I’ve been in Bayeux this week. Not to admire the tapestry but to plant a cross on the grave of Private Thomas Bintley, one of the 4,144 British and Commonwealth servicemen who lie in the immaculate cemetery on the outskirts of the town.
Bintley parachuted into Normandy on the night of 17 August, one of a small team of SAS troops, and three days later he was killed in a skirmish with German troops. A local man was made to dig the Englishman’s grave and while he did so, he later testified, the Waffen SS ‘danced on the corpse of Bintley’.
Having found Bintley’s grave I walked among the forest of white headstones, a rare British pilgrim in a summer unusually quiet for battlefield tourists. A couple of inscriptions caught my eye, such as the one on the headstone of 20-year-old Lt. Peter Manton, MC, of the Royal Armoured Corps:
‘A Splendid Comrade who died that England might live.’
When that generation is gone, I foresee a great change in how we remember our war dead
Not far away lay lance sergeant Harry Cotton, killed on D-Day while serving with the Devonshire Regiment.
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