TriumphAnt

My arrival into Bayeux in the full light of day was considerably less traumatic than it had been the previous morning in the pre-sunrise darkness. Plus I was once more in the company of my trusty navigator, Leslie.

Our destination was the famed tapestry... Tapestry, I suppose, since in the world of art it is so well-known that it is pretty much always capitalized. (That reference to its familiarity in “the world of art”, vs “the world over”, is deliberate. Leslie has studied a great deal of art history, some of which can’t have helped but bleed over into my rather art-naïf brain. But recently, we showed a few pictures of the trip to a group of friends and when the photo of the courtyard leading to the entrance of the gallery where the work is displayed came up, after our “Price is Right” wave to the screen with, “And this is the entrance to the Bayeux Tapestry exhibit...”, one of our friends asked, “What is the Bayeux Tapestry?”)

So on the chance that it is only lightly familiar, perhaps even completely unfamiliar to even one of the endlessly patient readers of this blog, here is what you need to know: the Bayeux Tapestry is not, in fact, a tapestry at all. Neither, apparently, is it native to Bayeux.

I hope that clears up everything you needed to know about the famed Bayeux Tapestry.

No?

A little less about what it is not – and something more about what it is – might that be useful?

It is not a tapestry because it’s not actually woven in the way we typically ascribe the word to, say, a carpet. Physically, it is a piece of embroidered cloth that is 20 inches (50 cm) tall, and a jaw-dropping 230 feet (70 m) long. What makes it such an immensely valuable piece of embroidery is that it is now approaching 1,000 years in age. The Tapestry is first and foremost a story. Over a series of dozens of individual scenes, it recounts the tale of events leading up to, and including, William the Conqueror’s successful invasion of England and defeat of Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Almost everything else about the Tapestry – who made it, why, where, even precisely when – is mired in scholarly controversy. Rumours of a missing 7 m persist. It has been seized by Napoleon, who planned to use it to inspire his own intended invasion of Britain and it was tucked away in the Louvre basement during the Nazi occupation of France in WWII. When a full-sized replica of the Tapestry was created for display in Victorian England in 1886, the morality of the day required that a pair of pants be woven into a most critical position on the British work’s one male nude figure. And apparently there is a Danish Bayeux Group, created in the year 2000, whose members are in the process of making an historically precise replica of the work, right down to using thousand-year-old sewing techniques and plant-dyed yarn.

Here endeth the lesson, although I commend to you this site, wherein you will find all the above facts, and many more, as well as a good summary of just what about the Tapestry is causing scholarly debate. And if you have a spare four minutes and 13 seconds, here is a delightful You Tube trip along a portion – the latter half – of the Tapestry (including the good bits, galloping horses, barbecues, knights in battle, heads lopped off, that sort of thing), wonderfully animated by a fellow named David Newton, that spins out that part of its story for those of you who can’t make it to the actual exhibit.

Once you pay your admission, the exhibit staff outfit you with an audio accompaniment, which is both good and bad. It’s good because it offers a moderately complete interpretation about what you are seeing as you walk past the Tapestry. (It is in a very dimly lit hall, mounted at roughly eye level – unless you’re a giant or a dwarf – in a long, horseshoe-shaped display case. You move along the outside edge of the curve.) But bad in that the script clearly has been very much crafted to keep the visitor moving along at a pace that might charitably be called “brisk”. In fact, it almost puts the “run” in “running commentary”. Any pause, even for a moment, to admire a particular panel requires fiddling with the pause button, then restarting the commentary with the inevitable sound hiccup of a few lost words. Throw in the added factor of the exceedingly dim light, which makes finding the right buttons a tactile rather than a visual exercise, and there is a slight (only very slight, I hasten to add) frustration factor. But I did buy a book about the Tapestry that dissects it panel by panel and includes a generous overview of the history of the Tapestry itself, as well as a summary of the events it depicts.

After we left the exhibit, we spent a good couple hours just wandering around Bayeux. And now that I was no longer looking to the cathedral simply as a landmark to get me to the parking lot in which I needed to be, I took the time to thoroughly admire it – outside and in.
The cathedral shares its age with the Tapestry. It was consecrated in 1077 in the presence of the same William the Conqueror who is the subject of the Tapestry’s yarn (pun intended).

For some reason, in France they’re quite proud of the places in which they entomb people and no visit to such a magnificent structure is complete without a descent into its crypt. The Bayeux cathedral was no exception.


