The ‘sense-haunted ground’: landscape, memory and the battle for Normandy 1944, part one
Remembering the dead
We visited the small British World War II cemetery at St Charles-de-Percy last autumn. It was a kind of pilgrimage, I suppose. St Charles is the southernmost cemetery for the dead of the Allied campaign through Normandy in the summer of 1944. A little over 800 men are buried there, 102 of them still, and perhaps forever, nameless.
Most of those men gave their lives in Operation Bluecoat, the British advance - or ‘breakout’, as it is called - south from Caumont-l-Éventé, through Le Bény-Bocage and the Souleuvre valley and down to the road running east-west between Vire and Vassy – in late July and early August of that year.
The cemetery itself is a small square of green enclosed by high hedges on a quiet lane a little way outside St Charles. It lies in flat sturdy farmland beneath a range of hills to the north; to the south, more distant, the land rises again to the Estry ridge. The day we visited was still and hot, unseasonably hot for autumn; the sky was cloudless and the bright soft blue of glazed china. We passed through St Charles and the village had the slow sated quiet of a lunch table after a heavy meal. Few people, little activity, not much of it lively.
Workmen were digging in the parking area, which is not much more than a lay-by overhung by trees just beside the cemetery’s entrance. We could hear them – snatches of loud conversation, the insistent engines of their JCBs churning up the silence – as we walked among the graves. It was an intrusion, dragging our attention away from the neat rows of white stone; but it was also a comfort, as the sounds of everyday life often are. Inconsequence, I think, is what peace sounds like.
The entrance to the cemetery is a modest stone porch stretched a small way along the roadside edge of the graveyard. It is supported by four columns and flanked by two bare rooms which offer both information and a visitors’ book to mark your visit it. The porch is off-centre, pulled towards the southern end of the cemetery’s square; it leads onto a wide swathe of lawn, also off-centre, that intersects the graves. The whole space is dominated by what’s become known as a Cross of Sacrifice – a tall, elongated stone cross on which a sword, held cruciform, hangs, its blade pointed downwards, as if ready to pierce the earth.
Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield for the cemeteries of the Great War, these crosses seem on some level to contradict the ecumenical order and impersonality of the gravestones themselves. Certainly, few of the personal messages inscribed on the stones reach for scriptural or other religious comfort; the most poignant of them are simple direct affirmations of tenacious memory, tenacious love and tenacious loss. I didn’t make a note of any of them: the only place for those consolations is where they are now, on stone, where the sorrows they struggle towards describing still seem intimate and private, however publicly they are displayed, however long they outlive the memories they record.
But the way the sword hangs on the cross, as Christ’s body too hangs, is undoubtedly a potent icon of sacrifice, a sharp jolt of perspective, reminding us that these soldiers’ lives were demanded and given – willingly or reluctantly, in terror or in hope – for the sake of a greater, better life for those who come after. The rows of the dead on either side are aligned to face the memorial, as if bearing witness to the thought it seeks to enshrine, or as if they were themselves honouring a sacrificial ideal. Two cypress trees flank the cross, like sentries, stood respectfully at a discreet distance to its rear.
There were two new graves. A couple of weeks before our visit the remains of two tank crewmen, William Bayliss and David Blyth, both from the Coldstream Guards, had been laid to rest. The battle of Normandy was won on the ground, field by field, hedgerow by hedgerow, lane by lane, and the two men had died in action on 4 August 1944 at a nearby hamlet named La Marvindière, a few miles south west of the cemetery.
The crew of a Churchill tank was made of five men: three in the turret and two in the driving compartment below. The commander of this particular tank, Lieutenant John Keatinge, up in the turret, was just 20. According to Michael Howard and John Sparrow’s regimental history The Coldstream Guards (1920–1946), the Irish Guards had come down from St Charles towards the German positions on the ridge at Estry, overlooking the Vire-Vassy road. Skirting the village of Courteil, where they encountered strong German resistance, the guards made their way through the fields to the west. “Progress was slow and difficult,” according to Howard and Sparrow. “Only tracked vehicles could breast the banks which lined each field; and the guardsmen clung on for dear life as the tanks rose and fell, like ships in a heavy sea.”
This was on 3rd August. Unable to force the Germans from the ridge without further support, the guards dug in at La Marvindière. “For three days the position resembled a desert leaguer,” Howard and Sparrow write, “and the guardsmen lived on the spare rations of the tank crews… there was neither contact with the Grenadiers on the left and 11th Armoured Division on the right nor a secure life-line back to St Charles, and German tanks and half-tracks roamed the lanes to the north very much as they pleased.”
This, then, is the small fragment of war in which Bayliss and Blyth died. Early in the morning on 4th August, German Panther tanks were withdrawing south from Montchamp - between St Charles de Percy and La Marvindière – when they encountered the battalion of the Irish guards. The guards lost four tanks and 14 men that day. Keatinge was killed, and another crew member, Eric Wyatt, died of his wounds five days later. The bodies of the three other men in the tank – Bayliss, Blyth and Leonard Markham – were recorded as missing. Markham’s still is.
