TriumphAnt

I realize that I am probably overworking the number of references to “The Longest Day” here, but (a) we are, after all, on the D-Day beaches; and (b) “The Longest Day” so far is still number 1 on most people’s lists of “Best D-Day movies”. (And no, “The Americanization of Emily” doesn’t count. Or shouldn’t anyway.)

Our last D-Day stop was above the cliffs where, in the movie, the American Rangers are launching grappling hooks attached to long lines of climbing rope, while others are scaling those same cliffs using lightweight, collapsible ladders.

That scene was actually filmed at the precise location on the Normandy beaches where the attack took place in 1944 – Pointe du Hoc. Invasion-wise, it was a fearsome objective. Unlike the hundreds of yards of flat sand the troops at Utah crossed, the beach at the base of the hundred-metre tall cliff was barely ten metres in width. The point thrusts into the English Channel like a fang. From it, you can look miles to the left across the farthest stretches of Utah Beach, while to the right there is an equally panoramic overlook of Omaha Beach.

Needless to say, the Germans fortified it to an almost unbelievable density with heavy-artillery bunkers and machine gun positions, while just as needless to say, it had an extremely high priority as an Allied target. In a singular irony of the battle, shortly before the landings the Germans had actually removed several of their heaviest guns from their Pointe du Hoc clifftop shelters in order to prevent their destruction by the huge pre-invasion air bombardment. But fortunately for the Allies, the Ranger attack and D-Day itself took place before the Germans could return the guns to their bunkers.

(In a second irony, one of the prominent US Ranger parts in “The Longest Day” was played by a very young and very Canadian Paul Anka, who also composed the main musical theme for the movie.)

On June 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan spoke at a special ceremony honouring the US Ranger battalion that scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. He lavished praise on the small unit, noting that of the 225 who landed and carried out the assault, then held off no fewer than five very determined German counterattacks made to try to re-capture the site, only 90 Rangers were fit for duty two days later. At the site today, there is a huge bronze semi-circular plate commemorating the 1984 Reagan speech.

As you stand on the Pointe today, you can’t help but feel a multitude of sensations. The ruins of several massive bunkers give you the feeling that the Germans, before the attack, must have felt invincible here. The dozens of closely packed shell and bomb craters, on the other hand, coupled with the fact that so many of the bunkers are utterly wrecked, also give you a feeling of the intensity of the Allies’ efforts at wiping out the many defences packed into such a small patch of land. With nowhere to run, the Germans must have suffered a great many casualties in both the pre-attack blasting and during the Ranger assault itself.

As thorough a recounting of the attack as you’re ever likely to read is here.

Here’s what it looked like when we visited:



The “rolling” look of the terrain here is actually the result of the countless shell and bomb bursts. In the first picture, the structure with the viewing platform on top is the only structure on the Pointe that survived the pre-invasion blasts pretty much intact. It is an observation post.

Here’s Leslie looking straight into the business end of one of the lesser-damaged German bunkers.


And here’s a shot illustrating just how successful the Allied pre-invasion bombardment was. The photo also gives you an appreciation for the thickness of the reinforced concrete used in the bunkers’ construction.
Nothing less than a direct hit was going to cause any serious damage. But fortunately for the Allies pouring ashore to the left and right of Pointe du Hoc, there had indeed been a great many direct hits made on these defences in the 48 hours before the invasion, effectively taking all of the Pointe's big guns out of the picture.

With our departure from Pointe du Hoc, we also said good bye to the D-Day portion of our trip. (On a parting semantic note, the “Hoc” in the point’s name is actually pronounced like the garden implement: “hoe”.)

We had a long drive ahead of us the next day, so we decided we’d spend a leisurely afternoon in and around our gite. We lunched at the Roosevelt, and over a delightful beverage called a “kir Normand” (a blend of cassis and Normandy country cider), we dialled up the cyber-world via the café’s internet link and wrote a few postcards, mailing them from the post box mounted on the outside wall of the café.

Which brings me to the European French keyboard.

I confess I had simply assumed – in my white, male, English-speaking way – that computer keyboards the world over are all driven by not only our alphabet, but also by our peculiar “QWERTY” configuration of its letters. Surely, I thought, Bill Gates, or Wally Underwood, or Fred Selectric – somebody – would have mandated that this be so. The discovery that this was not, in fact, the case in much of French-speaking Europe came as a bit of a shock. The keyboard in use in many places there is not enormously different, but it’s different enough that it reduced Leslie – who is touch-typing trained – to the tried-and-true method of keyboarding known as hunt-and-peck.

(My own typing speed was considerably less affected, because I look at the keys. One downside of my style is that, as I flail away with eyes on the keys, if my computer mysteriously shifts out of the document into a window demanding, oh, say, the text that I wish to have translated, I can actually key several dozen characters before glancing up to discover that, for whatever fat-fingered, irreproducible key combination reason, I have inexplicably left the document in which I had been working several dozen characters earlier.)

Here are the essential differences: A and Q trade places, as do Z and W. M sits to the right of L (where our colon / semicolon key is typically found. The numbers 0 to 9 are still on the same keys, but to get to them to produce the digits, you have to press the "Shift" key. (Hitting the digits without hitting "Shift" is the path to an array of lower-case characters with accents.) Where the real fun begins is when you search for anything that is not a letter or number – the “@” symbol that is the heart of every e-mail address, for example. We finally had to ask for help to get the period – discovering that it actually required two keys to be pressed simultaneously. So here’s another travel tip for you. If you plan to travel to a place where you’ll be doing some keyboarding on something other than your own laptop or Blackberry – a Cyber-Café, say, take along a guide to the standard AZERTY keyboard. You can find it simply by Googling it under that name. But here’s what it looks like, along with some effort made to explain why.

