Chapter 15. Paris Much Later

It was a looong night indeed!  Who could sleep, worrying that if you dozed off, you’d lift your head off the table?  Only occasionally did we hear a single gunshot or two, but that was plenty to keep us alert the first night.  With the light of dawn there was no sound of the Boche.  And we weren’t moving!  We must be there!!  But no, we were in the country, farmland and no apple orchards.  Then we learned that the German saboteurs had blown up the tracks a few miles ahead of us and we had taken a detour.

Back to our train car, you can imagine the hubbub and accompanying problems with one toilet and 115 women!  And what was for breakfast?  No sign of food.  By mid-morning, though, and for the rest of our journey, we lived on delicious French bread and red wine.  During daylight hours peasant women came out of the fields with a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine which they handed us through our opened up windows whenever we halted.

With the morning light each morning, the warm fall weather allowed us to keep the windows open.  That was a great help in diluting the odor of wine, wine, wine, now added to the aroma in the car.

Much of the time the train stood still, occasionally having reached a small rural train stop.  Then we would start chug-chugging but soon would stop again in the middle of a farm field.  Only the train engineer, I presume, knew where we were.  One full day and night passed, then about mid-day the second day, as I recall, we pulled into a sizeable railroad station where there were stacks of boxes of K-rations which we thought had been destined for Patton.  Apparently our General ordered our GIs to help themselves, so they grabbed enough for each of us in the 95^th to have a K-ration feast that afternoon.

As dawn broke the third day we were in a city!  Must be Paris.  No, it was Chartres.  We could see the two famous unmatched Cathedral towers.  Fairly early that morning we had orders to detrain.  The General had arranged with the Mayor of Chartres that our entire 700 or so 95^th personnel could march through the streets directly to the Cathedral where they would lock the doors.

Clean air to breathe; aching muscles to stretch!  Of course we were overjoyed.  Inside the Cathedral the first sight was disappointing.  The gorgeous blue stained glass windows were completely boarded up; but the less precious ones brought in exquisite light.  I remember only one person in attendance, an elderly maintenance man.  Fortunately he was excited and eager to be a guide that day, able to tell us and show us his beloved wonders throughout the immense cathedral.  We, just a few of us, stuck with him most of the day, barely able to communicate, he in French and we with pantomime and a few recalled French words from French classes.  We talked about the meanings of the different sections of the architecture and stories portrayed by sculptures and glass including in bays, crossing, treasures, about history as told in windows, and in different levels of the building.

Most memorable to me was the very deepest small area we climbed down to see.  It was, he described, a completely bottomless well.  I think we dropped something in.  Sure enough, way, way down we heard a sound that suggested the object hit something, and then no more sound.

The pantomime of the guide suggested that ancient people had been punished by being pushed in, that a village had begun there, fortifications ,defeats and survivals and finally in the Middle Ages the start of the Cathedral on the spot.  Many years later, when I had learned to speak a little French and returned to Chartres Cathedral, I took a tour with an English-speaking guide.  When I asked about that bottomless well he looked at me as if I were totally nuts.  He’d “never heard of such a thing!”

After dark we marched back to our cozy train ride and set off again for Paris.  We were starting the 4^th night to be followed by the 4^th day on a train trip that today takes less than an hour.