Six-year-old Marie-Claire Dubois lived on her parents' farm just two miles inland from Omaha Beach. When the fighting reached her village on June 7, 1944, American soldiers stumbled onto her property. They were young, exhausted, many of them not much older than her father. Marie-Claire began gathering wildflowers from the pasture — small yellow buttercups, white clover, purple thistles — and giving one to each soldier who arrived.
An officer named Lieutenant Robert Hayes from Alabama was the first. Marie handed him a buttercup. He knelt, took it, and said: Thank you, little one. She had no idea he had watched his best friend die on the beach a few hours earlier.
Over the next two weeks, Marie-Claire gathered flowers for hundreds of soldiers. She did not stop when shells fell nearby. She did not stop when her parents begged her to come inside. She had made it a mission of her own: everyone who walked across her pasture should leave with a flower.
She continued for three months after the invasion. When the front moved beyond her village, she gave her last flower to a wounded German soldier. Her mother, horrified, asked her: Why would you give a flower to one of them? Marie-Claire replied: He looked sad too.
After the war, one of the soldiers Marie had given a flower to — Robert Hayes — returned to Normandy with his family. He knocked on the Dubois farmhouse door and asked for Marie-Claire. She was then 14. Hayes said: I kept that buttercup pressed in my Bible for three years. I brought you this: a book of pressed flowers from Alabama. She said nothing. She hugged him. Neither spoke for a very long time.