Europe @ 2.4 km/h (35 page)

Epiphany. Pink clouds fleck the sky far out to sea nearly an hour after the sun disappeared from view. Dogs frolic on the shore, oblivious to the roseate hues of the slow-dying day as I approach the lighthouse at the end of the pier, 730 metres from land. Left and right gulls wheel, and squeal. A duckboard is surrounded on three sides by a pebble beach (but of ducks there is no sign). It is not quite deserted, young men with bicycles make tracks, couples in love walk hand in hand. The world has exhaled and, for just this moment, catches its breath. But I have been 73 days without sight of the sea — so perhaps it’s just me.

1059-1065 km

In most people’s eyes, I suppose, the remarkable thing about my visit to Etretat, on France’s Alabaster Coast, would be that I hitch-hiked there — or, to use the French,
fait de l’auto-stop
. Having auto-stopped as a wheelchair user in much more difficult territory — Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe — the crux of the story was not how I got there but the belated discovery that I needn’t have thumbed a ride at all. When Christian told me yesterday that
autocars
went to Etretat, I — who learnt French for six years — should have realised that
autocar
was not the same as
voiture
but I thought he meant a privately hired car costing perhaps €40 just to take me there — and that would never do.

I tramped 5 km, mostly uphill, from the suburb of Ste Adresse to a garage past the airport. A helpful mechanic there tore up a cardboard box and wrote on one of the pieces,

In no mood to correct his spelling, I held the card up to the oncoming traffic — which quickly became the outgoing. Half an hour — and five cars a minute — passed. After a little while, thinking that a passenger who didn’t speak the driver’s language might be considered undesirable, I covered up the ENGLAIS with one hand. Within a minute, a van with a GB (Great Britain) sticker whizzed by — another missed opportunity.

A few minutes later, one vehicle did stop — a car driven by Karim, an Algerian immigrant from the outskirts of Paris, where the car burners were active in the bonfires of November ’05. Karim was returning to Paris, where he goes to university, and decided to take the lengthier, scenic route. My luck.

It’s a very peaceful place, the Alabaster Coast, with its soughing of waves on a sickle-shaped strand. I was just admiring the common sense behind a sign on the cliff that warned, ‘
Préservez votre vie
’ (‘Guard your life’) when someone innocently told me the
autocar
was leaving in twenty minutes — and it turned out the
autocar
was none other than a regular bus service. Four hours I’d taken to get here when I could easily have done it in 45 minutes. And the charge — not that Karim would accept any petrol money — was all of €2 (about A$3.30).

1067 km

The first bus of my journey from Le Havre to Bayeux this morning crosses two great bridges across the broad estuary of the Seine. The second one, the Normandy Bridge (1995), is the world’s largest suspension span. Only months later will I realise why it looked strangely familiar. A scale model was one of the exhibits at Munich’s Deutsches Museum.

Just after 10 am I cross into the Western Hemisphere. A helpful passenger tells me exactly where the invisible meridian is. (The driver, asked to let me know when we crossed 0º, had given me one of those priceless French expressions — the pursed lips creating a doughnut mouth, the shrug of the shoulders conveying ‘I don’t know’ and ‘What is it to me?’ all in one.)

The second bus driver, from Caën to Bayeux, is a pain in the neck. As I prepare to use my bus-boarding technique, he asks, ‘Why don’t you take the train?’ Hauling myself up the bus steps, I have a question of my own, ‘Why not make the bus friendlier?’

1072-1083 km

A fiftyish ex-army man from London — an unregenerate Little Englander — provides unintended amusement at this morning’s breakfast table in a Bayeux
pension
. He is an habitual utterer of unconsidered remarks that reek of maladjustment to the failure of the French to be English.

After we’ve been served oven-fresh baguettes, he pipes up, ‘When do we get some decent bread?’ We swallow hard, but he’s clearly feeling alienated. A pause, and then … ‘I say, do you think they’d serve porridge if I asked?’

The cost of today’s outing to the landing beaches where Operation Overlord began is justified by one immortal line, when our tour guide, Ed, quotes a Canadian D-Day veteran who once told him, ‘You didn’t worry about the bullet with your name on it; you worried about the one addressed “To Whom It May Concern”.’

Needless to stress, the tour to
les
Plages du Débarquement
does not occur with the tour company that refused to take me … but I have plans for them.

