The Battlefields Of Normandy

There are many such small museums, too many perhaps, the cynic may respond. But they all help to put the visitor in the picture, much more intimately than the grander exhibitions, and the Battle for Normandy was a mosaic of little battles fought usually among a confusion of small fields and orchards and tiny hamlets. So their scale is right, and if a village is proud of the great events that came its way half a century ago and wishes to commemorate them in a way that is comprehensible to those who were not there, we should be grateful.

After Tilly the party went on, south west to Livry, and Briquessart, tiny places difficult to find on an ordinary touring map, the site, nevertheless, of the kind of typically hard fought infantry action that the nature of the landscape dictated. So small are they that one is hardly aware of having reached them. But they both exacted their toll in dead and wounded. Then, following the course of the fighting, we went south east to Aunay-sur-Odon, Mont Pincon, and Lenault where M le Maire was waiting with a small reception committee, including an ancien combattant wearing his medals and carrying the Tricolor. A year ago the commune erected a plaque on the wall of the Mairie to commemorate their liberation by the regiment, the first allied troops to reach it. The plaque says, quite unambiguously, Merci nos Liberateurs. Whatever General de Gaulle said about France being liberated by her own efforts, '... the Fighting France, the Eternal France ...' must have escaped the attention of those at Lenault. An officer who had taken part in the fighting laid a wreath, another quoted Laurence Binyon's words, there was a moment of silence and that was that, the sort of thing repeated countless times the length and breadth of this part of France. It was time to return to the hotel in Caen. They would be visiting places east of Falaise the following day, including St Lambert-sur-Dive where Major Currie won his VC.

All highly personal, of course, with a meaning hidden from most of us who had not been there. But Mont Pincon was different, the same sort of battle but of a different order of magnitude. It required a brigade to take it. It looms darkly over the surrounding countryside, a smooth dome dominating everything for miles around. One could see why it had to be taken, irrespective of the cost. There is something a little sinister about it, amid that green and fecund landscape, with its skirting of pine and silver birch and the furze and bracken above. It is one of those hills that seem to go on forever. It does not have an actual summit, just a series of false crests culminating in a long plateau, a 'killing field' if ever there was one. And so it proved. It was taken, of course, (Of course! How often does that phrase slip off the keyboard when writing about these things! In plain fact of course there was no 'of course' about it) but at frightful cost, by the Somerset Light Infantry and the Wiltshire Regiment suppor ted by tanks of the 13th/18th Hussars who have put up a little memorial on one of those false crests. They deserve to commemorate it since the infantry could never have taken it alone, a fact which they were the first to acknowledge.