For the record, whenever the federal government in Canada does something major – like a Speech from the Throne (which it did last week) – my job kicks into high gear for a couple days and many long hours of overtime reading and writing reports. So my apologies for the delay of a few days since the last post in the France series. I was “writ out”.

Several days after our arrival in Normandy, I took one of the best organized tours I think I’ve ever been on in my life. (I say “I” because I suspect Leslie was feeling a little “warred out” and opted to let me do this one – Canada’s Normandy experience – by myself.)

I almost missed its start. I had been armed with instructions that our gite hostess had told me were pretty much foolproof, but obviously she was unfamiliar with the full scope of fool with whom she was dealing here. They were really quite simple: take the road to Bayeux and park by the cathedral near the Tapestry exhibit. “Bayeux / cathedral / thousand-year-old Tapestry” – pretty hard to screw that up, you’d think.

For starters, I drove the entire distance in the early morning in complete darkness. The sun on Normandy doesn’t so much rise as it does “appear”. And in October, its appearance in the Normandy sky is a rather abrupt illumination at about 7:45 am. Even though I had left myself (I thought) plenty of time to cover what our hostess said was about a 30-minute drive, I entered Bayeux and promptly took a wrong turn.

Here’s why. She indicated the first turn would be onto “boul Marachel LeClerc”. (Philippe LeClerc was a French WWII commander whose Second Armoured Division was the first unit into Paris when that city was liberated. Just about every town in France with a population of more than 20 has a street named after him.) So I dutifully turned when a rather large neon “LeClerc” sign appeared at a corner – only later discovering that LeClerc is also the name of a vast network of French department stores, jewelry stores and gas stations spread across a good chunk of Europe and there just happened to be one located at that particular intersection on my way into central Bayeux. (That it never occurred to me to wonder why there was only one street sign in all of Bayeux rendered in billboard-sized neon was testament to the absence of caffeine in my brain at this early point in my day.)

Still in the dark – literally and figuratively – after several minutes of twisting and turning through Bayeux’s hilariously narrow streets, I happened on a very active parking lot guarded by a phalanx of security guards. Apparently a trade show of some kind was in the process of setting up in a nearby display hall and they were tasked with keeping the public’s vehicles out of the lot until the exhibit transports had departed. Once they determined from my map where I wanted to be – and showed me just how far I had strayed – they steered me correctly.

And as it turned out, my “generous” time cushion turned out to have been reduced to no more than about eight minutes by the time I did indeed get parked where I was supposed to be. (I had also completely missed a one-way sign in the darkness in my circular course around the cathedral. A lucky break, as it turned out, not only because of the absence of any watching gendarmes, but also because it dumped me a mere half block away from my destination.) But eight minutes was enough and almost as though waiting for me, a passenger tour van swung into the parking lot just moments after I did. Just as the sky was turning into full daylight with the speed of a switch coming on.

At this point, I have to pass along a hearty plug for a Normandy tour company called Battlebus. I’ll describe my day over many coming paragraphs, but let me start by summing up: the guide, a fellow named Sean Claxton, had more in his head than I have in an entire shelf of WWII books at home. Throughout the day, he would manoeuvre us through more Canada-related D-Day places – both renowned and obscure – than I could possibly have found on my own, even given a month to do so. His running description was hallmarked by a perfectly balanced blend of information and sensitivity. He carried with him a large album of heavily laminated pages that, over the course of the tour, revealed themselves to be dozens of maps and photos. As the day went on, his album pages either augmented what we were looking at – or placed us in a given setting as it appeared in June, 1944. There may be shorter or perhaps slightly less expensive battlefield tours you can grab in Normandy. But I cannot possibly imagine any better.

Also at this point – a bit of an alert for readers who might already be “warred out”. I plan to relate my Canada-on-D-Day tour in this single post. (And in the process, of course, also relate a great deal of what happened in 1944.) So the above introductory description of my struggling entry into Bayeux notwithstanding, this post will be almost entirely devoted to the battle that brought Canada into France in WWII. For anyone not interested in that much history at one go – abandon hope all ye who enter here. (Come to think of it, for that matter, I might even wear down the history buffs.) But with that disclaimer... all aboard the Battlebus under the more than able guidance of Sean.

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We started our tour where approximately 14,000 men of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and the 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade did – at Courseulles-sur-mer.


One of the best-known photos of Canadians landing on D-Day shows troops disembarking right on the shoreline via gangway stairs bracketing the bow of their large landing craft. They are carrying bicycles. (Photo: TheMonarchist.blogspot.com)

Visible in the distance in the left of the photo just above the beach is a large half-timbered house that still stands today and is known as the Canada House.
Here’s a photo of a photo I took from a display mounted right at Juno Beach that shows the house as it looked on D-Day,
and here it is as it appears today.

