Chapter 20. A Verdun Sunny Day

One morning in the wheat field, with the nurses drilling in the mud nearby,  I was privileged to lie on the outfit’s one spare army cot just outside my tent in the welcome bright late September sun.  I was recuperating from the grippe or from a cold I’d been fighting, and that day I wrote a letter home to a friend.  She saved it and later gave it back to me, affording me some real-time morsels.  It reads:

“I have on:  long (hip length) wool stockings, another pair of wool socks, a ski underwear top, a pair of long wool panties as well as men’s long underwear pants, a wool sweater, a cotton fatigue suit, a full length field coat, and a wool scarf tied around my head, and a blanket over and under…Honest to God I don’t know why war always entails mud a foot deep, rain continually and intense cold.  But “Se la guere!”

Gleaned from the letter also:  “Our tents are near the road, and refugees go and come in all sorts of odd vehicles, heaped high with their belongings all day.  Of course the only gasoline-run vehicles are the Army’s.”

We Red Cross gals were afraid we’d be in the wheat field all winter and at Christmas could not receive the gift packages sent from back home filled with our requests made in Ringwood.  So my letter reads “… if you have time and can, please send me any of the following things:  up to 30 men’s handkerchiefs (cheap ones), as many small 1945 calendars as you can find (for billfolds you know), small nail files and emery boards and any cheap, small dime-store gadgets that could go in a Xmas stocking for nurses or men—another thing is small mirrors, metal ones are the only practical ones.  Send me small hotel size bars of soap if you can get them too.”

After our Ringwood requests had been mailed home to stateside, we had learned more specifically what the GIs usually needed when they came back to the hospital from the front.

In the letter I had also described an interesting day Mary Kate and I had while exploring the hilltops nearby.  “Almost every hilltop has an old fortress built in the late nineteenth century by the French.  Sunday we discovered an Ack-Ack battery on top such a hill.  They were practically on top this outdated old weird hideout with all the latest highly technical electrical equipment of modern warfare.”

The letter continues:  “Our planes are going over again this morning---they’re coming back from the first mission now, and although I swear I’m not going to look, I can’t help it.  Thank God they all seem to be in the formations.  I’m sure to know some of them—and it’s so ghastly when you see holes in the formations.”