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David and Audrey Hazzard were finally reunited under a shining summer sky in Normandy, in a place planted to remember love and sacrifice. Between farmers' fields that roll to the sea, near a village called Reviers, the harvest of war is marked by rows of headstones bearing Canadian names.

In September, the daughters of David and Audrey brought their mother's ashes here, and laid her to rest with the man she had loved her entire life.

David did not come home from the war. There was no promised second honeymoon, no chance to get to know his children again, no nightly chats in bed with Audrey's head resting on his shoulder – all the acts of love he had imagined in the many letters he wrote home during his four years away.

Instead, at the age of 35, he was killed in the fight for a piece of land not far from where he now lies, at the turning point of the Second World War.

In a war fought largely by men who were barely out of school, David Hazzard had given up everything to serve his country, leaving his wife and his children, who were too young to truly remember him.

History books describe battles and celebrate heroes. But the ordinary struggles of mourning families last for years, long after fields and flowers have reclaimed the battlegrounds.

He held his marriage together with words, fearing the long years living in military camps would make it hard to go back to his old life. In many ways, his messages home written from a trench in France in 1944 could just as well be those of a Canadian serving in Afghanistan today.

Lieutenant David Kilbourn Hazzard was killed on the afternoon of July 5, 1944, a month after D-Day, on the outskirts of the French village of Carpiquet. He was commanding a carrier platoon, in charge of moving the machine guns and ammunition at the front line.

He and his men were dug in on the western edge of a small, but crucial airfield at Carpiquet, less than 20 kilometres from where the Allies had landed at Juno Beach. Considered key to seizing the nearby city of Caen and, from there, marching into Paris, the airfield was supposed to have been taken on D-Day. Now it was four weeks later, British and Canadian casualties had reached 25,000 men, and the Allied invasion was stalled. It had rained nearly every day since the Canadians landed in France. The mud had clogged up artillery, with low clouds making it hard for pilots to hit their targets, and a major storm in late June had delayed the arrival of supplies from England.

Now David's regiment, the storied Queen's Own Rifles, was waiting for its next orders, the men crouched low under an incessant shower of German mortars and machine gun fire. They had been there for more than 24 hours, trapped in open country with little protection. The pounding explosions made sleep impossible and they would be battle-weary going into the fight. A helmet bobbed too high – a cough or sneeze carried in the wind – could draw enemy fire.

In the trenches, a soldier felt safer pressed up against the cold soil. But the Germans, well hidden in bunkers around the airport, had their dreaded 88's – the best gun of the war, it was said. Its shells could explode over a trench, and splatter shrapnel down like a rainstorm. They travelled faster than the speed of sound; not even a whistle announced their arrival.

The Nebelwerfer rocket – nicknamed the “Moaning Minnie” by Allied troops – was another infantryman's nightmare, shrieking across the sky and landing unpredictably to send shards of hot steel in every direction.

One attempt to take the airport had already been called off when the Germans threatened an attack to the north of Carpiquet. The second attempt was set for July 4: The Queen's Own were to follow a route cleared by Quebec's famed Le Régiment de la Chaudière and the North Shore Regiment from New Brunswick through the sprawling village, and seize the control buildings at the airfield.

At 5 a.m., 500 Allied guns began firing, shaking the ground across no man's land, and burning up the wheat fields. Soon after, the infantry sprinted across the open ground, taking care not to be caught in the crossfire. The Germans fired back with force. Thick, choking smoke from the explosions and the scorched ground made it hard to see or breathe, and only men with compasses could guarantee they were headed in the right direction. The Moaning Minnies screamed in the grey sky overhead. Soldiers rammed the rifles of fallen men into the soil – grisly markers in the smoke for the medics who would follow.

As the North Shore and the Chaudières charged into the village, the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, fighting on the south side of the airfield, were being cut down by mortar fire and hidden tanks. They could not take their target, the southern hangers, despite two brave attempts. With the buildings still in German hands, the full assault by the QOR was deemed too risky to continue.

The soldiers on the edge of the airfield were ordered to hunker down and wait.

The shelling was pretty heavy but Dave never showed the least sign of being nervous. He was just as calm as if he had been in his own back yard. He was always trying to cheer the rest of us up and just seeing the quiet cool way he took things was enough to give us a lift.

Rifleman Lloyd Mayhew, as told to David's brother, Smith Hazzard, in October 1944

The infantry had a saying in Normandy: “Dig or Die.”

On the western fringe of Carpiquet, David's platoon split up, two men to a trench. He paired with Lloyd (Shorty) Mayhew, an affable, 23-year-old rifleman, with a wife and son back home.