It was windy and raining heavily as we stood on the seawall. Sean told us that the sea was running much as it was when the Canadians landed. One significant difference in our view vs what faced Canadian troops was that the seawall today rises barely five feet above the sand. During the war, the beach was significantly lower and scaling the wall required ladders or the use of boat launch ramps.

Courseulles-sur-mer is replete with monuments and memorials paying tribute to Canada in general, and individual regiments in particular. Sean was a consummate storyteller and had a vignette – heroic, touching, tragic, humourous – to associate with almost every piece of real estate on which we stood.

He showed us, for example, roadside kerbs that had regular triangular notches banged into them every ten inches or so along much of their length. The marks were made by Canadian tank treads as the armoured vehicles moved off the beach and began the drive inland. Details like that, which reduce the monumental invasion to the most mundane of impacts, repeatedly bring home the reality that this is a battlefield, with scars both simple and profound, and put little exclamation points to the fact that D-Day is still part of the living memory of thousands of local residents, Canadian veterans and their families alike.

The Juno Beach Centre

In a word, disappointment was my first reaction. Initially, I thought it might have been due to perhaps my having had too great an expectation but, in hindsight, I think what bothered me most about the Juno Beach Centre is that it is very much, almost painfully so, a Government of Canada project. Here on beaches where a great deal of Canadian blood was spilled in the first act of the WWII Liberation of France, visitors to the Centre that is ostensibly built to commemorate that event are being pitched what is largely a “Canada is a wonderfully diverse country” museum display. And for me, nothing drove that home as succinctly as when I stepped into the large, natural-light-illuminated hall at the end of the path through the Centre to find myself staring at a curling broom mounted on a pillar, with the happy message that Canada is a land that makes the most of winter.

Oh, there were D-Day associated displays, including this beautifully touching presentation of “For the Fallen”, Laurence Binyon’s Act of Remembrance that is read each year at the Ottawa Cenotaph during the November 11 observances (this year, for the first time ever in Inuit).
The wall-mounted cross beside it is a temporary metal grave marker that was spiked into the ground at one of thousands of Canadian war graves hastily dug in the heat of the battle until they could be more properly re-located to formal battle cemeteries after the war.

But where the US D-Day beach museums focus entirely on what happened in that setting on that day, Canada’s role on D-Day in this Centre is rendered more sporadically, even incidentally in places, in a display that bears all the signs of an “Invest in Canada” appeal that, to me, is more properly the stuff of a High Commission reading room or a trade show.

But on the grounds outside, I did find and photograph a commemorative plaque marking a contribution to the Centre’s construction by a colleague with whom I worked. When I returned, I e-mailed it to him and he was delighted to see it.

Our next stop was the Canadian cemetery just 3.5 km inland from Courceulles, officially at Beny-sur-mer. Here, no government sales pitch is required – the simple message is unequivocal. Over 2,000 men are buried here, 340 who died in the invasion, and the rest lost during subsequent battles in the larger Normandy campaign. Sean highlighted two graves in particular, the first showing us that a little bit of poignant humour is indeed possible in this garden of stone. Somewhere in the Beny cemetery, a man named Rifleman J Stewart lies.
But somehow, his specific location was misplaced when bodies in the many temporary graves throughout Normandy were re-interred in this cemetery after the war. So if you look closely at the text arching across the top of his marker, you read, “Known to be Buried in this Cemetery”. It’s quite a “whoops”, when you think of it. And his is the only stone to be placed out of synch with all the other meticulously lined-up headstones, as you see in this photo, where it stands all by itself in bottom centre.

The second grave Sean pointed out is the cemetery’s only grave to be marked with a cross. R Guenard was a French civilian, a resistance fighter who helped Canadian troops by fighting alongside them during the Normandy campaign, and who died six weeks later for that cause. He had no known relatives and so was placed among the soldiers whose battle he shared. In addition to his name, the plaque on his cross reads simply, “Mort pour la France, 19-7-1944”.

As we left the Beny cemetery, Sean drew our attention to another recent (and peculiarly Canadian) custom – leaving Canadian $1 “loonie” coins across the top of the campaign map placed on a plaque at the cemetery’s entrance. Apparently, the practice only started with the wide publicity given to the embedding of another of those coins at centre ice in advance of the Canadian Olympic hockey games.

It was at about this point that Sean displayed one of his personal characteristics that, to my mind, places him among the gold medalists of tour guides. I had earlier happened to mention that Dan Darling, a late acquaintance of mine, who passed away fairly recently, had landed with the Canadians on D-Day, but had been badly wounded just a few days after the landing. “What unit was he with?” asked Sean. I told him the Stormont Dundas Glengarry Highlanders – the SDGs. So after leaving the cemetery, we paused at a plaque marking an intersection where a particularly fierce Canadian firefight had taken place, earning the junction and its environs forevermore the name of Hell’s Corners. From there, instead of heading back onto the road, Sean took us down a laneway, eventually drawing us up before a very large private home – not quite big enough to qualify as a Chateau, but close. Sean asked us to wait while he tried to roust someone from within the house, but no one answered his vigorous knocking.

