Off to our port one morning lay a range of high, white cliffs. Just like that. Eleven days at sea and nothing clear to the horizon, and then - this morning - these cliffs. We were so close I could see men and horses plowing green fields way up on top. A smugness stole over me, the same smugness I had felt back in the time of moss-on-the-trees, polydactyly, and the Washington Monument! I knew where we were!

My pals were crowded around me at the rail. Murmurs and speculations ran up and down the ranks. "Where are we?" "What are those hills over there?" "Maybe they have sent us back and that's...home...?" (This latter rather plaintatively from far back in the press). I cleared my throat. It was... show time! I didn't have to wait long. "Where's Powell, goddamit!? Never around when you need him!" Then "Who needs him?" - this too, from back in the ranks. "He's up here," chimed several voices at once. "Up here at the rail!"

All eyes were now on me. "So where are we, professor? Your crystal ball working today?" I waited till the hubbub died down a bit. Then I said, "Gentlemen! Those there are the Chalk Cliffs of Dover! Dover England! We are in the English Channel!"

There was no agreement - but (importantly) no disagreement. Just open, staring eyes fixed alternatively on me and then the cliffs. Then (I was ready for this) : "How do you know that, Powell? You ever been here or what?" This never failed to piss me off - the implied suspicion I was just an imposter. A poseur if you like. So I said, "The same ones the bluebirds are over - like in the song!" (This was from a popular song of WWII). "Them's seagulls," someone growled. "Ain't no bluebirds out here on the water."

As usual this pushed me to the brink, so I said, "Listen you knuckleheads! What the hell else could they be? We left New York eleven days ago. We sailed out across the North Atlantic toward Europe. Now the first thing we see is prominent, high white chalky-looking cliffs off to our port side - to the north. We have to be in the English Channel is all and I'm taking 1 to 5 those are the Chalk Cliffs of Dover!"

No takers.

They were coming around. So I played my trump: "And that long, low, blue smudge way off to starboard will be the coast of France!" About half the party crossed over to starboard to gawk. "Gawd Amighty!" said a few. The professor is right again...

We disembarked at Le Havre at night. It was a stage-set to disturb even the most callow of youths… Though France had been liberated many months, High Command decided everything should be done only in the dark. (At night I mean – the real dark). We poured out of that troop ship on the double like ants out of a nest when you kick it! Since there was no harbor anymore we ran over long floating metal cofferdams of some kind – slippery and wave washed, with big boltheads sticking up to trip you. I thought of the troops before us who had assembled these under the withering fire of D-Day… Omaha Beach lay maybe 50 airline miles west of us; Juno where the Canadians went in, a mere 25. No one knew what the rush was! The war was just over! I was hurting because I had all these extra boots you see – I think it was nearly a dozen pairs because my feet were so big back then the Quartermaster could not guarantee boots for me so held me back from going to Japan with my buddies I trained with, till they had enough – a whole extra duffle bag of Size 14 combat boots – then sent me to Germany with a lot of criminal strangers and Pennsylvania coal-crackers and sich like trash… LOL! Now, sixty odd years later I find myself wondering if Ivy Lee Johnson ever found anyone else to write letters home to his Mama in the Mississippi Swamps. Maybe he learned to read and write all by himself. Funny how things like that come back to haunt you in Old Age. Million laughs, right?

Anyhow we piled into trucks and they took us up to Camp Phillip Morris – a vast city of 8-man tents on the muddy frozen heights behind Le Havre – smack dab in the middle of a onetime battlefield. There was mud and dead and broken things and French urchins underfoot everywhere you stepped. Jesus, what a place that was! There was a Camp Chesterfield too – some miles further on – the whole place was ringed with the US “cigarette camps” as they were called back then: the object being to dump every last draftee scraped up in the US down on the lucky French as fast as they could.

My squad filed into one of the tents, someone started a fire in the stove and we all flopped down in the bunks with every stitch we could find on: it was freezing cold. The next thing I knew it was morning, and there were three or four guys standing around my bunk in a circle with a little French guy, cap in hand, they had "brought in" from a road outside. I pulled the blankets up to my chin and mumbled, "What the f*&^ you guys want?"

"Listen, Powell... You know this lingo (I had had about one year in French in highschool, which they somehow had figured out or maybe I had likely boasted of same... I dunno), so ask this guy who he is and what is the deal around here."

I was "on", I could see that.

I looked square into the Frenchie's eyes and then I said, "Parle vous Francois, Monsieur?" (I had asked a Frenchman if he spoke French...!). The little guys eyes bugged out! I could read it in his face: Americans were all nuts, but we had to be the nuttiest of all: asking a man if he spoke his native tongue!

