7. England

After much delay, during which time we stood in the hot sun with heavy packs and winter uniforms, the Transportation Corps in Greenock finally secured our rail transportation to Camp Stone, England. As commanding officer of our group, I was given the transportation-request sheet, which was the only ticket our group had. When I got my first sight of one of those English trains, I knew my troubles were just beginning. Each train car is divided into several separate compartments, each accommodating about eight men. These compartments are entered by a side door that opens outside the train. There are no intratrain connections between the compartments. I couldn’t figure out how the conductor would ever get through the train to collect our tickets. More annoying than that, I couldn’t see how I would ever be able to keep up with all my men, not being able to see them. Fortunately, the conductor never came through asking for tickets. I suppose the English knew that we were green troops, fresh from the States, who were being taken care of by the proper authorities. Fortunately, too, my troops were so absorbed in the newness of this strange land that it must not have occurred to them to get off the train and wander about. Since I was the only one who knew where we were going, they may have been afraid of getting separated from the main group.

I got my first introduction to wartime restrictions when we got to Glasgow. We had a six-hour stopover there, so we decided to eat supper. The nine of us chaplains went into the station café. Fish was offered for the meat. They had fish soup, fish chowder, fried fish, broiled fish, fish cakes . . . fish any way you might want it, but nothing but fish. So we ordered fish. Just for variety, I decided to order a glass of milk. The waitress politely but firmly informed me that milk was for nursing mothers only.

At ten o’clock that night our train was ready to pull out After some scurrying around, I got all my soldiers located and got all their luggage on the train. Locating the men was no easy task. Even in the short time we had been in Glasgow many of them had already established beachheads with some of the local girls. Some of these girls came to the train to bid farewell to their newly found friends. There was much handshaking, waving, and shouting good-bye in a good old Scotch accent as we pulled out of the station. It was a gala farewell. My troops had conquered Glasgow.

I will never forget that first night on an English train. The nine of us chaplains were in one small compartment. There was no water, no meals, no place to sleep, and no place but the great out-of-doors to answer the other demands of nature. It was utterly impossible to get into a position that even approximated comfort. The best one could hope for was a place to sit, and as the train lurched and jerked, even that wasn’t ajways assured. We had all been tired before we started this mad night ride. During the night we couldn’t sleep and got terribly bored and worn out just looking at each other. If we closed the windows, it became stiflingly hot. The windows had to be open. But when they were, smoke and cinders blew in and the roar of the rails made conversation a pastime for the leather-lunged only.

To add to our pleasure trip, during the night we had to change trains five times. Each change of trains meant a change of our baggage . . . duffel bags, Valpaks, foot lockers, and all. And we usually had only a few minutes to make the change. We really had to hustle.

When we finally made the last change, it was daylight and we were only thirty miles from our destination. When we got all our baggage on this last train, we learned that it would be at least thirty minutes before we left. Every man in our group immediately went to sleep. It was the first chance we had had to sleep since we had debarked from the Queen, and we really took advantage of the opportunity. We were all so dead to the world that not one of us knew when the train started. The first thing we knew, the conductor, the brakeman, the fireman, and the engineer were going through the cars, waking us up and trying to get us off the train. We had arrived unconscious at Camp Stone. A fine way to start overseas duty!

After we had staggered sleepily off the train at the Camp Stone station, we learned that it was still five miles to camp headquarters, where we had to report. I called up the base motor pool and asked for transportation. The officer at the motor pool assured me that trucks would be sent immediately to pick us up. Poor fellow— he had been overseas too long. “Immediately” didn’t mean the same thing to him that it meant in America. In England it meant any time within the next week. We hung around the station sleepy, tired, hungry, and irritated, for nearly two hours before the trucks finally came to take us to Camp Stone.

I got my men and baggage loaded into the trucks and then climbed in beside the driver of one of the trucks. As we started our drive to the place to which we had to report, and where I would be relieved of my responsibility for these troops, I sank back and dozed off to sleep again. It would be wonderful to be free of my responsibilities as a commanding officer, I mused. I had nursed these boys all the way from North Carolina to England. I had issued them clothing and equipment, paid them, fed them, put them on K.P., cursed them, and loved them, and now I was going to dump them. And what a joy that would be! Whoever heard of a chaplain being in command of troops, anyway? We were supposed to convert them, not command them.

