CWT Journal – August 31, 2026 / Bayeux, Normandy

Today was a wonderfully unhurried Monday. The girls and I walked to the Bayeux War Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery of the Second World War in France. Maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, it contains 4,648 graves—predominantly British and Commonwealth servicemen, but also several hundred soldiers of other nationalities, including Germans. Unlike the regimented uniformity of the American cemetery, many of these headstones carry intimate epitaphs chosen by families, giving the immense human cost of Normandy a particularly personal dimension.

Next door we continued our Normandy education at the Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy, where tanks, artillery, uniforms, maps, and photographs helped coalesce the individual places we'd visited—Omaha, Pointe du Hoc, Bayeux—into the larger campaign that raged across this countryside in the summer of 1944.

Eventually we meandered into Old Town for a look inside the magnificent Bayeux Cathedral. Its dimensions rivaled nearly any cathedral we've encountered in Europe, yet its interior felt strikingly austere by comparison—soaring stone and Gothic arches largely unencumbered by the gilding, frescoes, paintings, and profusion of sculpture we'd grown accustomed to elsewhere. Its grandeur came from scale and architecture rather than ornamentation, and we loved it.

We concluded our cultural education with something considerably less solemn: ice cream.

After several days immersed in invasion, sacrifice, and war, it felt good simply to wander peacefully through town together.

Perhaps the greatest monument to those who fought here is the ordinariness of a Monday afternoon they made possible.