Since I couldn't understand what he then said - if he said anything - and I didn't know how to say anything else - I just pulled the blanket over my face! My biggest career performance ever - all eyes on me! - and I blew it... After that my standing as "group interpreter" took somewhat of a hit, but I still held my (crooked) crown because after all, no one else knew any languages at all! In the land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man etc.

Later that day my squad and I decided to take a stroll and see what France was like. We went down a little cobble road between these steep hedgerows (the same ones that had stopped them cold after D-Day a few months before…). I kicked the ground some and found some German machine gun bullets and a tiny one-man camp stove from some man’s army. Further on was what looked like the flap of a field coat of some kind sticking up out of the dirt… Maybe someone was still wearing it...I decided not to kick anymore around it… (!) We went down a little hillside to a little stream on the other side of which was a quaint little farmhouse like out of a pontillist painting. We were strolling along like a bunch of nitwit tourists. I saw all these tiny, only lightly weathered yellow flags on wires (for all the world like the tiny flags you see today when lawnmowers and pesticide companies work over your greensward…) so I bent down to look at them. Each one had a skull and cross bones on it and in Gothic script it said “Achtung! Minen!”

I said “Hey! Hold up a minute!” “Now what? someone up ahead grumbled. I said, “I am not sure, but I think we are walking through an uncleared minefield!” Then someone called back, “Powell! Whose writing your script these days anyhow? You reading too many of those god damn books all the time.”

“Yeah?” I said … “Well, come look at this yellow flag here, Asshole!” So several guys stopped and came over. There was long silence. “Wheeeeee” said someone. “How do you know?” said a skeptic. “Can you read that stuff?”

“Nope,” I said – “but I think that is German, and I think we are in an uncleared German minefield is what I think!”

“Well, how does it say we should get out?” someone else asked in exasperation.

“They forgot to put that part on the flag”, I said. As it all sunk in everyone kind of bunched up closer together. I said “Bunching doesn’t make it any less likely you won’t step on a mine. Just means if we bunch up we all go together when we go!”

About that time a young girl in a nice looking fur coat came out on the porch of the farmhouse which was just maybe 100 feet away across the stream. We all stopped and stared. And then she opened up the front of her fur coat and pulled it back – and she had nothing on under it! “Jeezul!” someone said, “that must be one of them French whores!”

Someone else said, kinda hopefully….. “Maybe she wants the whole squad to come on over?” “Listen you nitwit: if you or anyone else makes one move in wrong direction here something’s going up alright, but not what you wish – it will be you and all of us… up in the sky!” There seemed general agreement on this.

“What the hell we going to do?” Someone then said – “I tell you what I am going to do I am getting my ass out of this fucking minefield right now! I walked in here and I am walking out!” And he started back up the hill! Now you could see there were little yellow flags everywhere in the grass! And as if by common consent everyone fell in right behind him and everyone stepped in the same spot the guy before him stepped. It didn’t help when someone said they had read the kraut mines counted like six footsteps sometimes and blew on the seventh, and so on…LOL.

Finally we all reached the lane again – in one piece. Whew! The French whore was still watching us from her porch down below. Someone waved but she never waved back. I imagined I could see the disdain on her lips from here: Lez Americans! Bah! Zey are not really men at all… Now eef it had been zee Frenchman there… Voila! Maybe even La Boche… (or maybe KaBoom, I say!). LOL. Wonder about the krauts, too. “Hell!” someone said, “They lay the frigging minefield – you can bet they knew just how to walk through it!”

Next day we were trucked down to the RR station and loaded in the 40/8’s. Know what a “forty and eight” is? These are those antiquated European boxcars you see just like in the movies – the kind they hauled the Jews off to the camps in. And to move everyone’s troops around all over Europe. They got their designation in the First World War – when horses were still a main motive power: on the box car sides it reads “40 hommes/8 chevaux”… 40 men (or) 8 horses. That was their capacity. They were still in use in the 1940’s. This train stretched out of sight with these empty boxcars. But someone in Command I guess couldn’t read French because they loaded us packs and gear and all into these things, not 40, but about 70 or so! We were so tight we could not all sit or lie down at same time: one half at least had to stand at all times – packed in the cold in damp wet wool overcoats…

Away we went! Through miles and miles of bombed out ruins and then out into a rural countryside. Night fell. On and on we went. Chug chug chug. Now and then a mournful whistle blew way off up forward somewhere. Clack clack clack we went through little villages and hamlets. It got colder and colder. When we had started out, the box cars doors shut tight and kept out some of the wind. But nature called, and so we took turns pissing out the door as we sped along through the ravaged French countryside. And eventually the dribbling filled the track the door slid in, and froze solid, so now the door was frozen open!

