I Swear I Speak English

When Valérie informed me that the English exchange students would be taking a trip to Caen near the end of the stay and had extended the offer to me, I jumped at the chance.  (Well, more exactly, I did a little jig.)  After getting excused from my two classes that Friday, it was set.  Now all I had to do was board a bus with 31 kids I didn’t know and three adults who I ate lunch with once.

We all spoke English and French, right?  We at least had that in common?

I thought as much until I was speaking with Valérie and one of the teachers, Hugh, before the bus left, and the bus driver walked up to tell Hugh about evidence of a “keg party” from the trip the day before.  First, let me just say that both Hugh and the driver, Clive, are English, and I know Clive is from Liverpool.  I say this to reassure myself that they were speaking English, because I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.  I turned to Valérie, asking in French if she could lend a sister a hand, but she shook her head and smiled vacantly; she hadn’t understood either.

This was going to be an interesting day.

After a brief delay due to a miscommunication with a correspondent’s family, we headed off to Caen.

More than one student threw me strange glances, especially after I asked them what they’d eaten so far and heard my accent, but I figured their teachers had warned them that the school’s English assistant would be coming with them.  Not so much.  I didn’t learn until the end of the day that their teachers hadn’t said one word about me; in fact, the student’s exact words were, “So who exactly are you, anyway?”  Awesome.

I tell this story now to explain the slightly awkward atmosphere of the entire day that began with the two-hour bus ride.  I spoke with their French assistant, Estelle, for almost the entire ride, but the students around us tossed more of those oblong looks my way.  Estelle and I traded stories about teaching our native languages, what we missed about not being in our home countries, and to where we’ve travelled.  Estelle is on her third of five years in England as a French assistant, and she is working towards a teaching certificate which requires her to learn a third language, Spanish in her case.  According to the other teachers, she is more than prepared to uproot from her mother country and replant herself in England, preferably, but anywhere but France, generally.  Although we spoke in French the first time we met, we spoke in English this time, and I was selfishly relieved: her English (including accent) was fabulous, and I would only embarrass myself if we spoke in French, though she did say I was super awesome at imitating the French students’ accents.

As always when you start out a journey late, we made good time and arrived at our destination early: Le Mémorial, or the Museum for Peace.  They let us in early so that we could have extra time wandering around the museum before we made our 1 PM date with the movie about the landing.  Throughout the whole museum, I felt like I was in this space between visitor — free to roam, take my time, and step in front of as many reading people as possible — and chaperone/sheepdog, herding the kids and making sure no one got lost.  (Doubly confusing as I still had no idea the kids didn’t know who I was, and they kept ignoring my sheepdog tendencies.)  I eventually fell into a pattern of following around the same teacher, Hugh, and a gaggle of kids who actually cared about learning; two of them compared the English, French, and German translations to each other.

Museum of the Peace. Unassuming exterior; rockin' interior.

Of course, as a museum about D-Day, it also chronicles the entre-guerre/time between the world wars as well as all aspects of World War Two.  It starts at ground level with the end of World War One, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and the belle epoche, what France calls the roaring 20’s.  With each successive display, you spiral downwards, down underground, around a giant white dome that looks like a mini IMAX theater.  The displays become more and more serious, disturbing even, with mini TV screens showing Hitler’s troops marching through Berlin in perfect blocks, like black and white moving Polaroids: innocuous, harmless.  A swastika flag hangs from a fake window, display cases show off an original copy of Mein Kamf.  Then Hitler invades Poland, and you walk into that white dome to find a narrow walkway illuminated by a low, eerie blue light and built with perfect acoustics.  Everything seems all around you all the time, and you can hear every shoe shuffling, every fabric rustling.  Quite simply, you feel unbalanced and under attack.

IMAX bubble and spiral downwards.

I was suspicious of the bubble from the beginning.

You stop those disembodied hands!

Creepy inside of IMAX theater!