(One interesting thing about this photo is that the cathedral’s crypt was actually considerably dimmer than this photo makes it look. The rule of thumb inside public exhibits in France is pictures – yes; flash pictures – no. I have a “no flash” setting on my camera that automatically boosts up the amount of ambient light that it lets through the shutter, which produces not-too-bad results like this. One drawback is that you have to keep as still as possible, even to the point of holding your breath – because your shutter is open for a long measurable fraction of a second. You will notice it most when you enlarge my indoor shots, because a blur – due to the relatively long exposure time – is more easily visible, no matter how firm a hand I might have thought I was keeping on my camera. I’m not going to apologize for that – the alternative was to forego a good many indoor and night-time photo-ops and I didn’t want to do that. But I digress.)

Back outside we discovered that when they say “old” in describing French construction, they mean old. Even buildings with little or no historical significance whatsoever, other than to make a unique contribution to the character of the town, are beautifully, often stunningly well-preserved.


Being in Bayeux, we decided that the opportunity to have lunch in a place called the Domesday Café was simply too good an opportunity to let pass. For the scholars in the room, when William the Conqueror lived up to his name and forcibly took possession of Britain in 1066, he eventually came to feel it necessary to tax the population. But before he could do that, he needed to know... well, the population. The Domesday Book is one of the world’s first great national censuses (censi?), requiring over a year to complete and eventually documenting over 13,000 separate places. And for the wordsmiths, “domesday” to William meant a day of reckoning, in the “accounting” sense. Over the last millennium, its meaning – and its spelling – has been only slightly twisted to, of course, “doomsday”, but we still hold it to mean a “day of reckoning”, albeit in the “final accounting” sense. Lunch in its namesake café was somewhat less apocalyptic but we did discover a delightful French style of delivering after-meal coffee; they call it “café gourmand”. It varies from restaurant to restaurant, but basically it pairs your coffee – which is almost always espresso or café noir – with several different samplers of bite-sized sweets. On our platter was an apple compote that simply sang, and a chocolate mousse that seemed about to waft to the ceiling it was so light. Our cellar choice? Vin de maison blanc. Um... that’s not “White House” wine, but rather white “house wine”. If you weren’t sure. (Nod to Bob and Ray’s famous US Department of Agriculture memo – “it should have read ‘ground hogmeat’, not ‘groundhog meat’”.) Our verdict? Superbe.

After we left Bayeux, we fast-forwarded almost 900 years to WWII again, with visits to another couple of very well-known memorials. Steven Spielberg’s brutally rendered WWII film, "Saving Private Ryan", sets its opening scene in a large American cemetery. In fact, that scene was filmed here.
Almost 9400 graves are located in the US Normandy cemetery, all deliberately facing west – towards home. In addition, as you enter the grounds, you pass an enormous semi-circular marble wall on which are engraved the names of over 1500 more US soldiers who have no known grave. (In contrast to those soldiers who are buried in the cemetery but whose identity was never determined. They each have a grave, and a cross, and each bears the same inscription: “Here rests in honoured glory a comrade in arms known but to God”) Also dotted throughout the cemetery are occasional markers that make what is presently the only visible religious distinction in US battlefield memorials – the vertical portion of the marker is topped with the Star of David for Jewish-American soldiers.


The US cemetery is located on the heights above Omaha Beach. It’s an appropriate location. You will recall my earlier mention that Utah Beach – where our gite was located – was a relatively easy landing in terms of casualties. Not so for Omaha, which US D-Day veterans almost always call “Bloody Omaha”, a label earned almost entirely because of the natural defences allowed by the steeply rising shoreline confronting the US forces who landed here. On June 6 alone, they suffered some 3,000 killed, wounded or missing. By mid-day, in fact, the situation was so tenuous for the Americans that General Omar Bradley was giving serious consideration to abandoning the beachhead and pulling the survivors off, while British General Montgomery was planning to offer the US forces the opportunity to divert through the British landing areas at Gold and Sword Beaches. Fortunately, a number of factors converged, including the launch of several successful attacks through erosion channels cut into the heights above Omaha, and particularly inspired episodes of battlefield leadership by which, according to official US war records, the troops were “inspired, encouraged or bullied” to get off the beach, up the cliffs and push inland.

You’ll need to enlarge this picture for an appreciation of the topography that the American troops faced. This is taken from the edge of the clifftop cemetery looking out over a long stretch of Omaha Beach. Add countless German guns and concrete fortifications to the heights and the cliff face, and thousands of obstacles embedded in the beach itself, and you might actually find yourself marvelling that the invasion day casualty count was kept to “only” 3,000.
In the photo, you’ll also see a couple of surviving bunkers about halfway between where I was standing and the beach, and to give you a sense of the full sweep of the land’s rise from the beach, those are buildings on the distant shoreline in the centre of the photo.

