The sense-haunted ground: landscape, memory and Normandy 1944

A long essay I wrote last year about the Battle of Normandy – now published in one piece for the first time

The cemetery at St Charles-de-Percy, October 2023

This was the first thing I wrote for Substack. In some ways, having a forum to post it is the reason I am on here at all. I originally shared it in three sections, but it was always intended to be read as one piece. It was something I felt compelled to write, and I found the process of researching and writing it deeply moving. Do let me know your thoughts in the comments.

We visited the small British World War II cemetery at St Charles-de-Percy in the autumn of 2023. 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, none 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. 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, 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 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 3 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,” they 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 4 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, than Bayliss and Keatinge, for instance. 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 – sometimes seem to 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.

A British armoured vehicle in a field near Évrecy in Normandy, July 1944

The English war artist Thomas Hennell, wrote from Normandy in late July 1944 of ‘the sense-haunted ground’ that the armies left behind. He meant, I think, how the intensities of human experience marked the landscape in ways that were both visible and invisible, just as those intensities left scars both visible and invisible on all those involved – soldiers and civilians, men and women, adults and children, allies and enemies. You don’t have to work hard to conjure up the ghosts of these men, creeping and crawling through the ripe corn, dodging from tree to apple tree. They are all around you always, making their slow way to their long sleep in St Charles. They are both always here and always passing through, both the grass and the wind through the grass.

And if these men still haunt the landscape it is surely in part because it too haunted them. “If the wind is blowing quietly through the trees, and everything is still, I physically feel what it was like to be in a field in Normandy at the end of a day,” remembered Lt-Colonel W Steel Brownlie of the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry. For an American officer, Tom Gilliam, it was the memory of an encounter with a group of French villagers in the woods: “The woods seemed to cast an eerie spell over us as though we were the subject of a fairy enchantment… As we came closer we could see the shadowy forms of French men and women and children, lining the roadway, not talking, some crying softly, but most just gently clapping, extended for several hundred feet on both sides of the road.” He could still hear the clapping fifty years later, he said.

Part of the reason why landscape and history are so stitched together here is that the landscape of lower Normandy, in particular, is integral to the way that the battle for Normandy unfolded. This is true of all land warfare, of course: terrain defines tactics. But here the battle was fought by small groups of men day by day, hour by hour, field by field. Each field, in its own way, was its own small war. And the pattern of the landscape is largely unchanged, and certainly not changed enough to overwrite the old shapes of the small-holding farms on the land.

Up towards the coast where the land is more even, the Germans had put in extensive work to deter invading troops. Behind the concrete gun emplacements facing the sea lay fields studded with mines. Low lying areas were purposely flooded; open fields were planted with what they called ‘Rommel’s asparagus’ – small forests of tall spikes designed to rip open the undercarriages of any Allied plane that might attempt a landing. Calvados – the Normandy department that runs east-west roughly from Honfleur to Omaha Beach and south to Vire and Falaise – lost some 30,000 hectares of farmland to German defences.

South of Caen and Saint-Lô, though, is bocage country. The fields are small, often a hundred yards end to end, and surrounded by high earth banks crowned in summer with thick foliage: hazel, hawthorn, bramble, oaks wrapped in ivy; weeds, wild grass, wild fruit, nettle; whatever seed has fallen and found root. Between the fields, the lanes are often little more than tracks – in the 1940s still largely gravel and dust – seemingly burrowed between the high dark hedgerows. The trees on either side are commonly tall enough and old enough to meet over head, creating hollows of variegated shade and shadow which the sunlight drips and dazzles through if and when it can. You almost might as well be underground already.

Unlike those flatter lands further north towards Caen, the bocage is a land of steep, rollings hills, of valleys cut through with bright streams and rivers. Pockets of woodland are scattered everywhere – oak, beech, hornbeam, fir - and lines of poplar guard boundaries and roads. This being Calvados, there are orchards of pear and apple in amongst the cornfields and the green pastures where the cattle graze. Normandy is dairy country too, the best in France, and the cattle here seem also immemorial: immense, impassive animals, domesticated yes but also, in the long arc of life on earth, indifferent to us and our trials and trivialities.

It is said some 100,000 cattle were killed or stolen during the liberation of Normandy. These fields the war passed through were not empty. Dead livestock were an abiding memory of the fighting and its aftermath. “The fields are full of dead cattle,” one British officer remembered, “mainly black and white… looking for all the world like balloons with wooden legs sticking straight out sideways.” The carcasses, abandoned in the fields, swelled in the summer heat, Brownlie said. If pierced, they “deflated with with a hiss and sweet, sickly smell.” Almost every memoir comments on that smell. The American general, George Patton, at the head of the Third Army in Normandy, flew in a spotter plane over the area a few days after the breakthrough. He found the stench of dead cattle overwhelming even at 300 feet.

