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For Memorial Day: 'The luck of the draw'

By Rose Hooper
Editor's Note: In observance of Memorial Day, Monday, May 29, Hoyle submitted the following article he'd written for the Golden Age writing club.

I have no thought of winning the lottery, because I do not play. Poker or blackjack is my game, where I can hold the cards and have a little say in the draw.

The thought of a windfall will have to suffice for the fulfillment of a dream to return to France and retrace the trip łUncle Sam" financed in 1944.

The route is traced on a map of France I bought before I came home. It's one of my prized souvenirs of the war, tracing the journey from St Lo to Worms, Germany, on the bank of the Rhine River. I did not find a map of southern Germany, but the journey extended from Worms to Salzburg, Austria, before the armistice was signed.

I will visit the hedge rows west of St Lo and have no fear of what lies behind each one. The cattle and horses will graze the green pastures, not lie in bloated hulks, legs sticking stiffly in the air and green flies buzzing around. Flowers will be blooming and their aroma lofting on the breeze where once the stench of rotting flesh and the acrid smell of burned gunpowder filled the air.

I'll climb the steep steps to the belfry of the village church and look over a peaceful countryside and hear the song of the birds instead of the boom of distant guns. I'll stop at the bar and pay for a bottle of wine, where we once found a 50­gallon barrel on a shelf. We opened the spigot and let it run, filling canteens and 5-gallon cans until the barrel was dry.

I want to see the crossroads where we encountered a German convoy, it ran headlong into our ambush. Several Germans were killed and many wounded. We captured about a 150 of the German soldiers and sent them to the rear on trucks.

Near LeMans there's a country lane that looks like a tunnel, tall trees line each side for a quarter mile, at the end of the straight a sharp curve turns left. Once a command car, a few yards in front of me, was blown to bits as it reached the curve. I would like to look peaceably around that curve.

The Peroy Forest must be a quiet, peaceful place now. My memory of it is a place of bursting mortar shells, zinging shrapnel and falling limbs, the hell of war.

Fort Manenviller is on a mountain top east of Lunneville. I want to ride up there to see if the rain has stopped. The view from the top is spectacular, not unlike the view from the mountains of home, not as high, but the countryside and hills of much of Alsace-Lorraine can be seen. I once lived in a hole on the east side of the fort for a month. The mire from tank traffic, reached to our boot tops. Shoes and clothes stayed caked with mud. Damp bedding was the norm. The only hope I had was in the view, when the weather cleared I could see Zwibrucken, Germany, through a scope, fifty miles away.

This area of Europe has been fought over so many times the natives speak both French and German, occupied by first one then the other. The rolling hills and the quaint villages bespeak a peaceful community when outsiders leave them alone. I will sit by their coke fires in winter and remember another day when the temperature was below zero and I hid in a shell crater with no cover, the ground frozen too hard to dig a foxhole.

There's much more to beckon me back, but I'm afraid the luck of the draw is out of my reach. I'll spend Memorial Day remembering and telling others how it was, for the ones who didn't make it back. May their names, deeds and sacrifice never be forgotten.

Back to Archive: 05/25/00.