Recently my fiancée, Lynsay, and I went on a vacation to France. We took the opportunity to visit the beaches of Normandy. Our destination was the city of Dieppe and the Canadian World War II cemetery. Neither Lynsay nor I had lost family there; in fact, between the two of us, only Lynsay’s grandfathers had fought and lived through the war. We’re pretty fortunate, and we know it, which is part of why we felt compelled to visit the cemetery that day.
We drove into the seaside town and toward the water, expecting the scene of the great military landing to be the logical location of the burial ground. And, sure enough, when we reached the sea, parked the car, and walked up to the rock-filled beaches, we spotted a Canadian flag. A lump formed in my throat.
“Here we are,” I announced. Unfortunately, what we’d found was a seaside casino with a set of international flags. Where was this world-famous cemetery? we wondered.
Dieppe is a factory town. Most of the people there felt pretty intimidating for an English-speaking couple from downtown Toronto. But, in our best and admittedly rusty Canadian French, we inquired about the location of the cemetery.
“Ou est le cimetière des Canadiens?”
Much to our dismay, none of the locals seemed to know. Most of them kept pointing away from the water and saying something about a nearby town.
Back in the car, we drove around Dieppe for over two hours, growing increasingly frustrated with each dead end.
Finally, in the middle of a roundabout, we spotted a small green sign. We followed it and a series of others that led us out of the actual city of Dieppe and into a farming community some miles away. And there, in amongst roaming fields filled with thick, fragrant poppies, lay a small cemetery with a simple stone-arch entrance. We parked at the end of a dead-end country road and walked inside the cemetery.
We were alone, looking out at rows upon rows of rectangular white monuments—each as straight as a line of soldiers in formation. The grass was freshly trimmed. The grounds smelled of moist greenery. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced. At each grave there was a flower, laid with military precision, yet the decoration was so sublime and fair you’d think the invisible groundskeeper was an artist.
As we examined each gravestone, Lynsay remarked on the large number of deceased who hailed from her hometown of Hamilton, that most of the men were really just boys, and that most of the deaths had taken place over a three-day period. “There must be a thousand young men buried here,” she said.
My thoughts were abruptly interrupted by the sound of a woman yelling in French and honking her car horn. I walked to the entrance to find a rugged, middle-aged woman, a local, waving something in her hand.
As it happens, I must have been so excited to have found the cemetery that when I exited my car I’d dropped, in the middle of the road, my brown leather dossier containing our passports and all our money for our trip—about eight hundred euros. The French woman was honking her horn so that she could return my case.
As the woman made a hasty retreat to her beat-up, twenty-year-old Peugeot, I called out, “Thank you, thank you! Merci.” She shook her head, looked me in the eye—and then at the graveyard—and said, “Non, non. Merci.” She was pointing at me.
It took me a moment to realize what she was trying to say.
After she left, I examined the dossier and saw that the case had been opened, but not a penny or passport was missing. She’d seen that we were Canadian, and although I’m sure that money could have solved a whole bunch of her problems, she felt compelled to return it.
So, as we discovered, the people of Dieppe haven’t forgotten what some very brave Canadians did, so long ago—they just chose simple gestures of kindness to express their gratitude.
Toronto, Ontario