I have been told that, decades after the war, local farmers still found it difficult to talk about the terrors of those weeks, trying to tend to their livestock while soldiers shot at one another in the fields and hedgerows. “We often see French civilians scurrying about in No Man’s Land, between us and Jerry,” a gunner said: “a few men carrying a piece of white cloth.” It is a hard scene to reconcile, this, with the images of war we have in our head: how could men be fighting and dying, shells be falling, bullets spattering the air and the earth, while cattle are fixed in some terrors of their own in the fields. If cows remained unmilked for too long, every movement became agony for them as their swollen udders swung and swayed and jolted. Soldiers who grew up on farms would sometimes take pity and milk the cows in passing, letting the milk go to waste on the ground but easing the pressure on the cows’ udders and freeing them, if only briefly, from their pain.

Cows or not, though, this was about the best countryside in the world to defend. And it is the country that Bayliss and Blyth and their fellow soldiers had to conquer in the summer of 1944. For these men, the land looked to be a bucolic idyll; but it soon became a place contorted by every manner of visceral emotion, of elation, terror and distress. “Young soldiers [were] playing a grim game of hide and seek, defying death in the leafy lanes and tiny fields of one of the most beautiful part of France,” one veteran wrote.

The war artist Hennell continued, describing what he saw: “The shot-threshed foliage of the apple orchards was fading and just turning rusty, fruit glowed against the sky; there were ashes of burnt metal, yellow splintered wood and charred brown hedge among the shell pits; every few yards a sooty, disintegrated hulk.” The spoils of war usually describe plunder and profit, the rewards of victory; but here, the more common, bitter meanings of spoils, of despoiling and spoliation, apply. “As long as I live that word bocage will haunt me with memories of ruined countryside, dust, orchards, sunken lanes,” Mosse wrote of the fields outside Vire.

I have found myself reading these words and thinking of some famous lines from the first book of Paradise Lost, as Satan surveys his kingdom of hell:

At once as far as angels ken he views
The dismal situation waste and wild,
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end

In particular, I thought of the paradox of that phrase ‘darkness visible’, and of how the Normandy landscape, its radiant light, its greenness, both embodies all the ruination and horror of 1944, and holds the wreckage of it – human, industrial, earthen, bloody, sedimentary, alluvial – in itself. How the war is written into its fields and valleys still, built into its villages, roads and towns. Part of Satan’s hell, of course, was that he could remember what heaven was like.

The testimonies of the soldiers are full of that kind of paradox. Some of the greenest and most fertile fields in Europe holding within them small private hells because the fields themselves were wrapped about by those high, dense hedgerows with their deep, matted roots. Each field, then, was a kind of trap that needed to be sprung. “Every hedge seemed to be alive with aggressive Panzer grenadiers,” wrote Major JJ How in his account of the British breakout from Caumont. It was “a nightmare of ambushes”. German machine gunners took up position in the far corners, commanding the open ground; snipers hid in the trees. “The German defenders could easily entrench themselves and remain virtually invisible, opening fire at close range on slow moving attackers,” Brownlie recalled. A favourite trick was for a few men to lie low in the long grass or corn and wait for the Allies to pass and then open fire on them from behind. Once you reached the hedgerows, the gaps were often booby trapped with hand grenades hooked up with trip wires.

Sometimes, of course, the Germans own tanks were positioned to fire into the fields. One British tanker had the phantasmagoric experience of seeing his death coming towards him through the corn. “The wheat had grown high and was almost ripe. Each time they fired the shells cut a narrow furrow through the ears of corn,” remembered Sergeant Kite of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment of a moment in the first days of Bluecoat. “Suddenly the gun of [the Panther] turned and pointed in my direction. I saw the muzzle flash as it fired and the corn bending down along the line of flight of the shell that was about to hit us.” Yet more horribly, if the British were advancing through a field of dry, ripe corn, the Germans sometimes fired incendiary shells. “The wretched wounded would get burned alive,” one soldier remembered.

At the end of the day, or at the end of each small hundred-yard war, you might look back and see each field studded with upturned rifles, their butts deep in the rich soil, marking where a man had fallen.

And then, across the lane, there was the next field to conquer.

As for tanks, they were hard to manoeuvre in the narrow lanes, and the tall hedges meant that the tank commander had to perch for hours, half-standing, half-sitting in the turret – balancing necessity and risk on the balls of his feet – to see anything at all, making himself an easy prey for the German snipers. One tank commander in the Scots Guards has left this vivid testimony of some of an unexpected difficulty. “In the small fields of Normandy among the cider orchards… every move during the hot summer brought showers of small hard sour apples cascading into the turrets through the open hatches. After a few days there might be enough to jam the turret. Five men in close proximity, three in the turret and two below in the driving compartment, all in a thick metal oven, soon produced a foul smell: humanity, apples, cordite and heat.”

I thought of this, when we sat outside in the evening and pored over a facsimile of an old Michelin map of the Normandy campaign, which we had spread over a picnic table. Close by, the apple and pear trees in our hosts’ garden dropped their ripe fruit on the firm grass and the gravel drive. I tried to imagine the sound of the hard apples and pears coming down on the hard tank skins with the inevitable irregularity of water torture, the sharp acid smell of the fruit in the summer heat rotting into sweetness and mixing with the sweat of men poised between exhaustion and terror, trapped in the hot casing that protected and suffocated them both at once.

