The Valour and the Horror

World War Two, saving private ryan, Second World War, W.W.II

Madame Tribulet finds her son in Caen

On June 22nd, Madame Luce Tribulet left her home in Sainte-Croix-Grand-Tonne to head east to Caen. She wanted to retrieve her son who was in one of the schools there, believing he would be safer at home. She set out alone on her bicycle, leaving her husband with their other four children, not aware that her path would be almost identical to that of the Canadian and English forces which were beginning to stretch out across a long front in preparation for Operation Epsom.

At first the road was dusty and pitted, torn up by tanks and by fire; she had to push her bike most of the time. A few miles down the road however, the surroundings changed. The road appeared strangely untouched, and everything was quiet. "I crossed a completely deserted plain, in the midst of that silence which is peculiar to the front line," she wrote. "An English motorcyclist stopped and asked me for wine, but I had none; and finally I came to Blainville, where the houses were intact and lived in, but shaking from the concussion of the English guns firing on the other side of the Caen Canal. There I met Madame Tresarieu, who was also going to Caen to see her sisters, and we traveled together. We had not gone 200 yards when we found the road barricaded with coiled wire and a notice reading: ŒMines'.

"We went into the fields, to get around the barricade, and were questioned by some English soldiers. They asked where we were going, and when told, they replied that it was very dangerous. We got back onto the road, and another 200 yards further on found that it was covered by round, black canisters - mines. We lifted our bikes onto our shoulders and stepped very careful over them.

"100 yards ahead was yet another minefield. At chateau of Beauregard, we stopped to tie white handkerchiefs to the handlebars of our bicycles, and went on, pushing the bicycles now, because we thought there might be Germans in the park who would fire on the road. Then we came to a shell-hole in the road, and an area where the telegraph posts and wires were down; and just after that, we had to remount and cycle fast, because shells were passing overhead, though they burst on the other side of the canal.

"And then we came to Herouville, completely evacuated, the houses ruined, with tattered curtains fluttering in the shattered windows. Rounding a corner, we saw some Germans in a lorry, but they paid us not the least attention." In fact, no one questioned them until they reached the square of Saint-Gilles in Caen. "We were halted by a German sentry, who asked us where we were going and then advised us to return that night. Caen itself presented a scene of horror. In the port area, there seemed to be nothing left standing. When we got into the city, we found places where no house stood higher than a yard off the ground; and the entrance to the Rue Arcisee-de-Caumont, where my son was, we found blocked and impassible by the ruins of its houses.

"But eventually I found where Francois had gone to- the Convent of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart-and we were reunited. The house where he had been living was destroyed on June 6th, I learned, and at the school he attended, seven children, a sister, and a teacher had been killed the same day. Madame Tresarieu was not so lucky as I; she found no trace of her relatives."

When Luce Tribulet and her son attempted to leave Caen that night, they were turned back by German units at several different locations, and the same happened the following day, and the next night. They were trapped in Caen and forced to live as two of the many hundreds of refugees in the cathedral of Saint - Etienne. There they endured the devastation of the 2500 tons of bombs dropped on the city, and survived the Allied invasion.

On July 9th, they were free to go home. On one part of their long walk home, Madame Tribulet was to see some of the terrible carnage of the battle that had taken place right along the route that she and her companion had ridden. Dead men and smoking vehicles lay about; the fields were destroyed, and trees and hedges were sheared to nothing but charred stumps. Two weeks before, these hedges bordering the road had been thick enough to completely conceal several German artillery units which were waiting in ambush for the Canadian and English troops, and which had silently watched Madames Tribulet and Tresarieu pass as they made their remarkable way.