“We’re not supposed to bring tours onto this property,” he said, “but the owner makes an occasional exception in special cases.” Then he took us all to a large plaque on the wall. It was a tribute to the SDGs, and its inscription read, “In memory of the Stormont Dundas Glengarry Highlanders, who fought in these fields they named ‘Hell’s Corners’ for the Liberty of France, 7-11 June 1944.”

“If your friend was wounded within a few days of the landing,” he said, “it likely was right around here, because the SDGs were held up here for several days of really hard fighting and they took a lot of casualties in the fields all around this house.”

In a similar aside a little later, he pulled us up to another plaque mounted on a stone cairn at the edge of a big empty field. It marked the site of a wartime airfield and Sean, who had earlier learned from the others on our tour – a family of three – that Dad’s grandfather had flown with a Canadian squadron in support of the landings from an airfield built close to the beaches. “It had to be this airfield,” said Sean, “because this was where the Canadian fighter squadrons were based right after D-Day.” They took several photos for Grandma back home, making us a unanimously astonished gang of tourists, amazed at just how thorough was Sean’s knowledge, and just how well he picked up on all the little details of casual conversation throughout the tour.

Our next stop was at a beautiful spot masking a terrible wartime atrocity. L’Abbaye d’Ardennes was used as a German observation post during the Battle of Normandy. It’s hardly surprising when you look at this photo of the now fully restored Abbey. It’s on the highest spot of land around and each of its corner towers is the landbound equivalent of a naval crow’s nest.
Sean showed us a wartime photo of German lookouts on one of the Abbey’s towers and it clearly showed the considerable field of view they had. But the Abbey was also the site of the summary execution of several Canadian soldiers who had surrendered to the German XIIth Panzer Brigade. The XIIth was under the command of a notorious Brigade Commander named Kurt Meyer,
who it seems bore a passing resemblance to Ralph Fiennes
(Photos: Meyer: LeMag ’44, a Webzine devoted to WWII; Fiennes: photo.net).

After the war, Meyer was convicted of war crimes on the strength of testimony from some of his own soldiers that he had specifically ordered “no prisoners”, and a witness – a soldier from another German army unit who was having his vehicle repaired in the Abbey’s maintenance shop – to the execution of the Canadian prisoners at the Abbey while it was occupied by troops under Meyer’s command.

In the Abbey yard today is a lovely memorial in the garden where the Canadians were shot.
In addition, the garden’s trees and one wall are stuck with poppies and on an adjacent wall is mounted a huge composite photograph of the victims of the execution.
Several years after his conviction, Meyer’s sentence was overturned on the grounds that the evidence used to convict him, while compelling, had been entirely circumstantial. No one could testify precisely that Meyer had ordered the prisoners’ execution and while, as commander, he was technically responsible for the actions of his men, the lack of a firm link from him to the actual shootings was enough to prompt clemency from a judge. Meyer became a post-war hero to his men in the Waffen SS when he fought vigorously to win them full veterans’ pensions after the war.

Our next stop was in a town named Bretteville-Orgueilleuse (which apparently will trigger the end of the world when someone actually pronounces its name correctly), where Sean showed us a photo to accompany an incredible story of three Canadian soldiers who had managed to knock out an advancing German Panther tank with a weapon called a PIAT (for Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank). Here’s Sean holding up a photo of the Panther tank stopped – literally – in its tracks.
To be effective, the PIAT
– essentially a terrifyingly small tube with a handle and a trigger (Photo: www.militaryfactory.com) – had to be fired at really close range. These guys had the will to sit behind a stone wall and wait until this behemoth was no more than 15 metres away before shooting. And in another example of making the battlefield tales real for our small touring company, you’ll notice that in the background behind Sean is the same house today where the tank’s advance was abruptly halted by the Canadians’ fearless anti-tank shot on June 7, 1944. Sean, in fact, is standing on the street side of the wall at precisely the point where the Canadians were taking cover until the moment they fired their PIAT.

There were many more stories that Sean told us, and I can’t leave off without one last one. For us, it was probably the most touching of all. The town of Buron also lies on Canada’s route of post D-Day battles as they fought to expand their foothold in France. One Canadian unit, the Highland Light Infantry, was exceptionally well-served in its spiritual needs by a Scots-born Presbyterian named “Padre Jock” Anderson.

And in Buron, Padre Jock comforted many wounded men as they lay dying. So many, in fact, that when the HLIs moved on, Sean told us that the Padre is said to have told someone that a large measure of his soul was remaining behind in Buron, in the town square where a battlefield hospital had been set up and where so many men died, literally in Padre Jock’s arms. After the war, the Padre wrote to the town council, seeking permission for his ashes to be interred in the square when his own end came. He explained why, but the council was officially unmoved. Their reply to Padre Jock was on the order of, “We are genuinely sorry, but if we say yes to you we will be unable to refuse anyone else seeking permission for the same.”

