Normandy Landings

1/12/12

In case I felt the need for a sense of perspective, I've now had one imposed upon me. I spent some happy hours this morning in that near to meditative state you can get into on the road bike, simply bowling along the lanes towards and around Camembert. Out of saddle only once and otherwise simply undulating in the freezing sunshine. Feet were something estranged from the rest of me, trying to tell me something about the cold but I wasn't really tuning into them. Just hearing the tyres on tarmac, and my breathing in the chill air. The ride started (and finished) at a site related to the history of the German invasion. A retreating French tank had made it as far as the town, before something had gone wrong. The French then disabled their own tank, rendering it unusable by the enemy, and it sat there and now is a protected site of French heritage. I parked next to it, feeling that sense of strangeness about being British next to something fundamental to the French National identity.

Shimmied onwards and northwards, unexpectedly diverting to pay a visit to the Canadian war graves. A lot of August 1944 deaths on the stones, and surprisingly many of the men were mature adults, probably family men, in their 30s. They didn't have to be there, they'd have been exempt I suspect from conscription. I'm not really sure how much of the Canadian forces were volunteer. It felt oddly alien the thought that these men from a different continent had come to France to fight for some slightly removed concept of freedom. Well, removed to me, not presumably to them. Freedom, eh? Or patriotism. Or for what's right. Or liberty. Concepts so intangible I feel slightly brain tight just trying to comprehend. Maybe that's because I have liberty, I can't picture it not being there.

And I carried on to Courseulles sur Mer and on again to Arromanches. Walking on the beaches there is an odd experience. It's not a living museum, but there's something a) tainted and b) nostalgic and somehow c) unnerving about walking on the beaches. Because we all know a teeny bit about the misery, about the sorrow, the men who died there for this intangible thing we think of as liberty. Do I feel any pride in being British, and what in theory our nation did for the alliance. Not really. It wasn't me, and if it happened now, I'd be torn about what was right. Does it after all matter who governs which people and which land? I don't have answers, just questions. And a sense of perspective which I didn't go looking for.