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Before I can tell you what happened to Ren and his f riends in and around Saint-Pair-sur-Mer, I need to tell you what happened to Susan and me there. Here, in the poignant confluence of two stories—the 102nd’s and that of local French civilians—we bore down on a seminal moment in the chaplain’s war: when he gave a Bible to a dead girl. After a half day of using Ren ’s notes to try to locate the precise spot where the 102nd had set up —but failing—we paid a cold call on the only official we could find in a ten-mile radius,the irrepressible seventy-four-year-old Louis Forget, mayor of the neighbor ing town of Jullouville. He spoke some English,and he knew all about“the American hospital.”It had been located adjacent to his father ’s farm. However, he was up for r eelection and had a full af ternoon of appointments. Could we come back? Did we want him to line up conv ersations with others who remembered the 102nd?For sure. On the way out we asked whether he knew the Garnier family—the family of a girl named Bleuette Garnier, whose death at the age of twelve, under a tent of the 102nd, deeply touched our Protestant chaplain. In her memory Ren gave the child’s parents an English Bible. I wanted to send a photograph of the Bible to Ren’s daughter, Mary Conway , who had been extraordinarily helpful in the whole project. Louis did not know the Garnier family, but he said he would ask around. A month later we were back at Louis’s office. Although he had struck out on finding any Garnier family members still living in the area, he had a day of appointments set up for us.None of these people spoke English, he explained, and the conversations would be more complicated than we could handle in our “nonnative tongue.”“We will be talking about many horrible deaths.” He spent the day by our side. We first visited with seventy-nine-year-old Jean Touzé, owner of the Angomesnil camping park. He recalled that, as a child,he had watched a movie at the hospital; the “commander”had let him in the tent,where he CHAPTER 6 Saint-Pair-sur- Mer August 194 4 46 chap t er 6 sat alongside doctors and nurses.One doctor belched a lot.Even if he did not recall the name of the movie, Jean certainly remembered the makeup of the hospital,for he had lived just across the road from it. He presented us with a detailed map of the tents —reflecting a logical adjustment of the “ideal” configuration as detailed in the army ’s Medical Field Manual, which based the lay out on local features, such as the Thar River. The explorations of young Jean were resurrected in expertly color-coded cartography ,down to where the bodies of the soldiers who had just died w ere kept—the same tent where the personnel stored the alcohol they drank. Next we met Madame Roland Dulins Duprey,who had lost two brothers to accidents involving leftover German grenades. Although she had no recollections of a Garnier famil y, she had a childhood f riend, Marie Louise Lévi-Ménard, who “remembered everyone.” Off we went to find Madame Lévi-Ménard in the modern hospital in near by Granville,where she was recovering from knee surgery. She was seventy-nine but looked fifty-five. Striking. No, she knew of no Bleuette Garnier, but there in the hospital room—where Pennie of Pennedepie finally found the limits of French tolerance for dogs—Madame Lévi-Ménard recounted her life as an eighteen-year-old member of the Resistance. Her family had rented the manse that once was used b y the priests of Saint-Aubin-des-Préaux, adjacent to S aint-Pair-sur-Mer. When the Germans took control of the area, the officers set up shop in the downstairs of the manse, while the family moved upstairs. Despite their latenight presence below,Marie Louise used her professional skills as a shorthand transcriber, combined with a battery-powered radio receiver made by her cousin,an electrician,in order to record forbidden BBC broadcasts on the Allied troop movements. The following mornings her transcr iptions were passed on to a local Resistance network. Indeed...

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