Even with their age difference the two had a lot in common – a modest background, families waiting for them. Lloyd was from Gananoque, 50 kilometres southwest of Brockville, where David had grown up. Both had been determined to see action: David, despite his age and a bum knee that could have kept him safely in England; Lloyd, who had enlisted as soon as his son was born. And they both knew how to handle a gun – David had regularly won trophies at rifle competitions, and Lloyd had grown up hunting.

Many of the men in his platoon had known David when he was still a sergeant with the Queen's Own. Lloyd liked the fact that he still encouraged them to call him “Dave.”

“That's how he wanted it,” he later told Smith Hazzard, David's brother, “and that's how it was.”

David had the higher rank, but he was relatively new to the battlefield; landing in France a week after D-Day, he had been assigned at first to the division headquarters and sent to the front line only 16 days earlier. Carpiquet was his first major assault.

Lloyd, on the other hand, had come ashore on June 6, racing over bodies and dodging bullets on the beach at Bernières-sur-Mer. He'd watched his own brother-in-law incinerated when his mobile gun carrier was hit. By the time Lloyd found himself in the trench at Carpiquet, he'd seen too much death to seek glory in war. He just wanted to stay alive.

He had to leave me to look after something, and while he was gone a shell landed fairly close. I was really scared and when Dave came back he could see I was pretty shaky. He covered me up in the trench with my gas cape and said, ‘Don't worry, kid, you're alright.'

Lloyd Mayhew

By the eve of the battle at Carpiquet, morale was flagging. The Canadians were about to face the 12th SS Panzer Division, made up largely of Hitler Youth whose motto was: “We were born to die for Germany” – and they knew what they were up against. Six members of the Queen's Own had been found dead in a hay field in June, shot in the head at point-blank range after being taken prisoner.

On the outskirts of Carpiquet, David's platoon had witnessed the fanaticism of the enemy first hand as another group of Canadians attempted to take a German bunker. The enemy soldiers inside refused to surrender and kept up a barrage of gunfire even though they were outnumbered. The Canadians found one of the bunker's air vents and, after a last attempt to secure a surrender, poured gasoline into it, followed by a grenade.

As Lloyd Mayhew described it decades later to his son, the Germans who survived stumbled out on fire. Most were barely 17 years old.

As the leader of his platoon it was David's job to instill calm. He was responsible for keeping his men safe, ensuring the guns were in working order, and maintaining contact with the company commander. He was on call around the clock, so sleep came in fits and starts, and even then it was interrupted by exploding shells.

With the men settled in trenches, he might run back and forth between them, making sure they were dug in deep enough, or shouting out roll calls to check on them. He could assess their mood from their letters home, which he was responsible for censoring, a task that often left little time for writing his own.

Three days before he died, David received a treat from his mother – coffee, which he packed away to share with his platoon. He was always thinking about “the boys” who served under him. He reminded them to write to their moms, cautioned them against gambling their money away, talked them through troubles with sweethearts. A non-smoker, he asked Audrey to send cigarettes for his troops, and suggested she visit their families living around Toronto. Though he appreciated an officer's pay boost and admired the dapper uniform, he still thought the way he had when he enlisted: loyal first to the rank and file.

“He was a good man to follow,” recalls Harry Fox, who is now 94 and fought in Italy with the Queen's Own; he had known David in the militia before the war. “Some men, the only way they can get their ideas across is to shout and holler. Dave wasn't that type. He was a gentleman.”

That's perhaps why, when David stepped back into the trench after attending to an errand as platoon commander, he took one look at the young riflemen nervously working away at the trench floor, and reached out his hand. “Give me the shovel, kid. You look beat.”

Then he said, ‘I guess I'll do a little digging.' He picked up the shovel and straightened up to start digging the trench a little deeper. Just as he stood up, a shell burst right on the edge of the trench and the shrapnel caught him full force. He fell right back in my arms and all he said was ‘I've had it,' and he was gone.

Lloyd Mayhew

On July 11 – the day after their 10th wedding anniversary – Audrey received the telegram telling her that David was dead. His last letter, written on July 2, wouldn't reach her for several more weeks.

Anne, 9, was upstairs with 6-year-old Karen when the doorbell rang, and her mother screamed, “Noooooo” She can hear it still, she says, beginning to weep as she tells the story.

Like so many wives left alone during the war, Audrey had held her family together. Living with her mother in Mimico, she saw each daughter off to their first day of school, and went to work in an employment office to bring in extra money. She balanced the budget, and knitted socks and sweaters for the troops at the Ladies Auxiliary. In the provincial election, she cast her own vote, and then a second, by proxy, for David. A victory garden was planted in the backyard so the family wouldn't need to buy food that could go to the troops training in Canada.

Each night, she and Nanny, as her mother was called, sat by the radio, listening for war reports, for hints of where David might be. Families swapped news as soon as any mail came. She learned he was in France only at the very end of June; his letters until then had suggested he would remain in England, deemed too old for battle, a fate she prayed would be true. And then, suddenly, he was dead.

