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French President Emmanuel Macron described Gautier and his
comrades as "heroes of the Liberation".
"We will not forget him," Macron wrote on Twitter.
Just last month, Gautier presented a student marine commando
with his green beret at a passing out parade at Colleville-Montgomery,
near the spot where he had landed on Sword Beach in a hail of
enemy fire at the age of 21.
In a poignant moment during that ceremony, the young marine
knelt on one knee to allow Gautier, who was in a wheelchair, to
straighten his beret.
Gautier spoke to Reuters in 2019 at his house several hundred
metres from the remnants of a German bunker he and comrades from
the special forces of French Captain Philippe Kieffer had
secured before pushing inland.
He recalled how he had been too young to join the army when
Hitler’s forces occupied France in World War Two, and so
enrolled in the navy.
He was on board one of the last French warships to sail for
Britain to join the Free French Forces of General Charles de
Gaulle as the Germans swept across the northern half of France
in 1940.
Decades later he still grappled with the violence of war.
"War is a misery. Not all that long ago, and perhaps you find
this silly, but I would think ‘perhaps I killed a young lad,
perhaps I orphaned children, perhaps I widowed a woman or made a
mother cry’," he said.
"I didn’t want that. I’m not a bad man. You kill a man who’s
done nothing to you. That’s war and you do it for your country."
(Reporting by Richard Lough; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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