The ‘sense-haunted ground’, part three (2024)

The first two parts of this essay are here and here.

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, 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 basem*nt.

The Flying Fortresses flew in low. A little further south in Lonlay l’Abbaye, the 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 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 from 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 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 places are steeped in them too.

The French historian Alain Corbin was 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 impossible to find 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.