When the telegram came, Anne remembers, it was Nanny who came upstairs to gently break the news to the girls. Soon friends began arriving to offer condolences. Grief had to be tempered because everyone was grieving. They didn't have a funeral – there was no body to bury, and there were already too many dead men to mourn each separately.

After that first, horrible night, Audrey didn't cry again in front of her daughters. They understood that she was sad, but felt the loss in only an abstract way: It had been so long since their father had been home.

The war, for them, amounted to staged battles in the playground, stern posters tacked up at the post office – “Loose Lip Sink Ships” – and German prisoners of war in the local jail, who, during supervised walks in town, looked too ordinary to be dangerous. They knew enough to be proud of their father, but not enough to save the short letters that he sent home addressed to them specifically – a childhood carelessness they would regret forever. “We were very young,” says Anne, “and we went on with our lives.”

Audrey struggled to do the same. Years later, she admitted to her daughters that, had they not been there, she's not sure she would have survived. As it was, she stopped eating, and barely slept. She was prone to anemia, and the condition became more severe than ever.

It was almost four months before she learned how David died. In late October, she received a letter from his brother Smith, who had met Lloyd Mayhew in France, and found out the details. At least she knew then that David had died quickly, without suffering.

Later, a letter from David's close friend, Lieut. Robert Rae, revealed that her husband had been buried temporarily in Camilly, a short distance from Carpiquet.

“It may help you to know that a regimental cross with his name has been erected over the grave, and the French people continue to cover all graves with flowers,” he wrote. David “was a grand friend, admired and respected by all who knew him. … I know that you will keep the torch burning.”

In November, Lady Susan Laurence wrote. She and her husband, Roland, and their children had provided a “home away from home” for David in England. They still had some of his things stored in the bedroom where he slept when he visited, and she was sending the items home to Audrey: his photographs, his new brown civilian suit, his new QOR green blazer, his swagger stick. “This letter comes with my love and very real sympathy,” she wrote. “I hope you have some ease from your burden.”

On Dec. 17, Audrey's birthday, she received one last message from David: a bouquet of roses, one for each of her 31 years. He had arranged the delivery before leaving England six months earlier.

At Christmas, despite Audrey's failing health, she and the girls boarded the train to New York to visit David's sister Margaret, who was working for William Stephenson, the infamous spymaster known by the codename Intrepid. While taking her daughters to see Santa Claus at Macy's, Audrey collapsed. She stayed in bed for most of the rest of the trip.

Slowly, she began to put her life back together.

With the pension the army sent her after David died, she bought a larger house down the street, on the shore of Lake Ontario, and rented out the upstairs apartment. She quit her job at the employment office, and took a teaching job at one-third the salary, so she could be home with her daughters after classes ended. An elementary school teacher for more than 30 years, she left such a mark on her students that some invited her to their weddings and brought their babies for visits. “She set me on the right path,” recalls Janet MacDowell, 58, who was Audrey's student in the mid 50s. “She was very much a lady. It was a true calling for her to be a teacher.”

She stayed heavily involved in her church, teaching Sunday school and serving on the board; a few years after the war, she helped to unveil a stained glass window in honour of the men who died. But she refused to attend Remembrance Day services. “I don't need just one day to remember,” she said.

Audrey had always been the shy, quiet one compared to the bolder, more gregarious David. But without him, her daughters say, she forced herself to be more daring, to take new chances. “My instinct is to say no,” she would tell them, when they asked permission to go on one adventure or another. “But your father would have said yes.”

As Karen proudly describes her, Audrey became more liberal in her views of the world than most of her generation – supportive of gay rights and pro-choice, always encouraging her daughters to follow their own paths. Both family and friends remember her generosity – Karen, who took her mother out for lunch every Saturday, once watched her give a necklace to a waitress who admired it.

In his letters, David imagined the two of them travelling together – touring the English countryside, exploring castles, wandering through Westminster Abbey. And Audrey followed through, making the trips with family or friends. On school breaks, she flew off to the places he'd mentioned in England and France, and then to more exotic spots – the Greek Islands, Hong Kong, Thailand. Over the years, she made three visits to his grave in France, the last time with Margaret in 1984. By then, she was a grandmother, but she still wept, standing at his headstone.

“She made a good life,” says Anne, on a July afternoon, poring over old pictures with her sister in the basement of her Pickering home.

“It just wasn't the life she wanted,” Karen adds.

Audrey never expressed interest in remarrying. As far as her daughters know, she went on only two dates, and only many years after David died.

“There wasn't anyone else. She said, ‘If you have found the best, why bother?” Karen remembers. “He was the love of her life. And losing him was unbelievably tragic.”

I wanted to write to thank you for the news, received through you, of my beloved son David. To thank you too, for the tribute you have paid to the fineness of his character. He was a grand boy, always kind, happy and good-natured. It is hard to realize that he will not be back …, but Heaven does not seem so far away since he and my loved husband are there.

