The stones cry out

How do you say, “There are Nazi explosives in the mud on my shoes,” in French?

I stood in the security line at Charles de Gaulle airport being attacked by agents with strips of chemical tape—not metal detectors—though I was not aware of a single chemical anywhere on my body except deodorant and sweat. Yet they kept coming, once, twice, three times, rubbing little strips that looked like pieces of the outside of a piñata all over my skin, my clothes, my shoes.

My shoes.

The previous day, before my wonderful Air BnB host kindly drove me to the train station in Bréauté, where I accidentally boarded a train bound for Fécamp instead of Paris—I had climbed the cliffs of Étretat, a tiny Norman hamlet famed for the beauty of its white shoreline carved by nature into flying buttresses and a pebbled beach like a collection of exotic eggs. But more forces than nature had carved the cliffs of Étretat. Like the rest of the Norman coastline, it was heavily fortified during the Nazi occupation. The army of the Third Reich sawed a grid into the cottage-cheese-like bedrock, only visible at low tide, as well as chiseling out pill boxes from the natural caves.

A German pillbox at Fecamp

Unlike most tourists interested in French history, I had not come to Normandy to learn about World War II. Nor had I come in search of the natural images that had inspired so many landscapes by Claude Monet. I’d come in search of the coast as it had been during the French Revolution and the ancien régime. But even at the tiny museum at the top of the cliff that purports to tell the history of Étretat, the Revolution seemed a forgotten chapter. The most obvious monument to royalty, the Château des Aygues, vacation home of both Polish and Spanish queens, wasn’t built until the nineteenth century. The town itself seemed to want to believe that it had sprung up fully-formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus, after the violence of the Terror had passed, as if a village so quaint could never have been party to such bloodshed.

Yet the Church of Notre-Dame has stood in Étretat since the twelfth century—and its statues have no heads.

It was the only physical reminder of the Revolution I encountered in Étretat, and you have to know what it means beforehand to recognize its import. There are no signs to explain that during the Revolution, when the National Assembly and later the first French Republic waged war against the Church, it was not only priests, religious, and the faithful who refused to sever ties with Rome who often faced beheading. So too did their ancestors in the faith, the saints enshrined within the churches.

Yet there are also no signs to explicate the furrowed bedrock or the pillbox caves. In Étretat, the violence of the past carved its own monuments, and the citizens have left them to speak on their own terms. The town itself is the memorial, crying out in silent witness, violence echoed in the very earth I carried on my shoes.

As I stood in the security line at Charles de Gaulle, I realized that nearly eighty years later, the mud of Étretat still carried traces of the chemicals of war—but I could not for the life of me remember the French word for mud. Surely I couldn’t be the first tourist ever to bring home the violent past of Normandy on my shoes? Surely I could show the pictures of myself standing on the cliffs by way of explanation? My rusty French had served me well on my journey thus far, but if I had to rely on it now, I was probably bound for jail.

Praise God, the third piñata strip did not beep when placed into the senor, and security waved me through. But the history still clung to me—the rocks and earth still crying out, “Repent, for the day of judgment is at hand.”