The Countryside Remembering: At the D-Day beaches

Samedi 30 octobre: We were supposed to take the buses -- bus verts, ligne 70. Leaves Bayeux at 12h15. Goes past the American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-mer, Vierville-sur-mer, etc. Supposedly returns from American Cemetery to Bayeux at 17h00.

But of course, upon getting on the bus and asking the bus driver (Thank GOD we asked!!), we were told that the 17h00 bus stopped running at the end of September and that we would have to take the 14h17 bus instead, giving us about one hour total to see everything.

"Sinon, vous pouvez prendre un taxi," the driver suggested.

"Combien?"

"Vingt cinq."

It wasn't 25€, it was about 38€, but it turned out to be a very good thing we took a taxi instead, because I called the company past 17h00. We had been through the American Cemetery, walked along Omaha Beach, had lunch, and checked out the Musée Memorial d'Omaha Beach.

It was a stunning fall day; not too chilly, sunny. The water looked particularly blue. It made the green of the hillsides even more brilliant. Because this country, you see, has grown in. Cows roam along the bluffs -- very surprisingly steep. The Germans, I realized, had the high ground. Their barracks, strongholds, are still there in concrete, nestled into the hillside. They are empty these days, while the green ivy and grass creeps down, above, around. The gun holes are filled with green. A butterfly sat primly in one. A rather ironic, or maybe just beautiful, image I thought.

The cemetery, on the contrary, is perfectly cultivated, in relation to the wild hillsides. Perfectly tended and trimmed grass paying tribute to the endless white crosses, a handful star of David's thrown in. There are over 9000 graves here. Walking among them, you notice how many of them died between June and August 1944. Some of them have no name. The cross says instead, "Here rests in honoured glory a comrade-in-arms. Known but to God."

I found one grave. 6 Juin 1944. Div 1. He was in the first division and died on the first day. I think, he must have been one of the first to set foot on the beaches. The first to walk directly into German machine gun fire.

As we hiked down the bluffs, I found myself wondering if it had been this beautiful that morning, if the sun had risen bright or if it was dark, gray, cloudy -- more appropriate for the bloody work that had been done. I looked at the beach and wondered what it must have been like, to board the ships leaving the channel, to watch the beach approach and then to have enough courage to get off the boat and walk forward.

The American troops landed at Omaha at 6:30 in the morning. By 8am they had the first pocket of defensible land. One and a half hours is nothing in the scheme of things, but at the time it must have felt like centuries. At the Musée there are photos and videos from the invasion, and I found myself thinking how different war is in the movies -- there, fast, sudden. These films -- it is slow, dogging, dragging stumbling. The soldiers run or walk across endless countryside, they drag their wounded back to the ships, they exist somehow in the middle of the ruckus.

The witnesses of the veterans have several things in common -- they mention it was 'tense', a strange and remarkable frankness about the battles, how they were all frightened, how the beaches were littered with bodies.

500 men died in the first few minutes. That was the price of that first pocket of defensible land. They started an impromptu cemetery but had to move it, so the incoming waves wouldn't see that 500 graves were already there. 500 in the first wave. They called it Bloody Omaha for a reason.

Throughout the whole day I couldn't help but try and imagine it, imagine the stumbling landing, the way it must have looked, the weather, the impossible courage of those men.

The thing is about these beaches, this countryside, is that it remembers. The blood has long since been washed away and the shells of mussels now litter the beach instead of bodies, but this land is where it happened. A man with a gun used to be standing where the butterfly is right now. War has never been fought on American soil -- but these people here remember, or have family who remember. They can't forget -- even though life goes on these days, the little houses quietly tucked into the hillside, the countryside vibrates with a kind of deep, somber remembering. It's not sad, really. Not broken either. Just like in its stomach, deep in the soul of this place -- it remembers. Quietly. Calmly. Letting the sun bathe the sand and the water and the grass and beating -- like this, boom, boom.