STANDING in front of Lingvres church in the warm May sunshine. Birds tweedle happily in the trees; cows munch contentedly in the field.

It's an ancient church, creamy-white - the sort of shade you only find in a paint colour chart. But it's not quite right. The mortar lines are too straight and the creamy-white stones are too uniform, too square.

"Last time I was here," says a Durham Light Infantry veteran returning 60 years on to Normandy, "there were dead bodies piled up against the church. And the roof was full of holes."

The feet of the DLI D-Day veterans crunch on the fridge-white pebbles as they march to lay their wreath.

There are five of them in the sunshine. The Last Post drowns out the birds' tweedling. In the small field where the cows munch contentedly, 248 Durhams were casualties - 32 of them, including their commanding officer, killed - in 90 minutes.

"We shall remember them," croak the vets, each 80-plus.

I look at them and marvel. I marvel at their survival. Not just in beating the beaches and the war, but in avoiding roadkill or cancer to reach where they are. I marvel at their differences, at how fate tossed them together. From the man who admits to having been "a bad soldier" through to the major, the professional soldier. The "bad soldier" leans against his stick. No regimental blazer, he wears beige slacks. The major, though, is in beret and badge and unaided and upright after all these years. He almost enjoyed the war: the tactics, the man-motivation, the discipline, the equipment...

Inbetween, a farmer, a shop-keeper and a brickie. They did what had to be done and prayed that they got lucky.

I marvel that they did. If you stay with The Northern Echo next week, you'll meet most of them and learn how they did.

I marvel at their bravery. For instance, Stan Hollis, the Green Howard, the Middlesbrough man who won the only Victoria Cross awarded on D-Day, ran 20 yards at a pill-box spewing fire at him so that he could destroy the box and the Germans inside. But is that bravery? Or foolhardy stupidity? What would his mum have said?

And, in the sunshine, I wonder, inevitably, about myself and what I would have managed in similar circumstances.

But, I hope, it's a pointless wonder. D-Day was, probably, the last of the First World War-style battles where life was cheap. The Allies won because they were brave - or foolhardy - enough to throw wave after wave of men at the guns in the knowledge that numerical supremacy would, eventually, win through.

Modern life, modern education, modern media wouldn't allow a repeat slaughter. So many bodybags would destroy any politician who came up with such a crazy idea - which is why we invaded Iraq by sending planes from a continent away to bomb from tens of thousands of feet. A year-and-a-half after the invasion of Iraq, the Coalition has committed over 200,000 troops but lost just 900; on D-Day alone, the Allies landed 140,000, of which 10,000 were casualties.

Standing in the sunshine outside Lingvres church with the scene of the DLI's most bloody day at my back and the survivors before me, I wonder whether we've progressed so that life is now too precious to be frittered away on a battlefield. But then I remember that our 'precision bombing' from tens of thousands of feet has killed about 10,000 Iraqi civilians, and it is only the value of Western lives that has increased during the intervening generations.