Little of our speculations about our projected trip across France had centered around accommodations. Probably all of us had the preconceived notion that train travel in the States meant simple luxury of some sort. Subconsciously we had expected similar treatment in France. But when we saw the little box cars, we knew with one sudden jolt that we were in for a rough ride.
“It ain’t exactly first class, is it, Lootenant?” asked one man as we stood near a long line of cars waiting to be assigned.
“It’s considered first class for horses,” was all I could reply.
It must have been an incorrigible optimist who devised the theory that 40 men could fit into one of those little French freight wagons. I certainly doubt that he ever tested his theory personally with a ride across the bosom of France from Brest to Luxembourg. I have no data on the manner in which the eight horses could make out, but as for 40 dogfaces, complete with barracks bags, packs, rifles, rations, and miscellaneous gear, I can state without equivocation that the sign “40 Hommes” is a gross exaggeration.
GI humor was at its loud best as we surveyed our transportation and awaited orders to climb aboard. Meanwhile, I checked the rations and water in each of Easy Company’s cars and reported to Battalion that our cars were ready. An officer at Battalion told us to crawl aboard and make ourselves comfortable.
“Are you kidding?” I asked. “Let’s just amend that to read we climb aboard.”
“Well,” said the officer, “comfortable or not you’re stuck with it, so you might as well like it.” He said it with the air of a man who had brought along an air mattress for just such an emergency.
The night was pitch black. There were no lights at the station, and few of us had flashlights. We scrambled aboard somehow and milled around in the darkness trying to get settled, but it was no use. No matter how we tried, we always wound up with several men standing with no place to lie or even sit. Fortunately, almost everybody was in a holiday mood, so that we still could make jokes even as the string of cars with their cramped human burden pulled out of the freight yards.
I bunked with the weapons platoon, a group that remained full of high spirits through the night even though we soon became convinced we were travelling over the roughest roadbed in France. We were jostled interminably around the floor of the car on hard boards that refused to give even the slightest with our weight. When dawn finally came, we met it with bloodshot, sleepy eyes and stiff, aching bodies. They say that soldiers are happy only when they have something to gripe about. If this is true, we were without doubt the world’s happiest troops.
The train made numerous stops. Some were because of bomb damage to the line, others were for refueling, and still others, it seemed to us, simply because the patched, wheezing little engine got tired. At every stop groups of French civilians traded with us —long loaves of French bread in exchange for candy, chewing gum, and cigarettes. Sometimes they also bartered various kinds of wine and cognac, which helped to make our K-ration diet more palatable.
Sanitation was one of our more major problems. Each car carried a large pail which we promptly christened the “honey bucket,” but to designate a pail a latrine and to get the men to use it were two different things. The pail remained unspoiled through the entire trip while the men adjusted to their personal emergencies as best they could. When the train was in motion, the accepted method—when you simply could not wait—was to use the wide, open door with a trusted comrade holding you tight. But for needs requiring more preparation the men generally gritted their teeth until the train stopped. Then a general exodus began from every car, each man with shovel in hand.
Since we could never know how long any stop would be, it took considerable courage to dig a hole and undo your pants. The engineer operating the train obviously took diabolical delight in starting up just at the most crucial times. It became a common sight to see a man running full speed after his car, his shovel in one hand, his pants held up with the other. Cheers and jeers urged him on to greater speed. When he finally reached his goal, helping hands reached out to pull him aboard, and he received an ovation from every car in sight.
Meals aboard the train were less of a problem. We had loaded enough K-rations for the entire journey into each car, and at mealtime we simply doled them out. Though we ate perfunctorily and with little relish, at least we ate. The roadbed all the way from Brittany was strewn with the trash of ration tins and boxes. We had no alternative but to throw them out, for we could not afford to take up space in our cramped quarters with garbage. Though the company kitchens were set up and ready to operate in some of the cars, feeding hot meals proved to be impossible, primarily because we never knew how long we were going to stop and because we had no way of passing between cars. The kitchens did make an effort to provide hot water on occasion so we could make coffee or boullion, but the unscheduled nature of our stops usually precluded even this.
In checking with the kitchen for hot water during one of the stops, I became marooned in the kitchen car. At first I resigned myself to a prolonged, boring wait but soon came to realize that in reality it was considerably less than a hardship. The cooks in the kitchen car were from Company H, my old outfit, and they insisted on preparing me something hot to eat. There was no use protesting! Mess sergeants are a race apart; their kitchens are their domain and their word is unquestioned law. With a typical desire to please, the cooks dug deep into stocks they may have been saving for themselves and came up with a new type C-ration I had not seen. One consisted of spaghetti, another of frankfurters, a third chicken—all made my mouth water after the monotony of K-rations. Though C-rations themselves could become as banal as K’s if you had them all the time, to those of us more accustomed to K-rations, the C’s were a delicacy.
K-rations—God love ‘em—came in three types: breakfast, dinner, and supper. Each was packed inside a cardboard box, heavily waxed to make it waterproof. We burned the boxes whenever possible to heat the rations, but often the situation wouldn’t permit this. Nor could we heat them on the train for fear of setting the wooden freight cars afire.
Breakfast was by far the most popular meal. It contained a can of ham and eggs or pork and egg yolks, four cigarettes, a bar of concentrated dried fruit, soluble coffee, sugar, and hard biscuits. Coffee was one reason the breakfast package was so popular. No one ever understood why the Army did not see fit to put coffee in all three meals.