From County Wicklow — ‘a Catholic da, a Protestant ma’ — Ed takes us first to Pointe d’Huc. Through an occasionally brash exterior a remarkable humility can be discerned. As Ed says, ‘It took me four years walking these beaches before I had a vague idea of what happened down there’. Yet he conveys his distilled wisdom in four hours.

The Allies surprised the enemy, Ed explains, by attacking while Rommel was away in Germany (he had gone back for his wife’s 50th birthday). Questioned about the different shapes of impact craters, he points out that naval artillery shells leave oval craters, aerial bombs circular ones. It makes sense when you think of it (but I never did).

‘Omaha Beach was the one landing indispensable to the success of D-Day, the loss of which would leave a 35 mile gap. It was close to an unmitigated disaster,’ he declares and then goes on to detail why. Standing on top of a German bunker, Ed says 225 men were told to attack this point at 6.30 am on 6 June 1944. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Rudder had been told he could call for 600 reinforcements. But his duty commander, an Englishman, had drunk a whole bottle of whisky the night before. And the order wasn’t given on time.

‘It was ten past seven before the first [2nd Battalion] US Ranger’s boots hit the beach here. Only fifteen of the Rangers got to the top of the cliff. What the Americans didn’t know was that the guns had been removed inland, to a barn behind a farmer’s field.’ There the Germans used hedgerows as ‘inverted trenches’.

The largest seaborne invasion in history, its scale staggers the imagination even today. Later, at the Memorial Museum of the Normandy Battle, I will see figures that are beyond comprehension: a force strength of 2.9 million, 660,000 airborne and 285,000 on the sea; 7774 aircraft flown.

Before you know it, we’re back in the van with military precision, heading for Vierville (Omaha Beach). Ed informs us that none of the German bunkers was pointing out to sea, ‘whatever
Saving
Private Ryan
says’. The aperture allowed a gunner to fire obliquely on landing craft within a 12 mile range. So many of the paratroops were blown off course that there weren’t enough left over from Utah and Sword beaches to drop on Omaha, retarding the invaders’ advance.

The reason Omaha, Juno and the other sites were chosen was that they were among only five beaches along this line of coast where you could get vehicles onshore. The coast of Brittany, Cherbourg and Le Havre was too jagged; the Germans had Calais and Normandy better defended; and sites further south were not practicable because they had to be within reach of fighter cover from Britain.

The last stop of the tour is the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, overlooking Omaha Beach — a very moving site, with 9387 crosses and Stars of David in a section called the Garden of the Missing indicative of the sacrifice it took to regain a foothold on the Continent. It is fitting that the tour should close with a view of the eloquent dedication on the monument there, TO THESE WE OWE THE HIGH RESOLVE THAT THE CAUSE FOR WHICH THEY DIED SHALL LIVE.

If Normandy suggests D-Day, Bayeux — the first town retaken by the Allies — echoes to the drumbeat of an earlier battle of consequence for the world. The Bayeux Tapestry, depicting the victory of William, seventh Duke of Normandy, over the English at Hastings on 14 October 1066 — 941 years tomorrow — is sometimes characterised as a medieval comic strip, but only the Norsemen’s descendants were laughing.

While the events retold on the 68-metre-long ribbon are familiar enough to any student of English history, the story of the tapestry itself was new to me. In the Middle Ages, Bayeux Cathedral burnt down twice without harming it. During the Revolution, in 1792, it was used as a tarpaulin to cover a cart loaded with weapons bound for Paris until a captain of the Republican Guard saved it and stored it in his office.

One of the less celebrated scenes set me thinking about religion’s subservience to the military in the Middle Ages (and not just then). A cleric — a man of the cloth in both senses — is shown carrying a mace into battle. God’s vicars on earth were not permitted to shed blood, but bashing people senseless was another thing.

All round town leaflets advertise that this is the annual Day of the Pig, with the centrepiece of festivities a ‘
marché gourmand
’. The leaflets depict a pig smiling under a spotlight — obviously one that hasn’t read the leaflet. According to the fine print, one lucky pig will be named Cochon de Bayeux. I visualise the winner getting a sash and a reprieve until Christmas. Tomorrow night, it says in even finer print, the highlight will be a traditional banquet of savoury pork, put on by Bayeux chefs.