But it is harder in a place of peace and order to conjure the noise, the dizzying synaesthetic clamour and din inside the machinery itself. The same Scots Guardsman also remembered how total the experience was,

the perpetual ‘mush’ through the earphones twenty-four hours each day, and through it the machinery noises, the engine in the background, with the whine of the turret trainer and the thud and rattle of the guns an accompaniment. The surge of power as the tank rose up to the crest of a bank; the pause at the top while the driver, covered with sweat and dust and unable to see, tried to balance his forty tons before the bone-jarring crash down into the field beyond, with every loose thing taking life and crashing round inside the turret. Men, boxes of machine-gun ammunition, magazines, shell-cases - and always those small, hard apples.

The skill of the driver, and indeed of all those men in the crew, was remarkable: the operator struggling to keep the wireless on net and the guns loaded; the gunner with eyes always at the telescope however much the turret revolved and crashed around him; the hot stoppages in the machine-guns… always the wireless pounding…

Even the sentences pile on top of one another, dense with things that are too much to remember, but which refuse to be forgotten.

A tank crew was a self-contained military unit, a small community of command and disorder, all of its own. Tanks easily lost sight of one another in the bocage, whatever gymnastics the commander did, and had to rely on radio contact; close by that was all well and good, but across any distance the pitch and roll of the hills and the thick woodland made radio an unreliable medium. Other means of communication had their hazards: one sergeant in the Guards found himself stuck on one end of a telephone line for twelve hours – just 200 yards from German positions outside Le Busq. Sightlines were a perpetual problems for everyone in such undulating, tree-rich country, not least the artillery.

Indeed, Major How recalled the mixed experience of having artillery support on 30 July, the first day of Bluecoat, in a field near Caumont. “We kneeled in the damp corn surrounded by the early morning silence,” he wrote. “The guns opened up behind us. We rose from the trampled corn to move forward. The field was filled with the high pitch scream of falling shells, a rapid accelerating whistle that finished in a succession of blinding flashes and explosions. We threw ourselves down, pressing against the corn, and we would have burrowed down into the protecting comfort of the earth beneath had we been able. Earth and stone rained down on our backs and legs, dust and smoke rose in the air and shrapnel whined away into the distance.”

There is something deeply moving about men in terror seeking protection in the earth itself, when it is earth that covers them, in the end, if there is nothing sufficient to protect them. “Better a deep slit trench than a shallow grave,” runs an old army maxim, but the earth will always claim us. Wasn’t Adam made of earth – rich, sweet, red earth – to begin with?

Vire after the Allied bombardment in June 1944

It’s not far from Caumont-l-Éventé, where the British breakout in the Battle of Normandy began, to Vire: 20-odd miles, perhaps. And Caumont is itself about 20 miles south from the coast near Omaha Beach, so it sits roughly half way between Vire and the sea. These are not long distances at all, and you can drive between these three points today in 40 minutes or less. Indeed the long, arrow-strait roads – like that south-west from Le Bény-Bocage to Vire, say – invite speed. You can see the road far ahead, rising and falling in the succeeding waves of hills and ridges, and local drivers, in particular, seem impatient to pass through, hovering six feet behind the car in front, before swerving with some elan into the oncoming lane just as they the crest the hill.

But if you have read anything about the Battle for Normandy, you will know that the fields you speed past, the towns and villages you weave through, were hard-fought for, and both the liberating army and the people of occupied France paid dearly for almost every yard of it. It is tempting to think that the fast roads invite you to look away now, to look on into the future, not to dwell on the past; but even at the time, they were a way of not looking. “I drove along a road running through sunny, smiling fields, bearing few marks of the fighting that had swayed over them a few hours earlier,” the correspondent for The Times wrote on 9 June 1944 of the road to Bayeux. “The countryside could hardly have been more peaceful.”

Nevertheless, these roads too surely hold trace memories of terror impelled by a different kind of speed. The British code names for the three roads running north and north-east of Vire, for instance, were Coventry, Warwick and Rugby; the Germans had a much less homely name for the road from Vire to Le-Bény-Bocage: they called it a Jabo Rennstrecke – a ‘fighter-bomber racecourse’. The Allies had almost total command of the air over Normandy and the British could call up flights of rocket-firing Hawker Typhoons from forward air strips. The planes circled the strips in relays, ready to pounce: they were on their targets in twenty minutes. The British code name for this kind of air support was ‘Lime Juice’.

It is hard to overstate how ravaged the land itself was by the war. “The whole place looked like a moon landscape; everything was burned and blasted,” the German general Fritz Bayerlein recalled of the Allies’ saturation bombing west of Saint-Lô on 25 July. “The earth was as if it had been ploughed,” an American infantry officer said of the same bombardment. “Within an area of many square miles, scarcely a human being or an animal was alive and all kinds of trucks, guns and machines of every type were in twisted disorder over the deeply scarred soil.”