“It was the worst place I have ever been in,” wrote Richard Mosse, an officer in the Welsh Guards, remembering just such a scene at just such a time – 8 August – in another field just off the Vire-Vassy road. “Numerous bodies of our predecessors lay in the fields between the companies, with about 25 knocked out vehicles, mostly British. A thick dust covered everything, and over it all hung that sweet, sickly smell of death.”
DNA testing – familial connections trapped in tooth and bone – has in recent years been used to identify the lost body of Richard III buried under the lost and buried altar of a Franciscan friary, as well as the bones of the pre- and post-Conquest English royalty shuffled in amongst each other in the mortuary chests in Winchester Cathedral. The same technology, slow and painstaking, was used to identify Bayliss and Blyth, aged 22 and 25 respectively, whose ordinary lives make them somehow more worth memorialising than Cnut and William Rufus, say, deep into their long rests in those caskets above the altar screen.
The remains of Bayliss and Blyth were unearthed in 2015, along with part of their tank, when the field was ploughed for the first time since the war. Each had left behind a young wife and a child. Bayliss, who lived in Rugby before the war, had only married in May 1944. He surely never knew he was a father: his daughter wasn’t born until February 1945. Blyth, who had enlisted in 1937, was from the East Riding; he had a three-year-old son.
I am old enough now to have children older than many of the dead in St Charles de Percy. Older, certainly than Bayliss and Keatinge, to name just two. It is hard not to look around at at the neat rows of stones and the clumps of pretty mauve-purple aster, with the odd mole hill erupting into open lawn, and think not of 800 men, their bodies relaxing back into earth and dust, but of 800 fathers and brothers, husbands and sons: 800 absences in the shape of a man. That is, not of the space they hold in the square limit of the cemetery, a redoubt fortified against time, but of the spaces they left wherever it was they once called home. All the pains of childbirth, the hopes and pains of childrearing, the burble of language on the learning tongue, the hungers and satisfactions of young life; all those babies and boys grown into men and then gone, lovely and foolish and lost.
This is, I think, part of what the great war cemeteries are – of which St Charles is a small, small example. They commemorate their own dead, but they also function as sites of remembrance for all the dead of war – and perhaps the sheer scale of them reminds us of death’s numbingly voracious ubiquity, of all the unnamed and unremembered dead who have come before us. Which is to say, they are a kind of vast memento mori reminding us how brief and precious and perilous life is.
We say to ourselves that the imperial - now commonwealth - war graves project was necessary because of the scale of destruction. And there is some truth in that. But it is also something that modernity, and perhaps imperialism itself, enabled: how would the memorialisation of individual death on such a scale be possible without the wealth, resources and bureaucratic heft of empire? It is a cliché to say that the killing of the two world wars was on an industrial scale, and it is a cliché that claims a kind of exceptionalism for modern war that obscures humanity’s infinite and innate capacity for mass slaughter. Genghis Khan killed millions too. But if the 20th-century’s slaughters were certainly made possible by industrialisation, so too was its remembrance.
It is sometimes said that death is the great taboo of modern western life. If, as archaeologist Sarah Tarlow has written, “our present response to bereavement is to try to lessen the pain, to 'get over' the worst of the grief,” to move on, to return our gaze to life, what war cemeteries demand of us is something like the opposite. They make us look. As bulwarks against both the particular oblivions of war and the general, democratic oblivion of death, they resist all forgetting. The sheer emphatic scale of them, the uniformity and mass of them, demands it.
But there are continuities here too. In medieval Europe, people went on pilgrimage as an act of salvation: it was a way of earning forgiveness, of easing the way of the soul towards redemption. I’m not sure that the same doesn’t hold true today: we may not want forgiveness exactly, but still we bear a weight of duty towards the dead in our care for them. We want them to know that we understand what they entrusted to us, to know that we persevere. We want to atone for our forgetfulness even as we strive to remember.
The Reformation historian Alexandra Walsham has written that, for the pilgrim, the landscape they moved through was “envisaged as a kind of remembrancer itself… a living library of sacred texts inscribed with the heroic exploits of the saints and the passion of Christ”. If you look for long enough at the fields of Normandy, which - to borrow a phrase from the poet Tony Harrison – glow with a greenness that is close to pain, you can see heroism and sacrifice everywhere in the hedgerows and the grass, and you can feel the charge of those young lives in every change of the weather.
It seems remarkable to me that a field might remain unploughed for seventy years, and then more remarkable yet that it might unearth so much. So much grief. So much history. So many questions.
The next part of this essay, about the experience of combat in the Battle for Normandy, is here.
This is a tremendously beautiful reflection. Deeply pondered, magnificently presented. I can close my eyes and place myself there… not in 1944, but in 2024. Thank you for sharing these profoundly memorable thoughts.