ST. LO, France -- Even without the falling rain, there wouldn't have been a dry cheek along the Rue du Neubourg.
Men of the 29th Infantry Divisions -- aged comrades with aches and pains and old memories of fighting their way through the fields of Normandy to liberate this town from the Germans half a century ago -- are heroes again.
The 29ers parade past children clutching red and white and blue carnations. Past mothers cheering and fathers clapping. Past a new bride, still dressed in her white gown, smiling. Past two elderly Frenchmen standing side by side, tears rolling into the wrinkles of their red faces.
The 29ers have returned.
And St. Lo, the town of 25,000 people that D-Day almost erased from the face of France, expresses its gratitude in an outpouring of affection for the liberators who paid the price along with their parents and grandparents.
"I'm satisfied now," says Mervin "Buddy" Coblenzer of Pikesville, who landed with the Maryland-Virginia 29th Infantry Division on Omaha Beach June 6, 1944, and who, 42 days later, lay wounded beneath a bridge on the outskirts of St. Lo as the enemy retreated.
"For years you think about all this, but you don't talk about it," says Mr. Coblenzer. He stands between two tour buses that will carry him and the other 29ers to a banquet the town is throwing for victors of D-Day. The parade, complete with a military band and a company of French World War II buffs dressed as GIs, is just the beginning. "I'm with my peers, and I'm fine," Mr. Coblenzer says.
Veterans are pouring into France for what some are calling "Operation Friendly Invasion." No one can say precisely how many veterans are showing up, but it's hard to cross a street without bumping into someone with either an American or a British accent.
Although thousands of vets and dignitaries from North America and Europe will mark the 50th anniversary of D-Day today on the bluffs overlooking the beaches where the invasion force landed, for some 29ers like Mr. Coblenzer, there's more to this pilgrimage than remembering only June 6.
Four days before the St. Lo parade, the 29ers are on buses heading west from Paris. A passenger mentions that they are entering the famous farming section of Normandy, where thick hedgerows serve as barriers in the expansive checkerboard of fields. This is where soldiers fought desperately for every yard of ground. Many died and more -- including some of the men on the buses -- were wounded.
Some of the men stare stoically at the seat in front of them. One man drops his head between his palms. The bus, noisy with chatter moments before, is suddenly quiet.
In all, the 29ers, their families and a clutch of reporters number 480.
The group fills 10 tour buses, and when the caravan bounces along the narrow Normandy roads, the site of them turns heads everywhere.
The French seem to know instinctively that the gray-haired men looking at them through the rain-streaked bus windows are American war veterans.
In the pretty town of St. James, for instance, pedestrians pause on the sidewalks to smile at the visitors. Women lean out of second-story windows and wave their arms.
4,410 graves
Two days before the 29ers arrived, 2,000 French school children were brought to the American cemetery outside St. James, where they stuck little U.S. and French flags into the manicured lawn, a pair of flags for each of the 4,410 graves.
Then they released 4,000 pigeons which, the children were told, symbolized the men who died for their freedom.
The pigeons, the children's teachers said, would fly safely to England, whence came those liberators 50 years ago.
At the cemetery the 29ers are greeted by two columns of French veterans holding worn battle pennants, standing as tall as they can even though they are tired with age, too.
George Dabbs, a 29er who served with the 121st Combat Engineers, walks past the Frenchmen and turns to shake their hands. "I did it," he says, "because their free act of giving made me feel very good.'
Dr. Claude Petel, a Frenchman who says he was 16 years old when a GI befriended him in 1944, looked into the 29ers' faces and grabbed hands as they walked by searching for the face of his unforgotten old acquaintance.
"It's possible to see him again?," he asks with a hopeful shrug.
Among the tourists
The caravan leaves the cemetery for the trip's only venture into pure tourism -- a stop at the century-old Mont St. Michel cathedral and village.
The veterans work their way through the streets crowded with students, British tourists and vendors selling T-shirts, post cards and snacks.
William "Buck" Williamson, a 29er out of Virginia Beach, calls the vets "the hearing-aid and walking-cane gang." But some of these old soldiers are in marvelous condition. They climb the steep stone steps vigorously to lookout points. The tidal flats around the mountain island resemble a shimmering desert.
In pairs and groups of three and four, they sit to rest. Their thoughts are still back among the rows of white crosses and Stars of David at the cemetery, and, as teen-agers walk past licking ice cream cones and giggling, the men talk of losing buddies 50 years ago at the edge of some unnamed plot of ground in Normandy or later in neighboring Brittany.