By the end of August 1944, over 1,000 civilians had been killed or wounded by stepping on German mines. No wonder they watched closely, if they could. The 2nd Household Cavalry was stopped in its tracks by the mayor of one village who ran out in front of them gesticulating wildly. The road ahead was seemingly littered with scraps of paper. The Germans had retreated laying mines; the villagers had watched intently and, as soon as it was safe, they had gone out to mark each one. The word ‘safe’ doesn’t really do justice to their courage.

It took a long time for any kind of normality to return: in just one month, April of 1947, an astonishing 185,200 shells were recovered from the fields of Calvados alone. As the recent discovery of Bayliss and Blyth testifies, the fields of Normandy have far from given up all their secrets, are far from healed of all their wounds.

The sense of continuity in the countryside here is part of what allows it to absorb the infernal energies of 1944 and embody its history. Of course, agricultural technology has moved on. Driving back after dark to our holiday home we would see the fields lit by the brilliant spectral mass of machinery, six or eight monstrous shapes moving slowly over the earth, harvesting the corn under arc lights, clouds of dust fogging the night air, making the line of the road suddenly illegible in the weaker, now seemingly watery light of our headlamps. Technology in the wild, unexpected and otherworldly, always has the power to haunt us, as if machinery once set in motion has an authority of its own to which we are at best peripheral. For a moment these might have been the ghosts of tanks and artillery flattening the summer crops a lifetime ago.

In August 1944, the great and indefatigable American war correspondent, Ernie Pyle filed an extraordinary account from Normandy of what the Allies’ air superiority meant in practice. At first, you didn’t see the bombers, he said; they were “a sound deep and all encompassing with no notes in it - just a fantastic far-away surge of doom-like sound”. Then they became manifest out of the blue haze, “the merest dots in the sky. You could see clots of them against the far heavens, too tiny to count individually,” he wrote. “They came on with a terrible slowness… I’ve never known [anything] that had about it the aura of such a ghastly relentlessness.”

Apart from anything else, the sheer number of heavy bombers involved was incomprehensible. They came on in flights of twelve, three flights to a group, in groups that stretched beyond the limits of the visible sky. “Maybe these gigantic waves were two miles apart; maybe they were ten miles, I don’t know,” he wrote. “But I do know they came in a constant procession and I thought it would never end.”

Then the bombs began to fall on the German lines. “They began up ahead as the crackle of popcorn and almost instantly swelled into a monstrous fury of noise that seemed surely to destroy all the world ahead of us… From then on for an hour and a half that had in it the agonies of centuries, the bombs came down. A wall of smoke and dust erected by them grew high in the sky…everything was an indescribable cauldron of sounds. Individual noises did not exist. The thundering of the motors in the sky and the roar of the bombs ahead filled all the space for noise on earth… it was chaos, and a waiting for darkness… The air struck you in hundreds of continuing flutters. Your ears drummed and rang. You could feel quick little waves of concussion on your chest and in your eyes… I can’t record what any of us actually felt or thought during those horrible climaxes. I believe a person’s feelings at such times are kaleidoscopic and uncatalogable. You just wait, that’s all. You do remember an inhuman tenseness of muscle and nerves.”

Bear in mind that Pyle was describing the bombs falling somewhere further on among the German lines. The French civilians in their towns and cities, on the other hand, discovered for themselves what it was like to be beneath them. There’s no escaping how bitter an experience it was. If the region’s landscapes embody the continuities of history, it is the towns and cities that embody absence and rupture. It sometimes seems, reading about the Battle of Normandy, that the machinery of war – the technology of destruction – did have a life, and a logic, all of its own, and that is no more apparent than in the fate of the region’s cities, towns and villages. It is not exactly a forgotten aspect of the war; but it is not one we like to think about too much either.

This forgetfulness is not a new thing. “Entire villages have been pulverised, towns razed, cities wiped out,” the Liberté de Normandie wrote in an editorial of 6 September 1944. “We have strong enough hearts to bear this holocaust with pride. We only ask that we not be forgotten. And yet we are being forgotten… We in our murdered towns, we have nothing.” Did the Allies care? It depended who you asked. “The life of one single English soldier is worth more than the lives of thousands of French civilians,” a British officer told a woman in Caen. Brigadier Hargest, with the British Thirtieth Corps, was more empathetic. “They have seen us arrive under fire, which destroyed their cattle and crops,” he said. “They must be stunned by the misfortune that singled out their villages for destruction and scattered their life savings.”

The Allies’ aim was to disrupt German lines of communication and to ensure that supplies and reinforcements could not get through to the front lines. And unfortunately, the towns and cities were were the key roads met. You can see it on a map today: everywhere is a hub for everywhere else. Civilians were less sure. “The need for large-scale air bombardment was not understood by the inhabitants… The Germans hid in the woods and not in the towns,” Pierre Daure, the Gaullist prefect of Calvados said. “As for the argument [that] the bombardment was necessary to block the roads, my answer is that in this part of France there are so many alternative routes and tracks that it made little difference.” Daure may have had a point; but, as we have seen, the Allies’ progress through the bocage was scarcely a happy one.

