The first part of this essay is here.
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 line 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 temporarily, 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 of every kind 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?
The third and final part of this piece, about the civilian experience of the Battle of Normandy, is here.