159 Stained and weathered the memorial stands forgotten, or perhaps worse, simply unnoticed by the hundreds who pass by each day. The once carefully manicured lavender, shrubs, and trees are now overgrown. Weeds grow where heroes once stood not all that many years ago. Clearly something has changed in the last two decades. Nobody cares for this memorial. Nobody stops here. The monument sits on the edge of the public parking lot at the Carpiquet airport just west of Caen in Normandy. Anyone leaving the airport passes by. It commemorates New Brunswick’s North Shore Regiment, The Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Le Régiment de la Chaudière from Quebec, the Queen’s Own Rifles from Toronto, and the Fort Gary Horse, from Manitoba – regiments that fought here and the nearby Carpiquet village for five days in early July 1944. I was there when the memorial was unveiled fifty years after those grim days in July 1995. There was well over a thousand people in attendance that day. Scores of Canadian veterans, most only in their seventies, were there to remember. They were By John Goheen
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