Some 130 civilians in Calvados had been killed by Allied bombing in the three months leading up to D-Day; attacks intensified in the last weeks with over three hundred Allied bombing raids across Normandy in the month before the invasion. But that was nothing to what came next. In Caen, the bombardment began in earnest at 1.30pm on D-Day. “The terrifying, thunderous explosions crashed upon us. Our poor little dining room shuddered, the chandelier fell onto the table, the door of the house was blown in from the force of the blast,” one inhabitant remembered. “The sounds of the neighbouring houses, crashing down under the bombs, followed by the great hammer blows from these engines of death. All around us was nothing but violence and infernal noise… Clutching one another, we prayed.”

That night, at 8pm, the next great raid took place. The plan was called ‘Royal Flush’ and waves of bombers flew out of coastal bases like Newhaven, Worthing and Selsey Bill to fulfil it. The targets were Pont-l’Éveque, Lisieux, Vire, Condé-sur-Noireau, Coutances, and Saint-Lô – a little over three hours flying time away. The weather in the days before and after D-Day was notoriously bad; an atrocious storm on 19 June would destroy one of the two vast artificial harbours the Allies built along the Atlantic coast north and north-west of Caen. This night was no exception: the weather was so poor that some of the Flying Fortresses returned to base with their payload still on board. Even so, 1,300 civilians died during air raids in Calvados on that day; another 1,200 were killed by the Allies in raids on the 7th.

Caen had been a city of some 60,000 souls; by mid-June, all but 17,000 had fled. By the time the Allies finally liberated it in early August, there was only enough housing left for 8,000. It was a similar story across the region. Argentan, Falaise, Tilly: all lost 80% of their housing stock. In all, 120,760 buildings in Normandy were completely destroyed and 273,090 seriously damaged. It’s fashionable to talk about erasure as a historical or political process, as a kind of subjugation: this was erasure on the grandest of scales. The region had been largely untouched since the wars of religion in the 17th century; it had escaped the ravages of World War I.

Overall, the Battle for Normandy in the summer of 1944 left nearly 20,000 civilians dead, 8,140 of them in Calvados. Some 100,000 fled their homes; 76,000 lost everything they owned. “Survivors,” the Washington Post noted of Cherbourg on 26 June, “no doubt are not only homeless but suffering from exhaustion, hunger, shock.” Some of the shock came from being the victims of the very people who were meant to be liberating them. “After anguish and despondency, we felt real anger and indignation. The Allies are destroying our villages, and killing us, although the German soldiers have long since gone,” Robert Marie of Evrecy remembered. Four decades later, Jean Roger of Saint-Lô was still lost for words. “I can’t find any appropriate way of describing it: Dantesque, apocalyptic, a landscape from the end of the world.”

Vire was considered one of the prettiest towns in Normandy. Built on a rocky spur above the Vire valley it was a place of medieval timber and lath and plaster; of burnished granite and slate-tiled facades; of Gothic arches and oval windows; of Renaissance statues and courtyards filled with flowers; of narrow, tangled streets and tall houses stacked on the side of the steep hills. Much of it seemed irregular and disordered, a garden allowed to go wild: eras and styles in architecture abutted, over-lapped, over-wrote each other, built and rebuilt, written and rewritten in a vernacular that was organic and immemorial. Its order came not from organisation but from the deeper order of continuity and adaptation, of historic memory encoded in material experience and accreted in long unbroken sequences over a long arc of time.

The town’s inhabitants had heard the rumbling of distant artillery soon after first light on the 6th, a dark thunder rolling inland over the 40-odd miles from the coast. But they were mostly indoors eating dinner at 8pm. As in Caen, the domesticity of the scene speaks to a naked unpreparedness, perhaps almost an innocence. Nine-year-old Jean-Claude Debré was an exception. “I was alone on Rue Saulnerie. I had finished eating and I was playing with a ball,” he remembered. “At the sound of planes, I saw some people leave their homes to applaud our liberators. But then someone shouted, ‘Look out for the rockets!’ I don’t remember hearing any noise, but I have this haunting image of a floor and all these windows crashing down in the middle of the road. I was petrified.” A local baker grabbed the boy and carried him into a basement.

The Flying Fortresses flew in low. A little further south in Lonlay l’Abbaye, the French historian Alain Corbin, then eight years old, remembered that his mother made him and his siblings kneel and pray when they heard the faraway roar of those engines. The bombs in Vire fell in puffs of fire and spirals of smoke, accompanied by a deafening whistling; the whistling only grew in intensity as they plummeted earthwards. For André Letondot, another local eye-witness, the memories were themselves reduced to fragments of experience, something blasted and shattered into discontinuity: “The ground shaking, the smash of explosions, buildings crushed, clouds of smoke and dust, the cries of the wounded, survivors running in panic, faces blackened and clothes torn. For a dozen minutes there was… a mad terror, with visions of the end of the world.”

