Carteret is one of the Normandy coastal places where Hans Reiter swims during his regiment’s stay in the region. The rocks offer him a secluded setting for long swims, solitary reading, and thoughts of leaving the battalion behind; the sea becomes both a refuge from military life and the setting for a dangerous encounter with despair.

Setting and Routine

Based in Besneville, Reiter goes out in the mornings carrying his weapons and a rucksack with cheese, bread, and half a bottle of wine. He walks to the coast and chooses a rock well out of sight, swimming and diving naked for hours before stretching out to eat, drink, and reread his copy of Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Carteret is one of the places where he swims, alongside Portbail and the coast near the Ollonde; he does so regardless of the cold.

The routine makes the coast a private counterpoint to the regiment. Reiter brings his military equipment and provisions with him, yet spends the day apart from his unit, absorbed in the water, the rocks, and his book. His repeated visits turn Carteret’s shoreline into a temporary alternative to the organized life of the battalion.

Encounters in the Water

Reiter sometimes watches starfish for as long as he can hold his breath, deciding to touch them only just before surfacing. On another occasion he follows a pair of gobies, identified in his guide as Gobius paganellus, through a dense growth of seaweed. The passage from observation to pursuit ends abruptly: a powerful despair takes hold, and he has to return to the surface before it can drag him down.

That episode complicates the sea’s role as sanctuary. The underwater world draws Reiter into close attention and temporary absorption, but it can also become a place of danger. His rising to the surface marks a physical limit to the escape he seeks in the water.

The Coast as an Imagined Escape

At times Reiter feels so content resting on his damp rock that he thinks he might never rejoin the battalion. More than once, he seriously considers desertion: living as a tramp in Normandy, sheltering in a cave, and surviving on peasants’ charity or small thefts that would go unreported. His imagined future proceeds beyond military discipline toward isolation: he would learn to see in the dark, his clothes would wear to rags, and eventually he would live naked rather than return to Germany.

The fantasy ends with his imagined drowning, which he pictures as joyful. Set beside his earlier need to surface when despair threatened to pull him down, this ending exposes a tension in his longing for escape: the sea suggests freedom from the battalion, but also an ultimate disappearance. The narrative presents Carteret not as a destination Reiter reaches permanently, but as one of the coastal settings in which he repeatedly tests, and imagines crossing, the boundary between belonging to the regiment and abandoning it.