("What makes the rear-rank breathe so 'ard?" said Files-on-Parade.
"It's bitter cold, it's bitter cold", the Colour-Sergeant said.)

All that night and the next day. Once we stopped and they shoveled in some boxes of K-rations. Our speed was maybe 25 mph tops and often lower than that – sometimes almost a dead crawl. At these times guys would drop off and run out into the fields to relieve themselves. Then run back and swing aboard. Several times though, we hit a downgrade during these toilettes and picked up speed, and some guys never caught up to us again! (I swear this is true!). And up till a few years ago you used to read in papers about a prosperous American-cum-French farmer somewhere on the north plains of France who had died and left “numerous” descendants, his entire farm, etc. These were the desertees and the “lost” who made lives for themselves there and forgot the “good old US of A.” I can’t blame them: a French farm, as pater familias, probably beats Mississippi like Smith & Wesson beats five aces. And those who tripped running with their trousers down around their ankles and got left back around the bend may have been the “lucky ones.” Of such things does fate weave our way in this world…

The fields were full of makeshift graves – all armies – and you could tell who was which by the helmets swaying on the rifle butts…

"What's that that whimpers over'ead?" said Files-on-Parade.
"It's Danny's soul that's passin' now", the Colour-Sergeant said."

Burned planes – theirs and ours stuck out of the ground everywhere and French farmers were busy plowing right up and around them. Once, we came out of a tunnel. Down below was a canal between poplar trees just like you see in paintings and there was a barge in it and bargemen walking along a towpath… and suddenly right into another dark tunnel again – the total effect from black to black altogether like a magic lantern slide show.

After days and nights of this you lost count of what time it was – sleeping standing, lying or held up by others. I remember “coming to” once and I was sitting in the boxcar door looking out on this gorgeous (what I thought) was sunset countryside --- only to soon discover to my consternation it was a sunrise – not sunset! Wow! Another time we stopped for “hot chow”. The mud was nearly knee-deep even in the chow tents and we sat on benches whose seats were just above and parallel with the mud – a ludicrous sight indeed all these “legless” guys sitting at long tables shoveling in the grub…LOL!

One night we stopped in a bombed out darkened freight yard. The snow was falling thick and fast. Outside there was one lone French trackwalker coming down alongside the tracks – with a lantern in his hands. The only speck of light around. “Hey, call that frog over here!” someone said. Catcalls. Whistles. He turned and started toward our car. “Hey, get Bernie up here – he parlays this shit!” (Another illusion they held about me, since I had had about one year of French in highschool and to them this made me the “interpreter” for the outfit.). Pretty soon this little guy gets alongside the door. After the usual Bon jours and all and in the most exasperating and halting way I managed to piece together the following story… He was an “oncle” of some kind and had large family to support. He had had no job and everyone hungry. (Shades of Jean Val Jean and whatever I could recall! Lol). But finally he had gotten this lantern here and this had led to his being hired as night watchman in this place (Where were we anyhow? “Eighty kilometer nord from zee Parissss…”) This I relayed back into the car authoritatively. (Largely because we had not the faintest idea of where on Planet Earth we actually were). There was some more about the “hotel” across the rail yard from us – all burned out and blackened now – and how the “Boche” had done this and everything else bad around these parts…

“Hey, let’s see that light the guy got,” someone in the dark interior of the car said. “Let’s see that lantern he so proud of,” someone passed along and calling him close with promise of cigarettes and chocolate about a dozen arms reached out simultaneously and the lantern and its flame and warmth disappeared into our cavernous boxcar! About the same time the long string of cars gave a big jerk – we were moving again! Picking up speed. The little Frenchman ran alongside … Monsieurs!! Monsieurs! He was pleading …wanted his light back. But he was soon lost in the snow behind us. And that lantern became the official property of the Third platoon of some nameless outfit I no longer remember - and soon into its tiny circle of light on the straw covered boxcar floor someone was dealing a round of stud….LOL

We crossed the Rhine one day near Saarbrucken as I remember: by then they had patched up a bridge of sorts. The 78th Lightning Division which I was later assigned to as an infantry replacement had been the first across the Rhine in fact – at the Remagen bridgehead in fact – but of this I could not know then. The train stopped briefly and we were swarmed by a much different populace: our first Germans – smoking hooked pipes with little caps over the bowls and the houses all had storks standing in nests by the chimneys.

Welkommen, Soldat … hier gibst dem Vaterland!

Two days yet further yet into Germany, to the fairy book city of Marburg, where my first duty was cleaning latrines since I had “overslept” the sergeant said.. Next day I was promoted: down to help maintain order outside the big tents by the river where they were spraying all the “Polacks, Italians, and “DP’s” (displaced persons) with clouds of DDT to prevent the plague…).

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