Eventually, in his 80s, Padre Jock himself passed away and his wife repeated his request for interment of his ashes in the town square of Buron. Again the request was denied. And at this point in the story, Sean with masterful timing had slowed our tour van at a private home on one corner of the town’s square – the official address in fact, is Number 1 on the square. “But one of the councillors was so disgusted with the decision of his town colleagues,” said Sean, “that... well, look in the garden to your right.” And we did, and there, in a tiny plot no more than four feet by four feet at the very edge of the private garden bordering the square, was a beautiful little black marble stone with carved lettering filled in gold dedicated to the memory of Padre Jock. Under the stone lie his ashes, the tiny garden patch now a war grave. And Padre Jock, if not at rest in the precise place he left his soul, is certainly lying no more than a whisper away.

It was the icing on the cake for us. The day had been a truly memorable blend of all that the Battlebus brochure promised.

I have read about the feelings described by Canadians when they visit these places, and wondered when I read, “It made me feel proud to be Canadian”, was it truth or hubris speaking? And then I saw town after town with their squares renamed “Place du Canada” or “Place Canadienne”, and I saw monument after monument faced with the maple leaf and carved with unit names like Regina Rifles, Régiment de la Chaudière, the North Shore (New Brunswick), the Fort Garry Horse, and I scanned just some of the seemingly endless names on the headstones in the Beny cemetery...






And it made me feel proud to be Canadian.

Next... the Bayeux Tapestry and the Peace of War – the US and German Normandy cemeteries.

Utah Beach - June 6, 1944

As I mentioned previously, this American beach was the objective of the IVth Division, a unit with an assistant commander of significant US pedigree: Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. In “The Longest Day”, the 53 year-old Roosevelt, played by Henry Fonda, is portrayed with a cane and is shown receiving permission to take part in the landings only after submitting a petition over the head of the division commander, “Tubby” Barton. Both characterizations are accurate. Roosevelt had arthritis and turned out to be the only general who participated in the first-wave D-Day landings. General Roosevelt, however, also suffered from a heart condition and did not survive the war. Ironically, just a month after D-Day, he was felled by a heart attack. His actions on the beach on June 6, however, won him the Congressional Medal of Honour. When he learned that his entire force had somehow missed its landing by almost 2 km, his cool appraisal of the situation produced his famous, “Alright then, we’ll start the war from right here” assessment. His leadership that day was cited years later by General Omar Bradley, when Bradley was asked to name the most heroic combat action he had ever seen. He answered simply, “Ted Roosevelt on Utah Beach”.

His Medal of Honour citation sums it up nicely:
"For gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty on 6 June 1944, in France. After 2 verbal requests to accompany the leading assault elements in the Normandy invasion had been denied, Brig. Gen. Roosevelt's written request for this mission was approved and he landed with the first wave of the forces assaulting the enemy-held beaches. He repeatedly led groups from the beach, over the seawall and established them inland. His valor, courage, and presence in the very front of the attack and his complete unconcern at being under heavy fire inspired the troops to heights of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice. Although the enemy had the beach under constant direct fire, Brig. Gen. Roosevelt moved from one locality to another, rallying men around him, directed and personally led them against the enemy. Under his seasoned, precise, calm, and unfaltering leadership, assault troops reduced beach strong points and rapidly moved inland with minimum casualties. He thus contributed substantially to the successful establishment of the beachhead in France."

(For the literati in the room , JD “Catcher in the Rye” Salinger was also among the US troops in the landing.)

Also among the units landing on Utah was the First Engineer Special Brigade, who built roads and airfields with such astonishing speed after the landing that US Air Force Thunderbolt fighters were able to fly support for post D-Day operations throughout the summer of 1944 from two airfields just minutes inland from the beach.

The presence of the Engineers in the Utah landing is also the reason why much of this beach’s memorial and museum’s focus is a tribute to the units that support the front line combat soldiers.

I have the feeling that Roosevelt, very much a “soldier’s soldier”, would be quite happy that his most visible memorial on the beach is a bar and restaurant built around a concrete bunker that was used as a communications centre by the Germans.
On D-Day, after being captured the bunker was swiftly turned to precisely the same purpose for the Allies and became the hub of ship to shore communications through which all the later Utah traffic was co-ordinated, eventually landing almost 850,000 men, 220,000 vehicles and 725,000 tons of equipment between June 8 and October 31, 1944.

For our part, we took advantage of le Roosevelt’s offering of an internet connection (which only worked on our second visit; our first effort produced a classic Gallic shrug from the bar’s owner and an apology for the link’s having failed to work “for the last seven months”) to send a message home and also to discover the answer to the one burning question from the home front that the news junkie in me had to know: who won the Canadian general election?

