Leading Article: No room for such thoughtlessness

THE ROW over veterans' hotel reservations in Normandy for the D-Day anniversary celebrations in June, which was resolved yesterday, has been a gift to Francophobes, or those who consider the French prone to high-handedness. The French government weathered one embarrassment last month over the delicate issue of whether to invite the Germans to commemorate the landings that put an end to the Third Reich.

That dispute raised a question of principle: whether the commemoration of the anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy should be a commemoration of victory over tyranny in general or over the Germans in particular. This one raised an important issue of humanity. There was no justification for depriving some 200 war veterans of rooms that they had reserved up to two years in advance.

It may have been going over the top to see the refusal to honour their bookings as a plot by arrogant Frenchmen to humiliate those who risked death to deliver them from their Nazi occupiers. But the general indignation - reflected in coverage of the issue - was understandable. These were, after all, the men who had been in the vanguard of the liberation of Western Europe: soldiers - many of them in this instance Canadian - whose comrades died in their tens of thousands in this great operation.

In hastily reinstating the disputed bookings yesterday, France's Foreign Ministry insisted implausibly that it 'never planned to requisition' the hotels. What else but an order from the government could have prompted a respectable hotel in Normandy to refuse to honour reservations for which it had already accepted substantial deposits?

It would have been more honest for the French to have acknowledged their mistake along the following lines: 'Please accept our apologies. We realised at the last minute that we didn't have enough hotel rooms for all the dignitaries and journalists that we'd invited, so we unthinkingly tried to commandeer extra rooms to accommodate them. In doing so, we forgot to take account of the individual veterans who are, of course, the most important guests at this celebration.'

Helas, in no country, least of all their own, are officials inclined to provide either apologies or candid explanations for their mistakes. This seems to have been a case in which those same brilliant graduates of the ecoles nationales, who switch with dazzling ease from top jobs in diplomacy, to the civil service and state-owned industries, failed to take into account the interests of ordinary people. It is not a field in which officials have much training.