Tales Of The Gurrier

The road winds slowly amongst the sleepy villages of the Normandy coast. Here and there a sign points the way. Some are official, displaying insignia and logo, others are older, worn by the elements. No one has replaced them, they were placed there by others now gone. At the tiny hamlet of Colleville-Sur-Mer you turn sharply right and for a mile, descend a narrow, winding road, emerging at last on to the wide plain of the beach front. To your right the bluffs rise in gentle, green steps, sheltering small holiday cabins and a beachfront hotel. To your left is the beach front proper.

The beach is shallow, barely twenty feet of sand visible at high tide before being swallowed up by the gentle, lapping waters of the English channel. Directly above the beach is a low, grass covered rise. Families picnic and play boules on the greensward. The sun shines down from a perfect French sky, dotted with white puffed clouds.

I lay on the greensward and closed my eyes. I felt the earth beneath me and the light touch of the breeze rising off the sea. The sun, gentle on my face, the grass beneath my fingers and I tried to imagine, but I could not.

The eye follows the slope of the bluffs beginning above the greensward. The first gun emplacement sits, perhaps, sixty feet up. A concrete bunker slung into the hillside, overgrown with long grasses and thickets of brambles. Here and there are exposed, the twisted, metal superstructure, running like rusting red veins through the concrete. Their once sharp edges, smoothed by the ceaseless hands of time. Within the mute blockhouses, their graceless metal innards flake away in clumps of reddish dust and in places, great, violent gouges crater the concrete and bear witness to the past. Graffiti scrawled and chipped meticulously, laboriously onto grey walls count backwards through the century gone; 1997, cast in lurid red, 1977, hacked into a concrete pillar, 1959, in broad, black, brush strokes and far at the back, above a dark pool of stagnant water, in a muddle of fading grey, 1945, perhaps?

Emerging briefly into the sunlight of the new century, I climb again into history. Above and to the left, another, larger bunker bulges from the hillside, it’s flat roof graced by a squat, pointed stele. From this vantage point it stands, a silent, sentinel watch over Omaha beach.

I stand upon the summit and read the names cast in bronze upon the monument. Look down upon the peaceful scene below and try to imagine as one can not imagine, that day, a generation ago when America’s sons came here and laid their lives in sacrifice. You stand and try to imagine it and the words for it and you cannot. But Omaha has more to show you.

You walk on, rising slowly to the summit of the bluffs to reach the cemetery. Here amidst perfect lawns and beautiful, meticulously kept gardens you follow the gently curving avenue of trees and emerge in the wide circular monument to the unknown dead. Carved in yellow sandstone, names encircle you in their thousands, the men lost and never found, who lie in unknown graves and unknown tombs. The memorial reads ‘The world is their sepulchre’.

You pass on from the tomb of the unknown soldier and rise up, mounting the curving steps of the pavilion, your eye drawn to the grandeur of the statue to American youth, and then you see them. The crosses, stretching out in a sea of endless, white marble, shining in the sun of a late Summer day, here and there a Star of David rising amongst them.

Here they lie, the American dead, a handful, a mere nine thousand, rest here above the beaches of Normandy. A single mote amongst the millions and millions who died. They rest upon the summit of the hill, above the beaches where they died. Above the families that walk and play and swim in the warm waters. This is the legacy of the sons of America who died upon a foreign shore, they lie, far from home, but not forgotten. This is the America nations cherish, this is the land of men and women the world looks upon with envy and pride and in their finest moments, represent the best of the human spirit in all of us.

In another place, half a world away, I stood upon another strand of history and tried to imagine and could not imagine. In the lee of a broken wall, where crouched figures of human beings are burned into concrete by the heat of a man made sun. In the city of Hiroshima, amongst the shadows cast from the dawn of the atomic age, I looked and wondered at our capacity for inhumanity, at the enormity of this gross act of violence and here, above the beaches of Normandy, I find another piece of the greater whole.

We live amongst the detritus of history, the shadows of the past colour our grand visions of the future and the humdrum realities of our present. Sometimes it is hard to remember, sometimes it is easier to forget, to believe we walk a path untrodden, but we should not.

May we never forget them, nor all those who died, from every nation of the world, so we may live our lives in peace and strive to tread a different path.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 11:19 am and is filed under Bloggery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.