Leslie and I actually shared several glasses of wine and calvados in le Roosevelt. The bar is drenched in character and its walls are packed floor to ceiling with densely displayed memorabilia, but especially dozens of old two-way radio sets and the electronic miscellany of wartime communication.
Over the years, the countless veterans who have visited have left autographs and brief biographical notes on pretty much every writable surface in the bar, from tabletops to the face of the bar itself. On one of the tables at which we sat, one intrepid veteran related a service career that included naval service aboard one of the ships supporting the invasion, then aboard separate ships during both the Korean and Vietnam wars and even a stint as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton”. Another – in the top left corner of this photo – was probably written with a nod to the author’s lucky stars: “Josef Horn, German vet, wounded and captured at ‘Holely’ (?) by the 101 Airborn 6.6.44”.

The Museum and Visitors Centre is likewise an extremely well-mounted exhibit dedicated to the units whose jobs involve getting the front-line troops safely onto the beaches and supporting them once they’re there. The Museum’s notes describing their exploits, however, were marred by anything but efficiency. Their English translation is done so appallingly badly that it has produced several pleas for correction in the Museum’s guest book. I took a photograph of one – on a display of German soldiers’ equipment – and believe it or not, this isn’t the worst.
From its “These symbols of evil are shown in order to do not forget” beginning to its “Those who tend to forget the Past are convicted to come alive again it” ending, it was representative of an overall labelling effort that looked like an assembly of the products of the runners-up in a high school English as a Second Language class contest. (Come to think of it, I should probably apologize to ESL high schoolers everywhere.)

But that’s over-emphasizing the one negative aspect. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to this museum. And it did give me one of my louder laughs of the trip, when I discovered the much more peaceful – and certainly necessary – use to which another of the Atlantic Wall’s former defence bunkers just outside is now being put. (Note the sign on the right.)


Here are a couple more shots taken inside the Centre. The first one shows, in the lower right, the entrance to an actual defensive German bunker over which the Centre is built.
The black cone-shaped object in centre is the turret from a French Renault tank, which was turned into a bunker-mounted defensive machine gun position by the Germans. And the vehicles in the background are US landing vehicles called DUKWs. (In a happy military coincidence, the amphibious craft came to be called almost universally “ducks”, even though the designation is based entirely on practicality. The name comes from the model naming terminology used by the manufacturer, General Motors. “D” indicates a vehicle that was designed in 1942, “U” is for “utility (amphibious)”, “K” is GM’s indication for all-wheel drive and they used the “W” to indicate that its two rear axles were both powered – take notes; there’ll be a test later.)


In the second photo, visible outside the oval window are two different designs of beach obstacles – one a concrete pyramid shape and the other a vicious asterisk-shaped piece of iron – embedded in the sand by the Germans. Underwater at high tide, either could be – and frequently was – fitted with explosives to act as a mine that would destroy a landing craft or amphibious vehicle. And this is a photo taken outside.
The tank is a Sherman – the workhorse of US forces during the Second World War, and the statue in the background is a memorial to the countless Naval units who landed the troops and ferried their supplies to shore once the toehold became a foothold became a beachhead became the gateway to Europe.

Finally, take a look at this photo of a photo, also in the Utah Beach Museum, of US soldiers emerging from a chapel after a church service.
Heavily damaged by shellfire and bullets, the chapel was nonetheless employed for its originally intended purpose – as a small centre of worship – from the first days of the landing. As it happens, the Chapelle de la Madeleine is a mere few yards down the same road as our gite and it is today
a fully restored quiet place of contemplation. This is not the last time a sense of the living history of Normandy – and later Paris – would make itself felt to us visitors.

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Frankly, we could have used the organizational efficiency of an engineering battalion for our next assignment – a drive into Carentan to try to solve the so-far non-functionality of our PIN-less credit cards. I mentioned earlier that we would eventually discover that one of our four cards – my Gold VISA – did in fact come with an embedded pin. But even today, I can’t write that without steering a quiet snarl at the issuing banks, not one of whom mentioned to us the need for a PIN, even after we called them to notify them of our upcoming trip so that the sudden wave of charges originating from France would not set off any foreign-sourced alarms. But on the positive side, we found an “above and beyond the call of duty” employee at the Carentan Tourist Office who let us make as many long distance calls as we needed to try to resolve the problem. And once we found that we had one pre-PINned card of the four, celebrated with a lunch at a pub obviously geared to attracting visiting US vets, The Swampy.

Incidentally, French draft beer, rendered on bar menus as “bière pression”, is fabulous. As a rule, it’s much hoppier than the products of the big Canadian brewers. I found that the one I enjoyed most, even though it usually was among the least expensive of the available brews on tap, is called “1664”, a pale lager made by Kronenbourg.

