart.

Traveller, go,

And imitate if you can

His strenuous vindication of

Man's liberty

So I was struck recently, wandering the Pantheon in Paris, by the sinister white conformity of Catholic France's semi-revolutionary house of the dead. "Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante," it says along the frieze. To the great men, from their grateful nation. The French sometimes translate patrie as "fatherland" which, for all the usual reasons, I find rather creepy. Indeed, ever since patrie got mixed up with famille and travail during the occupation - in place of liberty, equality and fraternity -I'm surprised even patrie has kept its integrity.

But it's inside the Pantheon that I find things very odd. True, the feuding pair of Rousseau and Voltaire face each other in their original caskets. Voltaire arrived in London in time to see the funeral of Newton, whom he compared to Descartes. "In Paris," he wrote, "you see the earth shaped like a melon, in London it is flattened on two sides. For a Cartesian light exists in the air, for a Newtonian it comes from the sun in six and a half minutes."

But there is no natural light in the crypt of the Pantheon because, by God, there is conformity. All the grands hommes - plus a few women - are sealed inside identical stone sarcophagi. Alexandre Dumas's tomb is the same as that of Resistance hero Jean Moulin. So are those of Marie and Pierre Curie. And Zola. And André Malraux. And Victor Hugo and Jean Jaurès (like Moulin, one of my heroes) and Jean Monnet.

Egalité here means what it says. Like the dead of Verdun, France's elite are allowed no extra favours, no extra flowers, no poems, no special concessions. Just those long white tombs which remind me of the hibernation cabinets in which the crew of the space craft in 2001: a Space Odyssey are murdered by Hal the computer. "Life functions critical," the computer readout announced as Hal put them to death. And then: "Life functions terminated." In the Pantheon, their life functions have also been terminated, mostly by God although, in the case of Jean Moulin, by Klaus Barbie.

And so of course I was moved last week to find out how little Lebanon - the child of France - treated her honoured dead, the Muslims and Christians hanged by the Turks in 1915 and 1916 for demanding independence from the Ottoman Empire. They went to the gallows in what is now called Martyrs' Square less than a mile from where my home stands, shouting their defiance at Turkish occupation as the hangman set about his work. The Turks had discovered letters from the men in the abandoned French consulate and all had been tortured Barbie-style in the town of Aley before being sentenced to death.

Abdul Karim al-Khalil, a Muslim, shouted down from the scaffold words which should be engraved on every Lebanese schoolchild's heart: "My dear fellow countrymen, the Turks want to suffocate our voice in our lungs... But... we will ask all the civilised nations of the world for our independence and freedom. My beloved country, remember always these eleven martyrs! O paradise of my country, carry our feelings of brotherly love to every Lebanese, to every Syrian, to every Arab, tell them of our tragic end and tell them: 'For your freedom, we have lived and for your independence we are dying.'"

Al-Khalil himself pushed the stepladder from the gallows and hanged himself. Two brothers were hanged the same day, Mohamed and Mahmoud Mahmessani, Mohamed holding his brother in his arms for 15 minutes as he tried to comfort him before they were hanged together. Joseph Bechara Hani, a Christian, could utter only a few words before the hangman went to work on him. "I am innocent, completely innocent - I swear this before God... I die without fear."

The day after the last Lebanese patriot was executed, the French diplomat François Picot signed his secret agreement with Mark Sykes to carve up the post-war Middle East, taking Lebanon for France. There were no more patriots to resist him. And the name of the departing French consul to Beirut who left those incriminating letters lying in France's diplomatic mission? François Picot.

The Turks threw the corpses of the hanged men into a common grave on the Beirut beach. But when the French liberated Beirut in 1918, they were dug up. Surely they should be given an honoured reburial. Ah yes, but it turned out that the Christian church would not let the Muslim martyrs lie in their cemeteries. And the Muslim clergy would not contemplate allowing Christian martyrs to be interred in their cemeteries. So the mystical Druze allowed them to find their resting place on land they owned in central Beirut.

And that's where I found them last week, beside a canyon of traffic, locked away behind an iron gate, their graves covered with tree branches and surrounded by nettles, a cockerel croaking away between them. The Mahmessani brothers lie together in one concrete tomb, the others - there are 19 in all - have graves on which their names and places of birth can just be identified. Omar Mustafa Hamad, born Beirut 1892, Prince Said al-Chehabi, born Hasbaya 1889...

"The cemetery of the Lebanese martyrs," it says on a plaque beside the rusting gate, "was renovated under the auspices of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, March 6, 1994." But since 14 February last year, the murdered Hariri, too, has been a Lebanese martyr. And about 10 metres from the cemetery is the spot where President René Mouawad was vaporised by another massive bomb in 1989. Savage indignation indeed.

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