Chapter 22. Our Town, the 95th

Compared to living “on the road” from August to early October anything meant to be “home” might have looked good.  Optimism reigned as we opened our bed rolls, plopped them on our cots and took off for our first walking tour of the 95^th General Hospital in France.  With unseasonably cold weather we were pleased that in August in England our General had ordered all of us to roll up our winter coats and some winter underwear in those bed rolls.  Our Red Cross footlockers should arrive soon, but meanwhile we had to survive with warm outer wear and a change of underwear in our ditty bags, along with our Eisenhower wool pant suits.

Central in our minds was our recreation hall—where was it?  Was it big enough?  Oh, my gosh!  It was a crummy old rectangular elongated shack with an entrance in one end:  Made of graying, old, unfinished lumber on the outside, including the roof, and unfinished as well on the inside including the ceiling.

Just below the outside overhang of the roof was a row of a few half-size windows marching from end to end of the shed-like rectangle.  Once inside I realized my head came up to the bottom of the windows.  There was no proper ceiling, just the cross boards and roof supporting beams completely visible.  No insulation anywhere.  Immediately we named it “The Shanty.”

The Army provided two pot-bellied stoves, complete with old fashioned metal coal buckets for the coal.  The stoves cut the space from the far end to the entrance end into 3 sections.  Upon entering the Shanty, on one’s left was a corner walled room suitable for our Red Cross supplies and a small square of a room suitable for the Social Worker and the Red Cross Secretary.  The door between the office and the supply room provided a way to lock the door to the supply room.

Had there been a picture from the sky, the Shanty would have been about half way between our lodging and the l0-ward concrete building in which the patients were bedded.  Crowded fairly close together, forming a sort of raggedy rectangle, were numerous other concrete buildings that housed the l00 doctors, staff officers, the mess halls, numerous utility buildings, the quarters for our 500 GIs, the GI Club, the Officers Club and the motor pool and its maintenance buildings.

Later when we were assigned 150 German prisoners, their tent city at the far end of the rectangle probably made the overall area close to a mile long.  All this lay in the countryside about three quarters of a mile from town.  Our post was slightly more elevated than the main street of downtown Bar-le-Duc.  Thus it was fun to walk downhill toward the church spires of the village and not so fun to walk back home.

Not that we left our compound very often, especially walking.  Jeep trips were more common, often to bigger towns, by our military personnel who had business at other US military facilities.