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Beyond
Soissons mile after mile of American small ammunition in long boxes, piled
in lots of a hundred boxes or more each, closely flanked the roads. The
towns, rundown, dreary, unrepaired, unpainted, now and then half of them
masses of rubble, contained plenty of husky, youngish men, doing little
except walking with their girls--sturdy, red-cheeked, girls, with no need
for cosmetics. Bicycling and such exertions as wood-gathering, and limited
food, had obviously improved the young women of France physically.
At
"Bombay" the Bristol Hotel (is there a European city without
one?) still had one or two unoccupied officers billets, in other words
aging ordinary French hotel rooms, bidets and all. There was a hint of
heat, actual hot water now and then, sometimes even toilet paper--though
no towels and, of course, being French, no soap. An MP armed to the teeth
manned the reception desk, with orders not to admit women unemployed there.
The electric lights were of course painfully weak but the windows were
covered with those great, ample, thick-velvet draw-curtains common in
Europe and the Luftwaffe's persistent interest in one of our ammunition
dumps, a block beyond the Bristol, made it wise to enforce the blackout.
Strictly
speaking "Bombay" was only the headquarters of the Ninth Bombardment
Division, Ninth Air Force, in--now that it can be told--the ancient city
of Reims (which of course, our American army called "reams"
and thought you were showing off if you pronounced it correctly). It was
a twenty-minute walk from the Bristol, past the front of the famous cathedral
and the rump-like rear of the Carnegie Library--flashlight walk, that
is, for in December Army office hours began before daybreak and ended
after dark, seven usually icy days a week.
There
were half a dozen stone-and-stucco buildings inside the high stone walled
and iron-picket-enclosed Lycée de Reims, founded in 1802, destroyed between
1914 and 1918; reconstructed 1922-6. Madame la Veuve-Pommery lived just
across the street from the front gateway. German headquarters signs were
still painted on most of the doors. Male French civilian employees were
said to have asked, with lascivious smirks, when WACs were first assigned
there, whether they would sunbathe in the courtyards, as the German girls
who once worked there did. There was a French waitress-attended field
officers' mess and a company officers' serve-yourself mess on the ground
floor of a corner building, a bar, densely crowded after office hours,
on the second floor, a hard-benched movie on the third floor. It was within
this establishment that General Eisenhower was to accept the surrender
of the German forces the following May.
The
Petit Lycée, once occupied by the smaller children, now contained the
office of Major General Samuel E. Anderson, commanding general of the
IXth "Bomb Div," and much of his staff, in what had obviously
once been the principal's big office. Perhaps it is symbolic that the
Public Relations Office occupied what had been the kindergarten, its lockers
still adorned with paintings of interest to small children. Here, where
we were to impose upon genial Major Ken LeMaster and smiling Lieutenant
Jack Ballatine, IXth Bomb Div PRO officers, during our first fortnight
of writing, there was for some reason adequate warmth, so rare in Army
offices and billets in Europe, and on those rare days free from the almost
perpetually soupy weather of a French December, ample daylight. But the
French never have learned that even good electric lights high up under
the ceiling are not conducive to reading or, for that matter, to writing.
But this was only a preview; we would be back again for a longer stay.