Colleville-sur-Mer

There is a moment, approaching the cemetery, when you walk through the visitor centre and out onto the grass and the rows of white markers come into view — and the thing that hits you first is not the scale, though the scale is staggering, but the precision. Nine thousand, three hundred and eighty-seven crosses and Stars of David, arranged in curves that radiate from a central axis, each one exactly the same height and spacing as every other, each one a specific person. A name. An age. A state. A date. The precision is what delivers the blow, because it makes abstraction impossible. You cannot look at a number. You look at individual markers until you stop being able to.

I came in October, on a Tuesday, when there were perhaps forty other visitors on the grounds. An American family was standing at one cross I could not see clearly from where I was, the grandmother with her hand on the stone, and the way she stood made clear without any other information what the marker said. I turned away and walked toward the bluff and looked down at Omaha Beach below — the grey sand, the grey water, the dunes that the men who landed here on the morning of June 6, 1944 had to cross while everything was trying to kill them. The beach is 1,500 metres wide. Standing on the bluff, it looks impossibly exposed.

The path down to the beach is short and steep and deposits you at the base of the bluff, in a hollow of the dunes where the wind drops away and the sound is mostly just the sea. Walk west along the sand, away from the beach access road and the tourists who arrive by bus, and within ten minutes you are on a beach that feels completely undeveloped and alone with the Channel. The bunkers on the bluff above are visible from certain angles — concrete gun positions that the Germans had spent four years building and the Allied planners had spent two years trying to figure out how to neutralise. They are still there. No one has removed them. They sit in the dune grass like large grey teeth.

The Pointe du Hoc, a few kilometres west, is where United States Army Rangers scaled ninety-foot cliffs on ropes under fire to destroy artillery positions that would otherwise have commanded both Omaha and Utah Beaches. They discovered, having taken the position with catastrophic casualties, that the guns had been moved inland before the assault. The landscape at Pointe du Hoc has been left essentially as it was — craters from the pre-landing bombardment still pockmark the headland, the earth still buckled and torn eighty years later. You walk through it like a surface of the moon. The German command bunker is open; you can go inside and stand in the concrete rooms where men made decisions about who would fire at whom and when.

What I did not expect about this area of Normandy was how quickly life reasserted itself at the edges of the historic sites. Drive three minutes from the cemetery and you are in a village where a boulangerie is doing its morning trade and a farmer is moving sheep across the road. The coast road west of Colleville passes through small fishing ports where lobster pots are stacked on the quay. The war is not forgotten here — it is impossible to forget, the markers are in every field, the memorials are at every crossroads — but the land has gone on being productive and the sea has gone on being fished, and that continuation feels like its own form of respect for what happened.

When to go: Any time of year works, but May and early June carry particular weight because of the D-Day commemorations and the veterans who still attend them. The cemetery is at its most affecting when the crowd is thin — early morning in any season, or the low season months of November through March. Come prepared to stay longer than you planned.