Besneville is the Normandy town where Hans Reiter’s battalion was stationed during his regiment’s stay in the region. It is the point of departure for a period in which Reiter repeatedly left military routine behind to seek the coast, and it marks the contrast between his solitary life near the sea and his later posting in the Carpathians.

Setting and Reiter’s Coastal Routine

Based in Besneville, Reiter went out in the mornings carrying his weapons and a rucksack with cheese, bread, and half a bottle of wine. He walked to the coast, chose a rock away from view, and spent hours swimming and diving before stretching out to eat, drink, and reread Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. His excursions made the town less a destination in itself than the military base from which he could reach a private world beyond the battalion.

The coast offered Reiter both close observation and a powerful sense of danger. He watched starfish underwater and once followed two gobies through seaweed, but a sudden despair made him surface before it could pull him farther down. At other times, resting on the rock, he considered abandoning the battalion to live as a tramp in Normandy. These recurring thoughts show how Besneville’s location enabled an imagined escape: the military town remained close behind him, while the shoreline made a life outside its order seem briefly possible.

Departure and Narrative Significance

That interval ended when all leave was canceled without warning. Reiter’s battalion joined two others of the 310th Regiment, and the troops traveled east by military train, passing through Germany and Hungary before reaching Romania, the division’s new posting. The departure removed Reiter from the coast and from the daily routine he had built around swimming, reading, and solitude.

Besneville therefore anchors a short but consequential contrast in Reiter’s wartime life. In Normandy, the sea and its secluded rocks repeatedly drew him toward an imagined desertion; after the transfer, he lived far from the sea in the Carpathians and gave up the idea, at least for the time being. The town’s significance lies in this change of setting: it is the base from which escape seemed imaginable, and the place Reiter left when military orders carried him east.