For eight decades, Henri Mignon has viewed Americans as heroes. They twice liberated his tiny Belgian hometown, Houffalize, from German occupation — the second time, he said, when he was 8 years old, mere hours after shrapnel from shelling had killed his father.
The image of U.S. troops handing out gum to local children is a memory he has carried with him ever since. And he has dedicated more than 30 years to retelling the story of the war as a guide to tourists who flock to this corner of the Belgium-Luxembourg border, eager to learn about the last major German offensive on the Western Front.
But this month Mr. Mignon, 88, said he felt uncomfortable as he anticipated his Saturday morning Battle of the Bulge tour in Bastogne, just south of Houffalize.
It was not long after the disastrous meeting between President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Trump in the Oval Office, and it came as Mr. Trump was presenting a conciliatory tone toward Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s leader.
Usually Mr. Mignon portrays Americans as heroes and talks about the strong bonds between this part of the world and the United States. This time, he said, he didn’t know exactly what to think about the relationship.
“I feel it is changing,” he admitted in the days leading up to the tour.
Mr. Mignon has taken issue with American foreign policy before — during the Vietnam War, at times over the Middle East. Yet current events had pushed him and his fellow guides to a new level of distress, he said. Like many Europeans, they had felt their long-held admiration for the United States shudder.
Some guides, he said, had considered halting tours for American groups altogether. Mr. Mignon never contemplated that, but he did fret over exactly what he would say as he shuttled students and teachers from North Carolina around Bastogne. Would he again emphasize the closeness of the relationship between Europeans and Americans? How would he do that when modern America, from his vantage in Belgium, was looking far less heroic?
The sun was high and the March sky a gleaming blue as Mr. Mignon, sprightly, white-haired and wearing a Yankees cap, waited for the students to gather in Bastogne’s town square. The flags of Belgium, the European Union and the United States flapped gently behind him as they arrived, toting bags of Belgian chocolate.
Mr. Mignon began with a joke about his name, which means “little and cute” in French. He then launched into his tour, explaining how the Germans had occupied Bastogne for much of the war. It was liberated by the Americans in September 1944. But then, that December, German forces recaptured the town, which was again freed by Americans during the Battle of the Bulge.
The book and television show “Band of Brothers” center in part on the events in Bastogne, and once the students had boarded their tour bus, Mr. Mignon had the driver whisk them past real-life locations related to scenes from the show. He told them the true stories of Easy Company, the battalion on which the book and series focuses.
He explained to the students that Bastogne remains a very “American town,” one where the bell tower plays the opening notes of “The Star Spangled Banner” every hour.
After the students had filed off the bus and into an underground crypt dedicated to the war dead — below a memorial bearing the names of American states — Mr. Mignon described to them “his war.”
He recalled the day he was abruptly dismissal from school with a promise that he would be allowed to come back soon. It would be more than a year.
He described the Germans boarders who filled his house from basement to attic, growing progressively less kind as the war dragged on. He told how, on the final day of the second occupation, American soldiers had whisked him away in a Jeep from his burning house, ignited in the crossfire when they retook the town.
Mr. Mignon said that his family had “lost everything,” in the war, and that Americans had helped set them back on their feet.
After the war, Mr. Mignon finished school, studied military history in Brussels, and ultimately became an officer in the Belgian Army before retiring to this tiny town in Francophone Belgium, where he became a guide.
During the tour, Mr. Mignon spoke in the practiced manner of someone who has recited a grim story hundreds of times, maybe thousands. He did not offer any commentary on Mr. Trump or about how starkly America’s military involvement in Europe 80 years ago contrasts with the stance it is increasingly taking. He said he had decided that the tour was about celebrating the veterans of the past, not the United States of the present.
The Americans themselves avoided talking about politics during their trip, which had started in France and would continue on to Germany. “My responsibility as a government teacher is to teach how the government works and is supposed to work,” Laura Krizan, a teacher leading the trip, explained. “I’d rather them graduate and not know how I vote.”
And the Europeans they had encountered had been “shy” about broaching current events, said Thomas Boyreau-Suzémont, who had helped organize and shepherd the tour through various World War II sites across Europe — even if politics is perpetually top of mind these days.
“We never thought that this alliance would be in danger,” Mr. Boyreau-Suzémont said, of the European-U.S. connection. “People are shocked,” he added.
Mr. Mignon’s matter-of-factness slipped at the final stop of the tour, a tranquil pine forest that conceals foxholes once used by the Easy Company.
There, he used his cane to point out the divots in the earth that American soldiers dug to shelter themselves from shells and ammunition as they spent freezing winter days and nights attempting to defend Bastogne and push back German forces. He explained that the trees overhead were new growth, that they had not been present to “witness” the fighting that once transpired here.
The students, who had been listening politely, turned rapt as he told the stories in his heavily-accented English; the foxholes seemed to resonate with them more than the rest of the tour. And when Mr. Boyreau-Suzémont suggested it was time to leave, Mr. Mignon objected vociferously. The group had yet to see the most important and best-preserved foxholes.
“Je cours,” he insisted. I’ll run.
The group ended up touring those foxholes.
But as someone so deeply invested in the past, Mr. Mignon could not completely dispel of the present. On the bus ride back, with just minutes left, his resolve to not talk about modern events slipped.
He was describing May 8, when Bastogne celebrates Victory in Europe Day, with ceremonies held in honor of its American saviors. The day falls on May 9 in Russia, because of the time zone difference. He mused about what it would be like this year.
“Maybe your president will be present in Moscow then,” he quipped, to utter silence on the bus. “With his friends Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong.”
