Eleven O’Clock

Wednesday is a public holiday in France. In most communes the morning starts the same way: a few people at the monument aux morts, a wreath, a short speech, often a roll call of the local dead. Then everyone goes home for lunch.

I have stood at the other end of it. I did the Remembrance Sunday parades when I was in the army. It goes with being a military musician.

It is always a very moving ceremony, and I still tear up. Sunset is part of the bugle call; so is Nimrod. When I hear them it still gets me. And yes: we will remember them.

As soldiers we are taught about those in our regiment who went before us. Then it is our turn, and now another generation is doing the same. All of them characters in the regimental history.

When I first came to the Vendée, the band would parade to the monument aux morts and we would play for the veterans.

I have been thinking about all of it since August, because Normandy does the same thing on a larger scale and with less ceremony. Nobody at Sainte-Mère-Église is staging anything. The ten names are on a house wall because that is the house where it happened, and people walk past on their way to the shops. The paratrooper is on the church because that is where he came down. At Pointe du Hoc the craters have grass in them and a fence round the edge.

In September I wrote that a family walked past eating ice cream and the four seconds were over. I have been turning that over since.

The ordinary is not what spoils these places. It is what keeps them open. A site that is only ever solemn gets visited on the right anniversary by the right people, and left alone for the rest of the year. A place with a car park gets visited by anyone with a free afternoon, and some of them, for four seconds, understand what they are standing on.

That is what the sixteen photographs are about, if they are about anything: not the battle but the keeping. A parachute on a church roof. Roses on a casemate wall. A bicycle at Merville. All of it still in use, all of it looked after by people who also have shopping to do.

On Wednesday at eleven the names will be read in a lot of small squares. Then people will go home for lunch, and the monument will still be there.

The sixteen photographs of Normandy, 1944 are in the shop, as prints and as high-resolution downloads: the prints → the downloads →

Any photo on this site is available as a print. → Ask me.

The Normandy essays, in order: The Merville Battery, Pointe du Hoc, Sainte-Mère-Église and Utah Beach. The whole set is in Normandy, 1944: All Sixteen.

If you'd rather have one of these on a wall than a screen — prints from €99.99, Ilford or Baryta paper, made by WhiteWall in Berlin. The shop →