'What was it like?'
As D-Day 1994 draws near and the vets face an increasingly heavy schedule of events, the intrusion into their personal thoughts is relentless and resented.
A return to the sands of Omaha Beach, where many of the men spent the most hideous days of their lives trying to stay alive, has brought a new enemy in the hundreds of journalists trying to record every moment of the return to Normandy. "What was it like? Can you walk over by those rocks?" They are not questions, really, but demands as microphones and camera lenses are aimed into the veterans' faces.
It is not an easy time for many of the old men. They want the world to remember what they did here those many years ago. But they also want time to examine their emotions.
Many of them have never talked about their war experiences before returning to Normandy. They want to cry without feeling ashamed. "I'm not walking over by them damn rocks," mutters one veteran, bracing against a media request.
On another part of the beach, a D-Day survivor stoops to pack some sand into an empty pill vial. "For me and one of my buddies who couldn't make it over here," explains Charles Neighbor, who served in the 29th's devastated 116th Regiment.
Traffic on the narrow coastal roads from St. Laurent to Arromanches begins to back up as war-vintage Jeeps and ambulances -- even a flatbed truck loaded with a Sherman tank -- mix with tour buses and modern cars.
Army-green tents are pitched in small fields, and men dressed in GI garb trample the grass. Some of the ersatz soldiers are veterans. Others are sons of veterans who must feel that wearing an authentic uniform will bring them closer to the real D-Day.
Fifteen C-47s, the planes that dropped the paratroopers into France, fly overhead in a staggered formation. They make another low pass and another. The engines shake the ground.
This is big sky country. But the sky is bruised with endless dark clouds that spit rain every half-hour. The fields are a deep green. The soil is rich brown. A single footstep turns the ground to mud. Cows the size of mini-vans mind their own cuds.
A stubborn siege
It took the Americans more than a month to capture St. Lo from the Germans. It was supposed to take about a week.
The Germans were stubborn, and the GIs -- particularly the 29th Division -- met heavy resistance. As they went through the process of pushing the Germans back, nearly the entire ancient city was reduced to rubble. The French still call it "the capital of ruins."
Don Buckley, a veteran from California, has come to St. Lo with his three sons. He served with the 35th Division. He stands in the town center watching workers erect a grandstand for veterans to watch a parade.
This is not the St. Lo he saw 50 years ago. The piles of broken stone are gone, and smart shops border the square. New blacktop covers the ground, and the smell of fresh paint is in the air.
"I remember the 29ers," he says. "We relieved a company of them outside St. Lo. They were beat up pretty bad. One of their battalions only had six men left out of 198 men and two officers."
Storefront windows are filled with new merchandise and old war artifacts -- brass shell cases, first-aid kits and GI helmets. Flags of the United States, England, Canada and France flap from nearly every post and window. Loudspeakers play French martial music, Sousa marches and 1940s popular hits.
Not everyone here is pleased with the anniversary hoopla. Sophie Wakeford -- her grandfather was an Englishman -- is a French native who teaches languages at a local private school. She and a friend wanted to steal into St. Lo one night to hang German flags from the downtown lamp posts.
No German flags
But their plan fell apart when they were unable to find any German flags for sale.
She's not a Nazi sympathizer, she is quick to point out. But she disagrees with her government's position that Germany should wait until next year's 50th anniversary of the war's end for German veterans to return to France as official guests.
Besides, she continues, both sides in the war were responsible for the destruction of this old city. "I think American people did as much damage as the Germans," she says emphatically, standing outside a bookstore on St. Lo's windy Rue de Marechal LeClerc.
"Some people say yes, Americans were the liberators. But I feel something missing. All these flags with one missing is not right."
The younger French, says the 30-year-old teacher, do not hold the war or the Nazi atrocities against Germans their age.
"But I told this to my father-in-law, who was a prisoner of the Nazis," she says, "and he was very upset with me."
Outside St. Lo, the buses roar past farms and hills. Suddenly, a small group of farmers steps onto the road and forces a driver to brake. The farmers are excited and want to be let on board.
The driver opens the door and the farmers rush in. They shake hands and pass around bottles of home-brewed Calvados. One of them reminisces about the liberation of St. Lo.
Hubert "Slugger" Williamson, a 72-year-old 29er from Norfolk, Va., begins to weep.
"I was there," he says quietly.