Military History | Abbaye-aux-Hommes — The Marble Tables in the Refectory

A complementary hospital was installed in the refectory of the Lycée Malherbe, inside the conventual buildings of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes at Caen, in the first days after the landings. The plaque now on the wall says it happened the day after 6 June 1944, and it records what the room was used for: civilians wounded in the bombing of the town were carried in and laid out on the marble tables where the school had served its pupils' meals for more than a century.

The abbey was part of what the municipality's passive-defence service designated a sanitary island — the Bon Sauveur hospital, the lycée as its overflow, the church of Saint-Étienne as a reception centre. Joseph Poirier, third deputy mayor and director of passive defence, moved his command post into the parlour on 7 June. On 10 June a contractor, Louis Trouchu, and two of his family painted enormous red crosses on the walls and roofs in red lead; more were laid out on the ground from painted sheet metal, scarlet rags and cut-up geography maps.

How many sheltered here is unsettled, and the counts measure different things: kitchen records covering the abbey, the church and the Palais de Justice give roughly 3,500 into early July and about 8,000 by 9 July, while Poirier's estimate for the lycée alone reached 7,000. No bomb fell on the site. Artillery did, from both sides in turn — Poirier counted fifty-seven shells on the lycée and nineteen on the church, two of them through the spires, and wrote that the gun is blind. That the crosses spared the quarter rests on his own account; the town's guides offer the simpler explanation, that the abbey lay outside the aiming line for the raids on northern Caen. Jean Quellien, who directs the university's nominal census of the civilian dead, has since revised his own figure for Caen from about 2,000 down to 1,100.

The abbey has housed the Hôtel de Ville since 1961. The refectory is the salle d'honneur now, open to visitors, with the plaque on its wall.

📸 Cover: the former refectory of the Lycée Malherbe, today the salle d'honneur of Caen's Hôtel de Ville, photograph by Chabe01, 13 November 2021, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the plaque in that room recording the complementary hospital of June 1944, same photographer and date, CC BY-SA 4.0.