Normandy is both a military posting and a place of imagined escape in Hans Reiter’s wartime story. After the 79th Infantry Division crosses the Maginot Line and takes part in the siege of French forces near Nancy, it is quartered in Normandy; from there Reiter repeatedly goes to the coast, where immersion in the sea gives shape to his desire to abandon the war and never return to Germany.

Military Posting

The division’s passage through France is recounted with deliberate restraint: the western front offers little that the narrative calls epic. In June, after the Somme offensive, the 79th crosses the Maginot Line with few surprises and participates in the siege of several thousand French soldiers near Nancy. It is then quartered in Normandy, where Reiter’s battalion is based in Besneville.

Normandy is not a lasting home. When all leave is abruptly canceled, Reiter’s battalion joins two other battalions of the 310th Regiment at an eastbound military train. The movement carries the troops through Germany and Hungary before they reach Romania, and Reiter’s battalion is ultimately stationed in the Carpathians. The sudden transfer closes his time on the Norman coast and returns him to the military geography he had been trying, in thought, to escape.

Reiter on the Coast

While stationed at Besneville, Reiter often walks to the coast with weapons and a rucksack holding cheese, bread, and half a bottle of wine. He swims and dives for hours, sometimes from the rocks at Portbail near the Ollonde, sometimes from the rocks north of Carteret. Away from view, he stretches out on the rock to eat, drink, and reread Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region.

The sea draws him into close attention to its small forms of life. Reiter watches starfish underwater, waiting until his breath is nearly spent before touching them. On another occasion, he follows a pair of Gobius paganellus through seaweed. The encounter turns abruptly into despair so powerful that he has to surface; he senses that remaining below would pull him toward the bottom. The coast thus offers release from the battalion, but not uncomplicated peace: the same immersion that absorbs him can become dangerous.

Desertion and Return

On the rock, Reiter sometimes feels so content that he imagines never rejoining his unit. More than once, he seriously considers desertion: living as a tramp in Normandy, finding a cave, relying on peasants’ charity or small thefts, and eventually living naked. In this fantasy he would learn to see in the dark, never return to Germany, and one day drown in joy. These are imagined possibilities, not actions he carries out.

The contrast between the imagined life and the actual posting is stark. Reiter’s coastal solitude gives him a temporary alternative to military discipline, but the battalion’s eastward transfer ends that interval. Once he is stationed in the Carpathians, far from the sea, he gives up the idea of deserting for the moment.

Narrative Significance

Normandy’s importance lies less in a decisive battle than in the interval it makes possible. The account moves from the division’s summarized military progress to recurring scenes of Reiter’s solitary swims and reading, giving the coast a repeated place in his experience rather than treating it as a single excursion. In these returns, the sea becomes a counterpoint to the regiment: a space of chosen solitude that promises escape, while its depth also carries the possibility of being overwhelmed.

That tension anticipates the abrupt end of Reiter’s time there. His desire to disappear into a life outside the army remains a fantasy, and the orders canceling leave redirect the story eastward. Normandy is therefore both an actual posting and a brief imagined elsewhere, a place where Reiter can conceive of refusing the course laid out for him before military movement resumes.