Portbail is one of the Normandy coastal places where Hans Reiter goes alone during his regiment’s stay in the region. Its rocks provide distance from the battalion and a setting for repeated routines of swimming, reading, eating, and imagining escape.

Setting and Reiter’s Visits

Based with his battalion in Besneville, Reiter walks to the coast in the mornings carrying weapons and a rucksack stocked with cheese, bread, and half a bottle of wine. He swims from the rocks at Portbail, near the Ollonde, as well as from rocks north of Carteret, regardless of the cold. At Portbail he chooses a spot out of sight, swims and dives for hours, then rests on the rock with his provisions and his book, Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region.

Solitude and the Sea

Reiter’s visits turn the coast into a private refuge within the regiment’s military routine. The repeated pattern—walking out, swimming, resting, and reading—makes his time there feel separate from the battalion to which he is expected to return. His attention to the marine life he encounters belongs to this solitary practice: the sea is not simply scenery but the environment around which his temporary withdrawal takes shape.

The Temptation to Leave

The calm he finds on the rocks leads Reiter to consider desertion more than once. He imagines living as a tramp in Normandy, finding a cave, surviving on peasants’ charitable offerings or unreported theft, and eventually never returning to Germany. The fantasy ends with the prospect of drowning, but in his imagining that end is radiant with joy. Portbail thus marks both a temporary retreat and the point from which Reiter pictures a life beyond the regiment, even as the passage leaves that imagined escape unrealized.