From there, you progress through both World War Two history and France’s experience first fighting then collaborating, then doing both at the same time.  See, every American likes to point out that France surrendered to the Nazis in about four seconds, but actually France was cut almost in half during most of the war, with the occupied border drawn diagonally across the country through the near-central point of Vichy, which was where the collaborationist government was based.  Only half of France was truly occupied during the first few years of the war — unfortunately the part that had also been pulverized during the first go-around at a world wrestling match — and the bottom half, while technically “free” until November 1942, was governed by a puppet administration sympathetic to the Nazi cause.  Ostensibly, Germany occupied France even if the former let the latter “govern” itself so that Germany could focus on that war thing.  Defending itself simply wasn’t logistically possible for France in the face of years of bone-crushing poverty and joblessness, and add to that the former WWI hero of Verdun Marshal Pétain declaring that he’s going to form his own government in Vichy so don’t you worry your pretty little head, and I really can’t blame the French people for not knowing which way was up.  The collaboration part’s a different story, but that’s neither here nor there.

The museum follows the war both chronologically and by theme with exhibits about the Battle of Britain, propaganda, and daily French life.  The baby Haz-Mat suits were particularly touching.

You know it's a good museum when they have half-bombed walls.

Legit baby Haz-Mat suit. I checked the label and everything.

Uniforms!

Display about the actual D-Day.

TV screens as pictures? God, they're good.

I was pleasantly surprised that the exhibits about the French resistance were relatively small and scattered, for while there was an active resistance, and they were involved in Germany’s eventual expulsion, I thoroughly despise when countries (including the U.S., mind) toot their patriotic, fight-the-Man horns louder than they should.  In terms of the actual population, the French resistance was tiny, just like any other resistance, just like the colonists who wanted to separate from Britain; don’t blow the ratio out of proportion.

The students (who cared) asked good questions.  One asked about continued anti-Semitism in France, which led Hugh and me to discuss the family Le Pen, the Front National, and the increasing anti-immigration sentiments, and they seemed generally surprised that a blatant fascist made it through the first round elections and could make it through this time if the right isn’t careful.

After taking a rest to sit and watch original footage from the Nuremburg trials (at which my grandfather was present, he likes to remind me), I met up with Estelle and the rest of the kids who didn’t take the museum as seriously as we did; I overheard one saying that they had hit the gift shop over an hour ago.  That means they spent about a half hour in the museum itself. UGH KIDS.  Sometimes I wonder we have them.

The film was about D-Day itself and used a split screen to depict preparations on both sides of the war and with only a soundtrack: no words at all.  What I didn’t know before the museum was that about five beaches were actually invaded, and while the Americans, British, and Canadians were clearly the ones who executed the operations, they didn’t all go in together: the U.S. hit Omaha and Utah beaches first, followed by the British at Sword and Gold beaches and then the Canadians at Juno beach, all within an hour of each other.  I’ve seen the pictures, and I’ve seen the footage, but both have come out of context; after wandering through a museum dedicated to a war that “horrific” doesn’t even begin to describe, they have context.  You feel your heart pounding, the adrenaline rushing through your system and doing what it does best, but you don’t know who you’re more worried for: the Allied forces charging into the breach, or the Germans who have no idea what’s coming, or everyone because, really, you know how most of them ended up.

Though most of the kids were thoroughly subdued after that experience, grumbles of hunger eventually won out, and we hightailed it to the bus and our next destination: Gold Beach near Arromanches and our lunch spot.

If at all possible, I think I fell in love with France all over again.  Each new aspect of this countryside I see, I immediately construct a house there in my mind, and the cliffs overlooking the beach were no different.  The Normandy coast is just savage enough to be rugged and civilized enough to make you wonder why it’s not more savage: huge cliffs of tall, waving beach grass footed by sandy beaches that jut and dip as they stretch to the horizon.  It doesn’t smell like the sea: it smells like clean, like the absence of pollution, like your lungs have been freed from a rubber band.  At this beach, huge slabs of concrete poke out of the ocean, waves gently breaking around them: the remnants of a Mulberry harbor (sweet code name), built to usher supplies to the rapidly advancing Allied front.  The French left the remnants the harbor out in the ocean as a testament to what happened at this beach, and when some of the students stood next to the beached slabs and I saw their actual scale, I must say that I had a new appreciation of the logistics of war.

Beach and the town below.

Parts of Mulberry harbor.

The teachers gave a thorough warning to be back at the bus in an hour and fifteen minutes, and the kids scattered like iron filings from the wrong end of a magnet, some to chill out at one of the lookout points, others to the beach, others to the little town below the cliffs.  Estelle and I parked on the edge of the cliff alongside the path down to the town and ate a leisurely lunch.  We were joined by Hugh, who nodded out towards the ocean with binoculars in hand.  “Some of the kids are swimming.”