‘The end of the world’ seems a common response to the bombardment; I’ve cited two examples here in a few paragraphs. It is like a last resort of the imagination, as if what is being described is not so much the end of the world as the end of all reason – the thing that happens when all language and thought is exhausted and overwhelmed by sensory experience. It seems somehow apt that the language of suffering is medieval, even when the form of suffering is intensely modern. Perhaps the form of it is irrelevant, in the end. Perhaps too the apocalypse and the pits of hell are simply central to our vocabulary at times of crisis, a place of psychological sanctuary that we reach for in search of comfort and order. Indeed, ’infernal’ is another word you often see in memoirs and accounts of Normandy in 1944. Perhaps these explanations for the world are the milk on which infant reason feeds.

Those who could fled for the countryside. Others began the work of clearing the rubble which now lay on top of their loved ones, dead or alive. But fire followed quickly in the wake of the bombs. “The buildings of the central quarter fell prey to the flames and the whole town quickly became nothing more than an immense brazier,” Letondot said. “The flames climbed to more than twenty metres and an immense cloud of smoke spread across the ruins and the surrounding area. Alone and all lit up by that sinister light the clock tower stood unmoved… a vision at once magnificent and terrible which will never be forgotten by those who witnessed it.”

Unhappily for Vire, the Allies weren’t done. They came back the next day to finish the job. This second raid, Letondot said, was “an intense, systematic, interminable shelling which seemed to last for hours… The terror produced by the daytime bombardment was certainly greater than the horror of that in the night, with the screaming of the diving airplane sirens, the ground-shaking of the bombs, the thunder of their explosions, the fires growing tenfold, the stone and ironwork projectiles showering down on our shelters. Many medieval cellars proved the solidity of their ancient construction that night.”

Vire had been a town of 5,345 people. The Allied bombing killed nearly 300 and destroyed 73% of the buildings. Some 450 families were still in temporary accommodation as late as 1962. The walls in some of these huts had cracks in that let in light, along with the lives of your neighbours. Insulation was poor and sanitation worse; some had no access at all to running water.

Sanctuary is a complex idea rooted typically in retreat from a brutal material reality. It can be a sacred site reserved for the divine. It can be a place of spiritual respite. Perhaps that is what the recourse to apocalyptic language is, because it implies, at the end of suffering, redemption. But I think for most of us the idea of sanctuary exists somewhere in the charged space between a right and a privilege, a blessing and a necessity. Perhaps the trick is to make a necessity feel like a blessing, the good fortune feel like a gift - the gift of earth to absorb the shock of the blast, the gift of armour to protect yourself from the blow, the gift of ancient foundations, haunted with cold and damp, to hide from the products of industry and reason.

Was the sanctuary people sought here in medieval cellars simply one of safety? Yes, of course. But there is still a kind of resonance in the resort to ancient foundations, to subterranean places that both predate and underpin modernity, in times of existential dread and terror. Yes, necessity – but the availability of succour built by the labour of nameless, unremembered dead seems to unpick time and restitch it with new patterns and folds. Perhaps it is simply a different, non-linear way to understand time: suffering speaking to suffering and necessity and care stretching back and forth across the same shared space on the map, suddenly cramped with ghosts.

Does the same principle with the dead of war in the cemeteries not apply here too? Do duties of care not reach far forward as well as far back? We think a lot, with regard to climate change, about what world we will leave for future generations, but we think less about what our ancestors bequeathed to us and the terms on which they bequeathed it. Should those terms – communal, spiritual, familial – matter more to us? Atomisation is the key driver of modernity: the celebration and sanctification of the individual life. Are our lives not built on the thought and labour of generations past to whom we are linked by the connective tissue of ideas and ethics, by the inherited tics and idioms of cultures cultivated over centuries? Do we owe those unnumbered generations nothing, not even thanks?

At the Château de Villers outside Villers-Bocage the vicomte sheltered 200 people in his tunnel-like cellars. At Caen, hundreds of women and children took refuge in the vaults of the church of Saint-Étienne or in the nearby Abbeye aux Hommes. Many more escaped the city and sought another kind of sanctuary in caves, mines and quarries, such as those as at Fleury-sur-Orne. Stone from these places - Caen stone - was and is much prized. It is one of the Norman gifts to England as a result of the Conquest: you can see examples of its pale, honeyed yellow in the astonishing effloresence of cathedral building of the twelfth century and sites such as Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral.

As many as 12,000 people fled Caen, then, to find refuge in underground spaces that their ancestors had hollowed out in order to build other places of sanctuary. There is something primal and atavistic about seeking security in these subterranean fastnesses, in the very bowels of the earth - a cliché that becomes more disturbing the more you think about the metaphor it proposes. But there feels something particularly profound about the nature of these specific quarries and caves and the sanctuary-haunted doubleness of the stone, immensely present in the great havens of medieval faith but offering another haven here still in its absence.

