A poem appears in two languages on the wall of the World War Two museum in Arromanche. The last verse reads as follows:
Voir ces enfants qui rient
En jouant dans la mer.
Le soleil d’aujourd’hui
Sèche les larmes d’hier.
And, in English,
See the children laughing
And playing in the sea.
Today’s sun
Dries yesterday’s tears.
That’s one of the striking things about Normandy. Today, the sites of battles are so beautifully green and quiet, so serene, that it’s difficult to believe that, still within living memory, they were pounded by artillery, cratered by bombs, and soaked with blood. Omaha Beach, where an American commander told his beleaguered men on 6 June 1944 that there were only two kinds of people on it, the dead and those who would soon be dead, and advised them that, if they were going to die, they might as well die trying to get up onto the bluffs, is now a popular summer resort, crowded with sunbathers and swimmers. At first, that fact seems almost sacrilegious. But then, on reflection, it seems entirely appropriate that people freely enjoy their lives on a beach where thousands of men died so that they could do precisely that.
Posted from Carentan, Normandy, France
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