Alice Hazzard, David's mother, in a letter to Lloyd Mayhew, Nov. 5, 1944

Lloyd Mayhew, who died in 1983, received a letter from Alice Hazzard, but they never met. On certain Sunday evenings, says his widow, Harriet, Lloyd would get in his car, drive from Gananoque to Brockville, and pass Mrs. Hazzard's house. But he couldn't bring himself to go in. “I cannot talk to her,” he explained to Harriet. “I cannot tell a mother what I saw.”

It was hard enough to think of it himself. When the German shell exploded, he had reached out to grab David as he fell. But there was barely a body left to catch.

“Get out, get out of there, kid,” he heard muffled voices call to him. “He's dead. It's too late for him.”

Lloyd passed out, and woke up a week later in a field tent with a bandage on his head and his vision so blurry that he couldn't write his own letter to tell his wife he was safe.

He never went back to the front, serving out the war in a military post office. In 1945, He returned to Gananoque. With Harriet, he raised three children and watched them marry and have kids of their own, but he was never the same after the war, she says.

He was prone to mood swings and headaches. Some nights in bed, he would ramble about the things he had seen in France, unable to hold it in.

And always, especially on Christmas Eve, says his son, Warren, Lloyd Mayhew talked about David Hazzard.

“If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be alive,” Lloyd would say. “A split second made all the difference.”

I wonder just what coming home will be like. I almost feel shy at the prospect of meeting the two young ladies as I sometimes feel that I've lost touch with them …

David, in a letter home, January 18, 1944

Audrey was 90 when she died in 2004, with her daughters at her bedside, singing old hymns. They buried her with her parents in Toronto's Park Lawn Cemetery. But they saved a part of her ashes in order to grant her final wish.

In September, they came here to the Beny-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery, with its stone monuments and tidy hedges, now carefully tended by the villagers of Reviers, and placed her ashes on her David's grave.

“It's just the waste of it that angers me,” says Karen, surveying the more than 2,000 headstones around them.

“It had to be done,” Anne says softly, thinking of the sacrifice made by her father, and so many others. “Someone had to stop it.”

But the cost to families who are left behind is often neglected in our war stories.

“Every single death is terrible,” says Barney Danson, who trained with David in the Queen's Own Rifles during the war, and later served as Defence Minister under Prime Minister Trudeau. “But I have always felt particularly about the men like David who were older than most of us but had wives and kids.”

Those families had to carry on, while the country celebrated peace.

“We talk about surviving veterans, and those who were killed,” says Mr. Danson, “and yet for each one, there are a whole host of people who were connected to them.”

David Hazzard lies in row 4D, just beyond the shady reach of a tree. Someone has left a poppy at the foot of his grave. His daughters, Anne and Karen, have memories of him, but they're just flashes, they say.

They can't be sure which scenes were experienced, and which were built on stories they were told later – his long arms wrapped around them while he recited The Highwayman at bedtime, being carried on the basket on his bicycle, or, for Anne, the thrill of sitting with him behind the steering wheel while he drove.

And yet, he is alive for them, a male presence in spirit, as Karen put its.

“Because he never left my mother. Ever. Ever.”

They are only just reading his letters now. Audrey kept them carefully folded in their envelopes, in a box in her bedroom closet, even in the last years when she lived with Anne. She occasionally encouraged her daughters to read them. But they worried about opening an old sorrow.

Now they're discovering a story they never knew: how their parents fell in love walking home from a church play, made adventures out of country drives when money was short, and survived their separation by retelling those stories to each other in their letters.

They can see themselves, too, in those pages from the father they barely knew, who nonetheless seemed to know them. Anne, now 73, the serious, studious one, became a nurse, married a minister and raised a family.

Karen, the scamp, a casting director well-known in the Canadian film industry, lives with her tiny dog, Taz, in a cluttered Toronto apartment, and, at 70, needs a moment to remember the current colour of her hair.

In France, they squabble incessantly, Anne whispering hushed apologies for Karen's wisecracks, Karen calling her sister “Anne the Perfect” with undisguised affection, while insulting her driving. But as Anne says later, of their trip, “This was something just the two of us should do.”

They feel that they have given their parents a proper ending, a last chapter to close the story.

“We have put them back together,” Anne says. “They were meant to be together.”

For the inscription on David's headstone, Audrey chose a quotation from the Song of Solomon, the Bible's homage to love:

“Well beloved,” it reads.

“Until the day break and the shadows flee away.”

Erin Anderssen is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

Assistance in gathering information for the Dear Sweetheart series was provided by the Queen's Own Rifles Association in Toronto, Dr. Jeff Noakes, a historian at the Canadian War Museum, the National Archives, and the War Amps.