But sanctuary, like pilgrimage, wasn’t merely a passive choice. At Roches à Mondeville outside Caen there were perhaps 8,000 people sleeping on straw, with carburettor lamps the only source of light,” Claude le Meilleur recalled. “The air was very stale and you were scared to death at the thought of possible epidemic… The day was spent organising our shelter, building earthworks in front of the [cave] mouths while shells whistled and exploded all around.”

At Fleury, local tradespeople - butchers and bakers - did their best to deliver bread and meat to this strange subterranean community that sprang up overnight in the quarry, but it was never sufficient. There was neither light nor air, but the men hauled water and cut what lumber might be needed; women set up kitchens and laundries. Cécile Dabosville, still a child, remembered that “apart from the fleas, our heads were alive with lice, scratch-scratch all day. Hygiene was non-existent; there were no toilets in the caves. We had to make do with corners or heaps of stones.” It says alot for the plight of Caen that some 500 hundred refugees chose to stay in the quarry for two weeks after the city was liberated.

Of course, had the war progressed differently, the country people might have fled to the towns and cities. Often sanctuary is simply an idea of elsewhere, sometimes a different place, sometimes a different time, a past which seems a fortress of comfort and certainty where everything has already unfolded and there are, or are not thought to be, any surprises any more.

Those who found refuge were lucky. Some were driven out of their senses. That’s not a figure of speech. “The population was literally crazed, seized by panic,” Joseph Poirier, the deputy mayor of Caen remembered. Outside Falaise a British soldier, was shocked to see “two women, barefoot and dressed only in their nightclothes, their hair streaming in the wind as they ran… the leading woman was carrying a large picture of Christ in a frame still complete with glass. They were both hysterical.” But perhaps hysteria is a reasonable reaction to apocalyptic horror. What kind of madness is it to remain rational at the very limits of animal experience when language itself is barely sufficient? The liberation was a liberation from all sense and order too: a descent into hell of unreason not least because the suffering seemed darkly absurd, allied servicemen bombing allied civilians to free them from occupying armies that were largely elsewhere.

By the end of July, there were nearly 1.5 million Allied servicemen in Normandy. But there were thousands of French refugees on the move too. If the locals were lucky, they had prams to push what was left of their belongings in, struggling with them over the churned up earth and high, hedge-lined banks. Refugees filled the roads, “pulling handcarts with all sorts of domestic bits and pieces,” Major Rex with the Royal Engineers noticed. “Hands were gripping suitcases fit to burst, tied around with thick string, rope and belts.” A Sergeant Greenwood remembered seeing two old ladies being wheeled in a wheelbarrow – three young babies and children too. “Some of them had been trekking for three weeks,” he said. Pity mixed with irritation among some of the soldiers, though. “You cannot help feeling sorry for the poor devils as you see them glumly trudging along with a few poor belonging strapped on their backs,” Lt-Colonel Baker with the 2nd Canadian Corps said. “At the same time they are a damned nuisance on the roads.”

Locals could often be seen begging for food. Those who lived in the cities had already been half-starved before the liberation. The Germans had rationed meat to 100g per person per week, but there wasn’t enough meat even to fulfil that order. The German soldiers took priority. The defence of the region took priority too: the railway lines were commandeered for the military; grain and cereal could not be moved into the towns. The French became used to black bread. One old man was given some white bread by US soldiers and sobbed in gratitude. “Then he ran home to distribute this miraculous food, like the blessed wafer,” a priest near Coutances recalled, “to all the inhabitants of the house and the neighbours.” To add to the Normans’ many other woes, the Allies cut off electricity, water and sewage.

Do the roads bear witness to these traumas? Are they haunted too by sense memories, of dread and hunger, shock upon shock? Normandy is for the most part a region of wide horizons, a fertile, farmed landscape into which particulars dissolve. I remember years ago at a time of personal crisis coming to a grotto, a shrine to the Virgin Mary, deep in the woods near Vire, bowered among the beech and oak, and it seemed like a page from a Book of Hours, a scene from a tapestry. I was jolted for the first time by the thought of prayer as a possibility. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale famously opens with a segue from a medieval falcon loosed to hunt over the Kent Weald and a Spitfire cutting through the sky. If the mind can find a way to skip back and forth between the great machines harvesting corn in the fields at night to tanks and artillery riding the swell of the land a lifetime back, can we see too the dazed and hungry ghosts walking at the roadside in loose fitting clothes, covered in the dry, red dust of summer, the few possessions left to them tied tight in a swollen suitcase or spilling from the stomach of a pram?

The Allies seemed shocked at their own handiwork. “Apart from the church spire and three shells of houses [it] is razed to the ground,” Major Julius Neave, a cavalry officer, said of the pretty village of Aunay-sur-Odon. Villers-Bocage “appeared dead, mutilated and smothered, a gigantic sightless rubble heap so confounded by devastation as to suggest an Apocalypse,” Major Forrest with the Royal Artillery said. Tilly-sur-Seulles was “not so much a village as a scrap heap with every house and shop shattered.” In every village he passed through “roofs gape, houses lie in amorphous heaps and church spires, reduced to skeletal shapes, stand out like interrogation marks above surrounding debris. Streets are choked until bulldozers force a track through them, shovelling the rubble aside, temporarily blocking entrances to alleys and side streets.”