The dinner ration was the least popular, and justly so. It contained a can of processed cheese, the inevitable hard biscuits, lemonade powder, cigarettes, a roll of malted milk tablets that hardly anyone ever ate, and sometimes a pack of lifesavers.
The supper meal was more popular than the dinner only in the sense that it was less unpopular. Personally, I never minded it too much. When we were able to supplement it with white bread, it made an acceptable meal. Supper was either a can of beef or pork, bouillon powder, cigarettes, candies, the same damned hard biscuits, and—precious commodity—toilet paper.
We always had to supervise handing out the rations, for if left to his own devices, every man would unashamedly take three breakfast rations. That would mean that the man to be fed last— the hapless lieutenant—would get three despised dinner boxes. I saw times during the course of the war when we would reach over and relieve a dead man of his breakfast ration, whereas we would not disturb his dinner or supper.
C-rations came in small round tin cans. Two cans made a meal. But carrying C-rations in combat was awkward because of their shape, which is probably why the Infantry got few of them.
Another ration which made a big hit with us was 10-in-1. This also was boxed, but one big carton contained a full meal for 10 men. The food was better and in greater variety and contained margarine, jam, and powdered eggs. We got this only when it was possible to prepare hot food. The cooks usually prepared this ration and brought it forward in cans.
Prior to our second night on the train we decided on a scientific approach to the problem of finding enough space for everybody to sleep. Before it got dark, everybody got to his feet. Stowing all non-essential equipment in one end of the car we prepared a huge bed by spreading all our blankets on the floor. With infinite care we put several thicknesses of blankets over the roughest boards.
I directed one man to lie in a corner of the car with his face to the wall, then another to lie in the opposite corner so that their feet were together.
“So far,” I thought, “so good.”
One by one I called forward each of the other men to lie with his face toward the back of the man ahead of him. As a neat, orderly pattern of prostrate men began to take shape, I was proud that it was I who had fathered such a scientific approach. But as we neared the far end of the car, I began to have my doubts.
These doubts proved justified. We ran out of floor space, but not out of people. We still had two men left over!
I signaled everyone to his feet again. This time we tried it another way, the men lying head to foot lengthwise in the car. At first, this too looked like the solution, but again when we reached the far end of the car, the result was the same.
Two men left over!
Two more times we tried it, once each way. But each time the same. Two men left over. Somebody then suggested a diagonal approach, but this seemed to offer no real possibility of success— particularly at the corners.
By this time it was dark, and we had no choice but to give up. The solution we had to accept was a rotation system whereby the two men left over acted as guards—not that we really needed guards. Dividing the remaining hours of darkness, we posted a list which showed how long each pair was to stay awake and whom they were to tap when it came their turn to lie down and sleep.
The system was just as uncomfortable in practice as it may sound in the telling. We were so tightly packed that if one man insisted on turning over or otherwise altering his position, everybody else had to follow suit. And the man with the weakest kidneys was invariably the one in the farthest corner from the door. His efforts to find his way to the door inevitably led to much shouting and confusion.
One night of this arrangement was enough to prompt us to try more rehearsals the next day in an effort somehow to find a place for those two men. But to no avail. As a matter of fact, we tried throughout the entire trip, but no matter how much we studied by day, drawing intricate diagrams, practicing time after time, the result was always the same.
Two men left over.
As we lurched along on our uncomfortable way, the scenery provided refreshing changes, from the closely-walled hedgerow country of Brittany to the great open fields of the interior of France where waving grass beckoned from long, gently sloping hills. Picturesque villages, built usually around churches, nestled along rivers or at the foot of the verdant hills. Stretches of open country, patches of forest, gentle rivers, and people who never seemed to tire of waving friendly greetings.
“It sure looks good,” said Sergeant Dixon, “but I’m waiting for this contraption to go through Paris. All my life I’ve wanted to see Paree, and I got a feeling it’s gonna be now.”
“Don’t be crazy,” replied Sergeant Archie Champion. “If this train gets anywhere near Paris, they’ll be looking for the One-Two-One for the next two years.”
I had no way of knowing whether we would go through Paris, but I silently agreed with Sergeant Champion that we would have quite a problem if we did. The results, I could well imagine, would be catastrophic. In fact, even while we were still conjecturing about Paris, our train stopped in the station of a fairly large town, and we had our first AWOL. What made it worse, the man was from my own car.
As we finally learned the story, the man missed the train for a fundamental physical reason. He let a thing called sex get the better of him. The guilty man—who in the end drew less censure than envy from the others—was a little fellow with a long, hard-to-pronounce Polish name that escapes me, but he eventually arrived at our destination by catching the next section of our train, which ran a few hours behind us.
The man’s explanation was fairly simple and easy to believe. He had gotten off the train to stretch his legs and had walked behind the station platform to the latrine. As he emerged, a beautiful (to hear him tell it) mademoiselle accosted him with an offer of an attractive way to spend some of the otherwise useless francs that were bulging his pockets. They retired to the nearest place of rendezvous which was a dark hallway, but in his quest, our hero lost all track of time. By the time he finally completed his business transaction, our train had left. Even though he caught the next train, the episode eventually cost him not only what he had paid the young lady, but two-thirds of his pay for six months.
But he appeared not to mind the punishment.
“It was worth it,” he contorted. “Oo-la-la!”