Up next – one of the most meaningful days of my war-related pilgrimages on this trip – the Canadian D-Day experience – Juno Beach.

One of our travel guide books refers to the Mont St Michel silhouette as France’s second best-known, the Eiffel Tower being first. And so it was somehow appropriate that it was in silhouette form that the historic Abbey and its island first appeared to us while we were still a few kilometres away, looming out of the late morning mist like some mad cross between Mordor’s Dark Tower and Cinderella’s castle.


Mont St Michel is not so much an Abbey located on an island as it is, in its entirety, an island. Its boundary walls encircle the island to its very edge and, from the moment you step onto the island after crossing the causeway linking it to the mainland, you are at the Abbey’s main gate.

Its location is also in a region of fast-changing tides. So fast, in fact that there are areas of the parking lot posted with signs advising of the high tide time on any given day, supplemented with the especially helpful notice that, if your car is still at this location in a few hours, it will be underwater.


For our part, we left ourselves an open-ended visit and parked on ground that lay above the high tide mark. The modest price you pay for choosing that option is that you are faced with a slightly longer walk to reach the Abbey / island’s front gate.

The guide book we used most often during our trip was possessed of a sense of humour and so we were forewarned that the winding climb leading to the Abbey proper was bounded by dozens of shops and cafés that to this day unabashedly maintain the ancient tradition of happily fleecing pilgrims of every possible form of currency in their possession.

As fans of the Harry Potter movies will instantly recognize, the sellers’ avenue has almost a carbon copy feel of Diagon Alley, the crowded street of shops where the Hogwarts wizards-in-training purchased their array of school supplies, wands, robes and the like. (Leslie and I clearly are not the only ones to have remarked on the parallel.
When, a couple days later, I took a Juno Beach tour with a family from Saskatchewan, they too had been to Mont St Michel and they too told me they were astonished at feeling they had just walked into Diagon Alley. And Googling “Mont St Michel, Diagon Alley” turns up at least a hundred other travellers’ diary comments echoing the feeling.)

The blatant, albeit picturesque commercialism of the lower levels notwithstanding, as you leave the shops behind and move upward into the realm of the Abbey proper, the magnificent Mont St Michel Abbey does not feel like it has been constructed on a rocky island so much as it has morphed from it. If ever a man-made structure could be said to epitomize the literary cliché more typically used to characterize an especially moving sculpture, “born of the living rock”, Mont St Michel is it.

(A brief, obligatory historical aside.) The presence of a structure on the island dates back to the eighth century when Aubert, a bishop of the Norman town of Avranches is supposed to have been visited by St Michael the Archangel*, and founded a monastery on the island to commemorate the visitation. Its present Gothic towers date to 1228. There have been religious occupants ever since, but in surprisingly small numbers, given the immensity of the construction. The present-day community is a dozen or so monks and nuns from the Monastic Fraternity of Jerusalem. Considering that a typical day sees the island crawling with thousands of tourists – tens of thousands in the busy summer season – it hardly seems surprising that the available private monastic space is able to accommodate no more than about 12.

* In a somewhat bizarre bit of reliquary, in Avranches there is a church (Saint Gervais) in which a treasury houses what is purported to be the skull of the now Saint Aubert, complete with a hole where the archangel Michael's finger is supposed to have pierced it (Modern day analysis, however, ascribes the aperture not to the intrusion of a divine digit, but rather to the skull’s having been trepanned by a well-intentioned physician of the day.)

One aspect of the site that both Leslie and I found puzzling, and not a little disappointing, was that its powers-that-be have elected to hang massive fabric photographs at several places that bore no relation to the site itself, but rather showed other great climbs, staircases and mountain trails from all over the world.
One of our guidebooks did note that the Abbey at one time was home to a number of beautiful and enormous tapestries so I suppose that the fabric photos’ presence might have been a manifestation of someone’s intention to try to recapture some of that former glory by covering several of the larger rock surfaces. But to us it just seemed kind of crass.



The climb up the staircases and steeply pitched pathways does come with constant rewards – the views from the upper levels looking back down over other points of the island, the distant countryside and the tidal flats are spectacular. In the last one, Leslie is contemplating the view.
If you enlarge it, you can see a distant trail of several footprints -- just above the roofline at bottom centre -- leading out onto the flats. It’s a walk that has to be taken in the company of a knowledgeable guide, because there are actual patches of quicksand out on the flats whose muddy grasp can apparently trap an unwary stroller like Krazy Glue.

And in a wonderful surprise, as you approach the top, at one point you abruptly emerge from a dim corridor into this beautiful little courtyard garden.

If you do plan a visit and you can manage it, October is definitely a good time to be at this site. On a couple occasions we were told that it is insanely crowded in the summer months. We bumped into only a few clustered tour groups here and there. The earlier photo of the parking lot shows a lot that is only about 2/3 full. There are three other lots of equal or larger size on the approach to the Abbey and in summer they are all routinely filled.