One of the things you notice here as a tourist – or as a pilgrim – today is how prominent the public statues of Christ on the cross are, as if looking down from his perch above high streets and road junctions on the memory of his poor broken villages and towns. Fortitude and sacrifice, the desperate necessities of heroism, are qualities we more readily associate with those in combat in the 20th-century battlefields of France; but these quiet domestic places are steeped in them too.

Alain Corbin grew up in Lonlay l’Abbaye, south east of Vire on the road to Domfront. In Sois sage, c’est la guerre, his childhood memoir of war, he writes of taking refuge, with his family, in the house of a peasant in the countryside. Ten of them slept in one room – some in a bed, some on a table, one in a chair, some on the dirt floor. There was a cow in the room next door, which during the day fed on the peasant family’s two hectares of pasture.

Like many men of his generation, Jéhan, the head of the house, was a veteran of World War I. What it was like to be traumatised again we can only wonder. Jéhan had fought in the artillery. He, with his son and grandson, worked frantically to dig a trench ahead of the bombardment he knew to be coming. Other veterans across Normandy were reliving the same nightmare, redigging the same redouts. Jéhan placed his at the corner of two hedgerows: two trenches ran at a right angle to one another, about two metres deep, cut through soil and clay. One trench functioned as the entrance to the other, like the antechamber to a tomb. They covered it with planking and with mud and brushwood. Jéhan promised Corbin it would protect them from the fragments of shell that were sure to rain down. The clay soil made the trench stiflingly hot, Corbin remembered. His account made me think of the recently interred Bayliss and Blyth and their fellow crews down in the bowels of their tanks where the heat of the metal casing that protected them served to suffocate them too.

Corbin’s family was woken early one morning by a single German soldier, wrapped in bullet belts, hysterically demanding to know which way was east. There may have been reason in his hysteria: the German military police, the Feldgendarmerie, seized potential deserters and hanged them from the nearest tree to motivate their comrades. Corbin recalled feeling a kind of pity for individual Germans: he thought them already defeated, but he knew that many of them were still certain to die. Nevertheless, the parting message from this German, on this morning, was clear enough, however broken his French: if you’re still here in twenty minutes I will kill you all.

The family fled in whatever they were wearing that moment, Corbin in sandals, his brother in wooden clogs. Not far from the American lines they were stopped by another party of Germans troops. It is a breathtaking moment. But the soldiers were perhaps weary, or perhaps indifferent – perhaps just humanly kind – and they let them through. Who cares in what form mercy comes?

Perhaps that is the attitude with which the people of Normandy approached the rebuilding of their ravaged towns. Samuel Beckett called Saint-Lô the capital of ruins; but really nothing differentiated Saint-Lô from almost any other town or village in Calvados. Redemption is a process, a hell that must be walked through and borne. The towns aren’t haunted by the ghosts of their peoples; they are haunted by their former selves, by the sudden rupture with their histories – quite literally overnight, in some cases.

People woke up and a small world built over centuries was dust and smoke drifting skyward in the clear morning light. History was there and then it was gone, a magician’s trick that could not be undone: the body severed, the clock smashed. History was there and then it was gone, suffocating in the rubble of itself. If we think of landscapes as sacred texts or manuscripts, towns like Vire were simply scraped away in June 1944; parchment was skin, living breathing skin, and it was surely a shock to generations of memory rooted in the old streets and familiar buildings were only skin deep after all. There was precious little restoration that could be done; the destruction was too complete. In Vire, the old roads were literally obliterated and it was impossible to find them beneath the sea of brick and dust and rubble that rose and fell in waves towards the crest of the hill.

Whatever you think of the post-war modern architecture that defines contemporary Calvados, I think it is fair to say that it is functional before it is beautiful, built low and determinedly of brick and concrete and well-cut stone. Even the villages have a strangely urban, industrialised feel however bucolic the patterns of life. They are not faceless or without character, but there is a uniformity of style that is decisively, blankly modern. But there is no mistaking the intense civic pride that burns fiercely in the clean streets, the floral displays, the immaculate public spaces. There is sanctuary in unremarkable routine, in the restitution of order too: it is what you cling to in the aftermath of grief, after all.

When Vire was rebuilt after the war, the town was reoriented around the medieval clock tower, which so remarkably survived the devastation. All roads in and out of the town now converge there; it was as if to say that time was starting over. You can read that as modernity wrapping itself around a medieval heart, or as medieval certainty offering security, a fixed point, a kind of oversight, for a world dazed and exhausted by change.

The local museum in Vire has an excellent permanent exhibition about the destruction of the town in June 1944 and its slow post-war reconstruction. One of its exhibits is an angel, carved from oak, which used to stand in a niche on the clock tower. The angel very nearly didn’t survive: its body is charred and its left arm is severed at the elbow. But the right arm is raised in what still might be a kind of triumph.