(The preceding has been a public service announcement from the Society to Prevent the Tearing Out of Keyboarders’ Hair / SPTOKH).

Meanwhile, in addition to kir Normand, we also discovered another wonderful Norman alcoholic beverage based on, no surprise here, the apple as well. It’s called pommeau and is typically a blend of apple juice (to be completely correct, unfermented cider) with its more fiery derivative – Calvados apple brandy. It is as varied as the many forms in which both apple juice and Calvados are produced in the region, but generally the end result of pommeau is a tipple in the 17 per cent alcohol range. The flavour is like a light to medium cider, which of course means it goes down far too smoothly and you can find yourself quite quickly light-headed, depending on factors like just how sunny the day is, whether you’re simply in beverage consumption mode or are drinking it with a meal, and just how relaxed you are feeling while you enjoy a glass or several. (It might, I realize in hindsight, also have made a not insignificant contribution to the erratic internet character production I generated via the AZERTY keyboard... but I digress.)

Onward.

The next day, we left ourselves plenty of driving time in order to allow a side trip to a town that Leslie had read was worth a visit, simply because it is picturesque.

“Picturesque” turned out to be an understatement, even by Europe’s many, often lavish examples of what is worth having a camera pointed at. Honfleur is a seaport, with a mirror-perfect basin in the centre of town that creates a setting which makes you feel like you’ve strolled smack into an Impressionist painting.

We spent a good couple hours wandering its streets, whose photogenic structures suffered not a whit for being removed from the waterfront.

And continuing with the trip’s ability to pitch often wonderful little surprises at us, we noticed that one very old-looking building set at one corner of the basin was flying an especially weatherbeaten flag . Take a close look at the uppermost banner on the rooftop in this picture.
You’ll note that the wind has shredded about 25 per cent of the flag’s outer edge, but in all other respects, it is the Province of Quebec’s Fleur de Lys flag.

Turns out there’s a reason for that. The building is the last surviving section of what was once a walled fortification that encircled the entire town. This particular structure was home to the King’s Lieutenant, the man who would have granted permission for Honfleur to serve as a point of embarkation for a westward voyage of exploration in the year 1608 by one Samuel de Champlain. Champlain, of course, founded the City of Quebec and hence the wind-scarred fabric tie to the town in which we were now standing. Champlain’s departure in the “Don de Dieu” (Gift of God) 400 years before we arrived for lunch had in fact been commemorated just a few months earlier – on May 11, 2008 – with the installation of this plaque on the wall of the old structure.

I mentioned lunch because our lunch on this day deserves mention. We read a couple streetside menus and selected a lovely little café called the Bistro Chez Laurette just yards from the building adorned with the Champlain plaque. Leslie had what she said was a beautifully prepared lamb shank after an appetizer of oysters. For my part, I had a “Salade Normande” as an appetizer that placed a number of the most unlikely ingredients together on a single plate: tomato, apple, radicchio, crisp dried discs of Brie cheese and bacon. (I love any society that declares bacon to be a salad ingredient.) I followed this with a fabulous “fricassee de lotte”, which the server assured me was food from the water, but not shellfish (to which I am seriously allergic). Lotte, I discovered later in the day when I found a translation dictionary, is French for burbot, which cleared up absolutely nothing for me until I was able to get hold of Google again – it’s a freshwater cod. And on a plate with a light cream sauce, it is utterly delicious!

A small shared carafe of the white house wine turned out once again to be a vinicultural treat and we wrapped it all up with a “feuilleté chocolate au biscuit de noisette”. I thought it was a pretty fancy name for an oversized KitKat bar, but it’s the French way.

On the way out of town, en route to our next temporary residence, we crossed a magnificent bridge – the Pont de Normandie, which crosses the Seine between Honfleur and Le Havre. It is called a “cable stayed” bridge and when it was opened in 1995, at just over 2 km it was, for a time, the longest such bridge in the world. (It’s since been surpassed by ones in Japan and Greece.) It is an astonishing blend of amazing architectural strength and visual elegance. The best views are seen as you approach it, but as we barrelled along and finally got to thinking, “This would make a nice picture”, the approach views were already behind us and we were on the gentle curving rise of the span itself. Leslie had the presence of mind to grab this shot looking straight out the windshield.
I especially like it because the graphic structure of the bridge and its cables has an accidental (although Leslie swears she planned it) geometric visual “anchor” in the black lines of the windshield wipers at the bottom of the frame. Not bad for a snap captured at about 90 km/h.

But just so as not to leave you feeling deprived after that glorious preceding description, here is a thumbnail of a shot taken from one of the approaches, just not by us.
(Source: Structurae, Nicholas Janberg’s International Database and Gallery of Structures: Images for Normandy Bridge)

I don’t know how Michelin characterizes Honfleur, but in our tour book it definitely gets a huge “Worth a Diversion”.

Next: Arras, and among the scars of that other world war – the War to End All Wars (that would be the one that ended just 21 years before Hitler marched into Poland to ignite World War II) – above and below one of the most breathtaking battlefield memorials you will ever see. And it is Canadian.