The drive to and from the Abbey to our gite at Utah Beach through the Norman countryside was also a wonderful road trip. Many roads in that part of the country – especially the more rural ones – are bounded by enormous, centuries-old hedges. While picturesque, they also gave me a much clearer understanding of why it took so long for the Allied armies to break out of their continental toehold on the D-Day beach landing sites and begin the simultaneous push south to Paris and east to, eventually, Berlin. Wartime histories of the post-D-Day struggles in Normandy include frequent reference to the difficulty of trying to advance through “hedgerows” or “bocage”. It is growth fierce enough to stop a tank in its tracks. As Wikipedia sums it up: “Bocage... refers to a terrain of mixed woodland and pasture, with tortuous side-roads and lanes bounded on both sides by banks surmounted with high thick hedgerows which limit visibility. It is the sort of landscape found in England in Devon. In Normandy, it acquired a particular significance during the Battle of Normandy, as it made progress against an entrenched opposition extremely difficult. American soldiers also referred to bocage as ‘hedgerows’.”

Later that evening, when we got back to our temporary home, we took another stroll out to the beach around midnight and discovered just how different it is between low and high tide. Recall my earlier photo of the placid Utah Beach at low tide when I referred to the hundreds of yards of sand the invading Allies had to cross. Contrast that with this same stretch of beach photographed at almost the same point a couple days later during the daylight high tide.
Strolling this area at midnight was not a little eerie. The only lights were those around the Utah Beach memorial and museum, and across the water from lighthouses and a few other distant sources that we took to be Channel shipping traffic. At one point, as we made our way back into the darkness to return to our gite, we both became aware of a presence a few yards off to our left in a field. Shining our flashlight that way produced a sudden rush of galloping horses as several of the animals, who had been quietly grazing in the dark, decided that our light was unfamiliar enough that it should be run away from.

Next: The Utah Visitors Centre and an Internet café built, appropriately enough, on the site of a German communications bunker that later served as the main Allied ship-to-shore communications centre during the invasion.

A bit of a heads-up. My handwritten notes are replete with little paragraphs and sentence fragments that are headed “AITOI”. “As I Think Of It” is simply a reminder to myself that the note reflects a point of recall that I jotted down out of sequence. So when it occurs here, it’ll mean the same thing – a fun fact or vital observation too important to exclude (insert smiley here), but out of chronological order.

For example: AITOI: Air France doesn’t charge you a thing (well, not in addition to the ticket price, anyway) for the many extras they provide. You’re barely in the air before they pass out a package that includes a headset, snazzy sleep blindfold, freshener towelette and earplugs. Most important of all, all the beverages you can consume – whether alcoholic or not – are provided at no extra cost. It really makes Canada’s airline “service”, whose only freebie is a small foil bag of a half dozen granite pretzels, look like the product of pikers. And as you taxi into CDG, you will find it hard to miss an absolutely magnificent pedestal-mounted Air France Concorde – a sleek reminder of the glory days when aviation fuel was cheap and the local decibel police had not yet gotten around to imposing rules about the thundering howl that jet engines require to haul a supersonic airliner off the runway.

Back to Normandy.

How rural was it?
Well here’s what sunrise looked like straight out our doorway.

DAY 2

In a lot of French communities, catching Market Day is a treat. Well not in Carentan, the nearest large town to our Utah Beach gite. Maybe it’s different in high tourist season but, in October, aside from a few sporadic classic French market stall vendors offering cheese, bread or meat, it was a sea of cheap jeans, t-shirts and cheesy (in its other-than-Camembert meaning) miscellany that differed from the front lawns at an Ottawa event like the Great Glebe Garage Sale only in that the prices were displayed exclusively in Euros.

That being said, Carentan did offer us our first French community walkabout and it was a delight. Home to a wonderful old church,
(“Wonderful old church”, by the way, is simply a given in any French community with a population of 100 or more. Even the tiniest community is inevitably centred on a stunning stone structure whose foundation like as not was laid down the same decade William the Conqueror pushed across the channel for his fateful meeting with Harold at Hastings in the year 1066.) Carentan also has warmly cobbled sidewalks, small close streets
and an institution over whose name we are still puzzling, the “Gymnasium de Haut Dick”, whose punning prospects are so obvious that even I will let them pass.

It might also seem hard to believe, but cobbled or interlocking paving stones seem to make a much gentler walk than the same distance on concrete or perfectly flat asphalt. I suspect it’s because more of your foot from the ankle down is being exercised than is the case on North American sidewalks. Maybe some local chiropody college could be found to fund the necessary research and I volunteer to submit to a strapped-on ankle monitor if they spring for a week of my strolling about Oxford or Cambridge or, for that matter, just about any town in Europe. But I digress.