We also paid a visit to the Omaha Beach Museum and once again I was deeply impressed at how well the US memorials impart a sense of the scope of the battle, as well as the tenor of the times from the perspective of both the German defenders and the civilian population who had, by this time, lived for four and a half years under occupation. In contrast to the Utah memorial, artifact and diorama labelling in the Omaha Museum is meticulous, very thorough and typo-absent.
This long diorama, for example, shows several typical German uniforms. Farther down the row, a French civilian woman on a bicycle is having her identity papers checked by a German officer; and the wall displays feature newspaper clippings and posters from the period. At the end of the row, the same style of exhibit changes from this pre-invasion display to show the full weight of arms and armies hurled ashore here on D-Day. And finally, as you near the end of the line of dioramas, you pass a large display case that provides a partial answer to why the defeat of the Nazis was vital: a ragged pair of striped clothing worn by an inmate of Buchenwald, and several horrific photos of what the Allies found when they first entered the extermination camps.

Outside, in what was for me a throwback to my childhood,
there is an actual 155mm US “Long Tom” cannon, the Dinky Toy version of which was in my toybox for years while I was growing up.

Our next stop was yet another cemetery – but one that stands in stark contrast to the Canadian and American ones. The La Cambe German Cemetery is quite moving in the understated way it memorializes the German soldiers who died in the Battle of Normandy. The inscription right at the entrance sums up the inner debate that a great many people no doubt feel as they enter the grounds:

“This cemetery contains over 21,000 graves.
With its melancholy rigour,
it is a graveyard for soldiers not all of whom
had chosen either the cause or the fight.
They too have found rest in our soil of France.”

Even visually, it seems to radiate a quietly conscious need not to impose itself too grandly into the countryside where its soldiers were first and foremost the agents of an occupying army that was often harsh and murderously cruel in its treatment of the subjugated population.

The vast majority of grave markers are simple stone tiles set into the ground, and many have simply “Ein Deutscher Soldat” as an inscription. Each group of 20 tile stones is marked by a modest line of five coarsely sculpted, unpolished crosses,
and each cluster of crosses is numbered. Most of the tiles mark shared graves, and the enormous mound at the centre of the cemetery is actually a common grave for over 200 unidentified bodies.
At the entrance there is a visitors’ guide that steers people with an interest in a specific grave to that location in the cemetery.

La Cambe’s most frequently visited grave is that of a renowned tank commander named Michael Wittman, who has almost a rock-star status among Germans with an interest in their country’s WWII combat history. He was credited with destroying 138 Allied tanks in various battles in France, Greece, and the biggest tank battle of the war – on the Eastern Front’s Kursk area during an eight-week long clash of armour in the summer of 1943 that pitted some 3,000 German tanks against 3,600 Soviet tanks . And in a loop-closing revelation, I discovered that recent research has made a pretty convincing case for his having been killed by a Canadian anti-tank crew in the fighting around Caen.

Our final stop before ending our tour on this day was at a church very close to our gite. And I confess it was for a rather macabre reason imparted to me the previous day by our guide, Sean, during my Canada D-Day tour.

The TV mini-series, “Band of Brothers”, features one entire episode devoted to Easy Company’s medic.
And this comparatively large church, in the minuscule town of Angoville au Plain, population about 50, served as a temporary hospital – very much like the iconic MASH units that would come into their own in the Korean war – during the D-Day fighting. Its doctors were medics from the Airborne who, over the course of two days, saved dozens of lives. In their honour, the small junction of country roads that meet at the church has been named Place Toccoa. (Camp Toccoa, Georgia was a training base for the US Airborne troops, including Easy Company.) Two of the church windows are stained-glass tributes to the Airborne
and a large sign outside the church recognizes the service of the medics.

“Macabre” enters the picture because a large bloodstain on one of the church pews has been carefully preserved to this day.
This is surely one of the most unusual battle tributes I saw on this whole trip and has echoes of the religious penchant for saving “relics” (read “body parts”) of its saints. Yet oddly enough, considering the profession of those it is meant to honour, it’s not as out of place at it might seem at first description.

But something even more unusual was to come as we returned to our rental car. As I stood outside reading the sign honouring the Airborne medics, I heard a motor and looked up to see a museum-quality German utility vehicle called a Kubelwagen putter into the junction. It parked directly behind us. I couldn’t resist asking the quartet who occupied it who they were. Turned out they were Brits, three on active military duty and the fourth was their civilian friend and driver / owner of the Kubel. And yes, they’d popped by to see the bloodstain. They obligingly let me take a photo of their vehicle while they spent several minutes in the church, even advising me to lift off the modern-day magnetic licence plates that were in place over the vehicle’s original wartime style of Wehrmacht licence plates. The rear Wehrmacht plate is what you see in this picture.


We still had a little bit of the D-Day battlefield left to see – one more spot on my “must see” list. But the day was winding down and we decided it could wait.

Up next: Where Paul Anka’s scenes in “The Longest Day” were shot (not, I hasten to add, the only reason for my wanting to go there) and a relaxing afternoon among postcards and pommeau.