“Yes,” I answered.  We’d seen a group of three girls go in, but they were nowhere to be seen.  “Hopefully they didn’t drown.”

“No, no, not them.”  The binoculars found his eyes again.  “The boys are swimming.  Well, skinny-dipping, actually.”

Estelle and I both shot up.  This was the ocean!  Along the Normandy coast!  In March!  I would like to say that my mind immediately shot to pneumonia and hospital visits and how this could totally not be at all my fault ‘cause I wasn’t a chaperone, nope, not at all, but in fact, I started laughing, asking Hugh through malicious giggles if I could take a look.

Yup.  Boys.  Buck naked.  In the ocean.

Side note: I love my camera.

HEE.

The novelty eventually wore off, and Estelle and I meandered down to the town so I could get a closer look at the beach and the giant pylons, but we soon ran out of time and had to head back up to the bus so we could get to our last stop: the American Cemetery.

Yep, those are people for scale.

I didn’t know until we arrived that technically the American Cemetery is American soil, and when Estelle told me so just outside the entrance, I replied, “I’m home! For an hour, at least!”  We then guffawed more loudly than probably appropriate considering the location and the fact that we’d just scolded the children for doing the exact same thing in the bathrooms.  But it’s true!  All American cemeteries in foreign countries are sites maintained and administrated by the United States, so my feet were on American soil for the entire hour of our visit, and the cemetery reminded me of every single picture I’ve seen of Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

There’s a welcome center that I think introduces the cemetery and the U.S.’s role in the D-Day invasion, but we skipped it because we only had an hour to spend before the cemetery closed.  Then, you follow a circuitous path along the beach before approaching the cemetery from the side.  Up some stairs, and to the left is a monument and to the right stretches the cemetery, entirely symmetrical and perfectly manicured.  A long reflection pond leads to the lawn, twin flag poles on either side, and then the thousands of graves: thousands of names of men and women who died in the D-Day invasion and the fight to free France from the Nazis.  The graves face the west and, therefore, the United States mainland, and that’s the point I found the most touching: that even though their bodies are on a different continent, they still have an eye on home.

Monument.

Monument and reflecting pond.

Those kids that didn’t get it before finally got it now; the fact that all these crosses and Stars of David marked bodies, people, that died in a historic event that, until this very moment, remained in a book, finally sunk in.  One girl turned to me and asked, “Are there bodies in all these graves?”

Well, yeah.  There’s no easy way to break that to you, hon.

(Right after that was when they finally asked who the hell I was, and I mentally facepalmed.)

And this was only the American side; there were British, Canadian, French, and German casualties that are buried along the coast in different cemeteries that, while probably different in design are similar in solemnity.  A group of us had a long conversation about my American view of the whole thing, and I told them about my grandfather fighting in World War Two, and one of them stopped me with a hand on my arm.  “Omigod, he’s not in here, is he?!”  I shook my head while biting back a laugh. I forgot how dramatic Anglophone teenagers can be.  Come to think of it any teenagers, really; I just probably don’t understand the French ones.

As we toured the cemetery (“can we walk on there?!”), we talked of living in a strange country, whether their correspondents were good at English, and about the French language in general.  We saw the guards lower and fold the flags, handing one to a group of veterans decked out in trucker caps and safari vests: my view of a traditional WWII vet, because that’s what my grandpa used to wear when I was little.  When we heard the clear tone of a lone bugler singing out Taps across the cemetery, we made our way back towards the monument and the exit.

The monument chronicled with pictures filled with arrows and in all three languages (French, English, and German) just how D-Day went down, and the semi-circle wall behind it listed the names of all the soldiers reported missing, including their rank, company, and state of origin.  I took pride in the fact that I saw some of the kids who blew through the Mémorial in a half hour take pictures of that wall.

Even though the day was somber and could have easily slipped into a state of melancholy, the day ended on an upswing.  The entire region, rambling fields and rolling cliffs and calm sea, exudes a sense of calm awareness, like a wizened elder recovering from a long illness: the scars are still there, but they’re healing.  They know where they’ve been, they have grieved, and they’re trying to move on the best that they can, even though they know they’ll never forget, and they don’t want to forget.  But you can’t keep remembering at the expense of living.

I hope the kids got at least a little bit of that feeling out of today.