Day 1 in Carentan was also the day we discovered that our PIN-less credit cards were going to be problematic. But if I was going to have to wash dishes to earn our escape from the restaurant in which we first tried to use one, a Pommeau aperitif (a local treat that blends harsher Calvados with a soothing quantity of cider), grilled hake, a fantastic red “vin maison” and a local cheese board by way of dessert was a price worth paying. (Fortunately, we had more than enough cash to cover the meal.)

And another general travel note. France automatically includes what we would consider to be a “tip” in the total that makes up their bill in a service-related business like a hotel, bar or restaurant. Attempting to add a further 15% (and I speak from experience here, until fortunately rescued by Leslie and, once again, her pre-trip homework) will earn you a look on the order of “Are you out of your mind??” Especially when you’ve pretty much been treated as an imbecile because three credit cards in a row failed to clear and the door to the kitchen and its sinkful of dirty dishes was beginning to open. (“Wait, monsieur, let me insult you some more and you can make it 30 per cent!”)

AITOI: Before I left, I received an e-mail from a regular Duck reader (thanks, Champ!) advising me to order the house wine. The logic is wonderfully simple. France is a wine country. Any restaurant offering a shoddy house wine is not going to be in the restaurant business for very long. So that’s exactly what we did, and along the way discovered many wonderful wines – a peppery red with echoes of Valpolicella in one place, and a fresh fruity Gewurtztraminer that was absolutely perfect with the veal cordon bleu we had ordered at a little place in Alsace. Oh, they’ll happily dredge their cellar to pander to a wine snob who wants to impress a table mate by ordering an hilariously overpriced label… but the same money will get you a minimum of three times the amount of house wine. (Or, conversely, the same amount of house wine will cost you a third or less of their least expensive labeled product. I didn’t mean to imply we were lushes here.)

Back to the war.

The nearest community (Carentan being the nearest _big_ community) to our gite was a small town called Ste-Marie-des-Monts and it bills itself as the first French community liberated on D-Day. It is also home to two little museums that face each other across the small square at the centre of town – a Musée de l’Occupation and a Musée de la Liberation. We never did get into the former, despite dropping by twice at times advertised as “Ouvert” on a sign on the door. But we did get into the Musée de la Liberation with its small but amazing collection of artifacts that I have no doubt Canada’s War Museum would love to get its hands on.
In fact, even the public dining room of our gite was framed with wall cabinets that were jammed with similar artifacts that our host had simply found on his own by scouring the surrounding fields with a metal detector. It’s hard to imagine that living on a battlefield could ever be perceived as having a benefit, but the ready availability of so much historical paraphernalia pretty much turns almost everyone into an amateur archivist or a serious collector.


(This communion dress, as noted on the label above it, was made from the silk of a parachute.)

From the Musée, we made the first of what I had pre-determined was one of the few “must-see”s on my visit to this part of France. I beg a pardon for this allusion from anyone who has not yet seen “The Longest Day”, but one of its more memorable sequences involves an American parachutist, played by Red Buttons, getting his parachute hung up on the bell tower of the church at the centre of a town named Ste-Mère-Église. That scene was based on what really did happen to a Private John Steele, including the fact of his actually having had the heel of his boot shot off while he dangled from the tower during the fighting that accompanied the airborne troops’ landing all over the town.

And in a bit of admitted tourist appeal, the good people of Ste-Mère-Église have actually slung an effigy of Private Steele from a real parachute on the bell tower in exactly the position he was suspended late on the night of June 5. And here I am, with the haplessly bronzed Pte Steele hanging from the tower above me.



The admitted “fromagerie” of this particular exhibit aside, the town is also home to an outstanding museum – just across the square from the church – dedicated specifically to the airborne forces and their operations associated with the D-Day landings. Two separate buildings are built around, in the first case, a WACO glider and, in the second, a C-47 troop transport.

And each is simply packed with fascinating display cases that feature the array of materiel that accompanies an airborne operation. But more than this, there are also special exhibits devoted to the French resistance and their pre-invasion communications (and sabotage of German communications) that leant such immeasurable support to the Allied landings). The real Private Steele himself made a couple post-war trips back to the town, duly photographed and recalled in a display in the museum, and the town is understandably the focal point of regularly held postwar reunions of members of the airborne forces.

Then, pronouncing ourselves “museumed out” for the day, we retired to our gite and in this most perfectly appropriate of settings, watched “The Longest Day” on a DVD player that was in our room. It was goose bump-inducing to be viewing the onscreen caption “Utah Beach”, while sitting mere yards from the actual location of those events’ recreation by Mr Zanuck and company. And of course, to watch again the dramatized plight of Pte Steele above the Ste-Mère-Église town square.
(Photo: Flickr.com)

Up next: A day’s hiatus from the war – Mont St Michel.