Such happy thoughts were running through my mind as we drove along in the truck. I pried open one eye just enough to get a glimpse of where we were going. Looking down the road ahead of us, I saw another truck coming down the road to meet us. At first I didn’t pay much attention, but as we got closer to the oncoming truck I suddenly realized something was wrong. In my amazement I sat bolt upright. The other truck was on the wrong side of the road. For that matter, so were we. Both trucks were tearing down the road on the wrong side. I shuddered- to think of what would happen if one of them suddenly decided to get back on the right side. Before I could do anything or say anything about it, we zoomed past the other truck. My driver must have noticed my anxiety, for he laughed and remarked, “In England, everybody drives on the left-hand side of the road.” I felt like a nitwit.

At long last we made headquarters and were signed in, and I turned over my records of the shipment to the proper authorities. I was free of my troops. Now all I had to do was tag along with the other eight chaplains. We were assigned to a barracks and told to put our baggage in the baggage room. All our baggage had to be inspected, in case we had smuggled over a few spies. After this was done, we were told we could have breakfast. That was wonderful news simply because we didn’t know what we were going to get. We headed for the mess hall in high spirits. After all, we hadn’t had what you could call a square meal since we left the old Queen two days before, and we were getting pretty hungry.

We were served coffee, fried eggs, and bread. Those were the queerest-looking eggs I ever saw. What should have been yellow in them was red—a rich, full-bodied red, like blood. But at a time like that, who would bother to quibble about the eggs? They were eggs and that was all that mattered. It was the bread that got me. I’ve always had toast for breakfast and the change to bread wasn’t easy. However, I do believe I could have changed to any normal bread without too much trouble. But that stuff we were served was beyond the pale of human consumption. In the first place, it was hacked into lumps about the size of a fist. Then, it wasn’t cooked. The inside was pure raw dough. The bakers had let it stay in the oven just long enough for it to get warm and to form a hard crust on the outside. The more I chewed it, the larger it got, and the stickier. After five minutes of chewing the stuff, I had to use both hands to pull a wad of it out of my mouth. And my teeth nearly came out with it. Besides all this, it just didn’t taste good.

Right after breakfast all of us went to our quarters and got ready to sleep for the rest of the day. After I had taken a shower—my first bath in more than a week—I made my cot. The English furnished us no sheets, but we were well supplied with woolen blankets. It may seem strange that anyone should be sleeping under woolen blankets in July, but in England they were needed. The cold, damp, rainy weather made plenty of cover necessary. In England it is not a question of whether or not it will rain; it is just a matter of when it will rain.

I went to bed with nothing on but my underwear. In a few seconds I was out of bed, looking for something else to put on. It wasn’t that I was cold; it was those woolen blankets. They were warm enough. The only trouble was that while they were being manufactured they were brought too close to the sandpaper-making machinery, and a lot of the sand and glue had gotten mixed up with the blankets. They were beyond all doubt the roughest, “scratchingest” product ever turned out by an assembly line. A few hours of exposure to the raw surface of those blankets would have taken the armor plate off a battleship. That is why I got up and put my clothes on—for protection against the blankets. After that, I slept all right.

The next morning we were all rounded up and taken out to an assembly ground for a period of instruction. The war in Europe had been over for some months, so we couldn’t imagine why the authorities felt that we needed instruction in battle procedure. But they felt that we did, so we were given further instruction in the use of the gas mask. Of course, we had had the same instruction and demonstration no less than a dozen times before we had ever come overseas, but we had to take it all over again. When we had started overseas, the authorities in the States had taken our gas masks away from us, saying that there would be no need for them now that the war in Europe had ended. But the authorities in Camp Stone, England, must not have heard that the war was over. They not only gave us another lecture on the gas mask, but they were horrified to hear that we didn’t even have gas masks. They hastened to rectify this tragic situation. We were rushed down to the Quartermaster Corps and issued gas masks in such a hurry that you would have thought that the Germans had already launched a gas attack. It would have been too bad for us if they had. The masks we were given must have been some that had been reclaimed from a Civil War scrap pile. They were really wrecks. Eyepieces were gone from some, others had bad leaks in the rubber hose, and one didn’t even have a canister. One officer, when he opened his canvas carrier to inspect the mask inside, found the carrier filled with K- rations, several packs of cigarettes, a pair of sunglasses, and several other items, but no gas mask. Fortunately, we were not asked to sign a receipt for the masks. This meant that the Army could not hold us responsible for them. The next morning, when we were climbing onto the trucks to leave Camp Stone and continue our journey to the Continent, for some strange reason not a single officer had his gas mask with him. By some oversight everyone of us had misplaced his gas mask while he was packing. They had been conveniently left in our quarters, where I am sure they were reclaimed by the boys from the Quartermaster Corps. I have an idea that those same masks had been issued and reissued to men passing through Camp Stone for many months. No doubt, after each shipment went through, the Quartermaster Corps men went around automatically collecting the gas masks that they had issued the day before. Trying to get rid of those worn-out gas masks must have been very discouraging.

