THE MAYOR MAKES A DECISION

The Mayor of Sainte-Mère-église, Monsieur Alexandre Renaud, was awake with the light. He and his family, wife and three sons, spent the night huddled in a deep trench behind the church, overlooking the town spring. They had been sleeping there for two nights and a day, the day being 6 June. A woman, less than 10 feet from the family, had been killed by a German artillery round and in the full sight of the children. Paul and Henri-Jean would remember this. The youngest, Maurice, clenched his mother in silence.

The mayor had spent the night fighting the fire that engulfed a building on the east side of the square and was a crematory for a trooper who fell from the sky into its burning interior. He noted the dead bodies of other paratroopers, hanging limply from the many sycamore trees that graced the church square. He wanted to cut them down, but the fighting was still too intense and he returned to his ditch to await dawn.

Much later, in a liberated Sainte-Mère-église, he would write a letter to the President of France, Charles De Gaulle, who would agree to award the French fourragère, an award in the form of a braided cord, to the 82nd Airborne liberators, a decoration worn today by all members of the division. His wife, Simone Renaud, tended the graves of the liberating soldiers for the rest of her life and rightly earned the title “Mother of Normandy,” the mother none of the fallen would ever again know.

Renaud’s oldest son, Paul, will go on to design the memorial stained-glass windows of the church; the middle son, Henri-Jean, will manage the Airborne Museum and be the principal host for all returning veterans. The youngest son, Maurice, will be chairman of the AVA (les Amis des Vétérans Américains), the local citizens’ groupthat hosts and feeds every returning Airborne soldier every year.

On 7 June, 1944, the citizens sensed greater security though the fighting was still close by as evidenced by the rattle of small arms as well as the boom of occasional German artillery rounds. Regardless, fueled by a combination of anxiety, exhaustion, and curiosity, they begin to leave their basements and protective crannies to see what had transformed their lives. The mayor was determined to gather them and to lead them. He was a veteran of Verdun and taps into his well of experience and competence in managing difficult situations.

The church was a very busy place. The Airborne doctors and medics had converted it to a hasty clearing station. The pews are beds with plasma bottles hanging throughout the cloister. The doctors had created a small surgical ward where the light is best flowing through the stained glass above, the dove departing in flight, which seemed wholly appropriate. Outside, to the rear of the nave, was a small door opening onto the eastern side of the square. Here and in the recesses of what passes for a garden, the dead were laid in the shadows of the buttresses.

The mayor, mindful of the shadowed remnants of youth he saw in the square earlier, had made a decision and goes about implementing it. The mayor walks the streets talking to the emerging citizenry, offering both hope and the simple norms of human communication, suppressed for many dark years.

The streets are covered with the trash and debris of close combat. The windows are shattered, walls crumpled, doors smashed, and furniture scattered. The reconstitution of the town will await the reconstitution of their spirit.

Close by, he sees a body of a paratrooper, jammed against a telephone pole, a point of curiosity to the citizens. The mayor reflected to himself:

The soldier is young. He has not yet lived his life. But in dying, he has fulfilled the meaning, the future, and the salvation of life for all that he saved this day of days. He brought a message of hope and future for a humanity that had lost hope. He gave his life that all others could live.

His body is lifeless in the street as the light of day rises to the newly liberated citizens. They creep out of their cellars and safety to awaken to the first dawn of freedom in many years. Some walk next to him, stop, cross themselves and give a silent prayer for the deliverance he and his brothers had given them. An older widow, dressed in black, stops by a garden on the street and picks some flowers. She stoops by the young soldier’s form and gently arrays them over his chest.

Another person gently shifts the young soldier to his back, untwists the last agony he endured for them and crosses his stained and dirt-encrusted hands on his belt. They had not yet been wrinkled or freckled with age nor would they ever be.

Empty cartridges are brushed aside.

Down the street, the church padre, who was also tending his flock, joined the mayor, who quietly talked to the citizens he encountered. Behind the mayor was his wife, dressed in a simple cotton dress, and holding her three young children’s hands. All were oblivious to the stains of mud and dirt covering them from the night’s events, which had been observed from a soggy but protective ditch behind their shop and house on the square. The sensitivities associated with cleanliness and appearance, so endemic in the people, was ground away and forgotten in the events of the night.

The mayor and padre came upon the young soldier and the pair attending to his body, in their way performing an act of contrition and cleansing to a body and spirit that truly needed no such help.

The priest and mayor spoke for a moment and then the mayor quietly moved to several other citizens who had gathered to the scene. Together, they all grasped the body of the fallen paratrooper and his now limp parachute canopy and carried it all to the church. Other parishioners secured the white rectangular box that resided on the edge of the square to accommodate occasional speakers and ceremonies. The box is placed just outside the church door so as not to disturb the hospital within.

The soldier is gently laid on the box and the parachute draped over his body.

A breath of wind courses through the square, lifting the shroud from his Face, revealing the youth and vibrancy of this man, among the many who had brought them this moment. The weight slips the silk past the jump boot tops, revealing the one part of the soldier uniquely identifying him as one of a very few numbers of delivering angels. He would be symbolic of all those angels that descended that night.

The mayor and the padre smiled. This silent soldier had brought them a life-liberating joy that none there and their future generations would ever forget.

On 8 June, a special mass was held at the front of the church. The padre stood behind the bier and delivered the service. At its conclusion with the communion, each parishioner took a wafer and touched the catafalque silk as they walked to their newly liberated homes.