It had been decided by the powers that- be that we nine chaplains were to be flown across the English Channel to Paris. I would have preferred taking a slower but more scenic trip by train and steamer. But my desire had little effect in determining my manner of travel. We were sent down to London, and from there to an airfield in the suburbs. Here we had to go through various checking processes to make sure that we were legitimate passengers. Our money was examined. Some of us had already changed most of our American money into English pounds. However, we learned at the airfield that we would not be allowed to take any foreign money into France. It sounded strange to hear the good old greenback referred to as “foreign currency.” It was necessary for us to remind ourselves constantly that we, and not all these other people we saw, were the foreigners now. Our money, both American and English, was changed into French francs. One franc was worth about two cents. This, combined with the fact that the French monetary system, like the American, is a decimal system, made trading in francs an easy matter. It was much simpler to trade here than it had been in England. The trouble was, the French didn’t use much coin. Nearly all their money was paper. And a paper one-franc note (worth only two cents) was almost as large as our American dollar bill. The result was that you needed a wheelbarrow-load of money to have anything at all. Another difficulty was that the French money was too long and too wide to fit into American billfolds. This made it necessary for us to fold the money up before we could put it into our billfolds. Whenever we wanted to make a purchase, it was necessary for us to unfold all our money so that we could see what we had. And that was bad, for it revealed to the store clerk just how much money we had, and he could set his prices accordingly.

After the inspections had been completed, the plane that was to carry us to Paris taxied into position and we got busy loading our baggage aboard. Then we climbed in, and off we soared, headed for Paris.

From our elevation we got a pretty good view of London. It was sobering to see the great amount of bomb damage. But we were soon to see that the damage to London was little compared to the damage to the French villages and towns. As we flew over France, the number of shell pocks, bomb craters, gaunt trees, and wrecked buildings and homes was simply appalling. It did not require any great imagination to understand what the French people had been through, and what the American and British soldiers had suffered in their drive across France. It looked so quiet and still as we flew over. It didn’t seem possible that just a few months before, men had lain dying and dead on those same peaceful hills.

My usual luck caught up with me again when we started to land at the airfield near Paris. The pilot of our plane made the usual circling approach to the field and then started down in a gentle glide for the landing. As I looked out the window and watched the buildings grow larger and larger as we came closer to the ground, it seemed to me that we were coming in mighty high and fast’for a landing. The pilot cut his engines and we dropped down fast. Then all of a sudden the engines roared up again and the plane pulled away from the field in a sharp climb. Since then I have flown a good bit. But in spite of my many hours in the air, I am still uneasy during a takeoff or a landing. It would be a gross understatement to say that when our pilot was unable to make the landing, I was uneasy; I was scared silly. When we had regained some altitude, the pilot circled around again and came in for another try at a landing. This time we came in a little slower and lower. I felt easier about the landing. Then I felt the bump of the wheels as they hit the runway of the temporary landing field. We hadn’t taxied far before there was a loud bang and the plane tipped over. A tire had blown out. The left wing caught in the runway and the plane spun around, bouncing and jerking to a sudden stop. We inside the plane were a tangled mass of trunks, Valpaks, arms, legs, brief cases, and heads. We had really been thrown all over the interior of that plane. Fortunately, no one had been injured. But as I climbed out of the plane, I couldn’t help thinking that this was sure a fine way to make your debut in Paris—coming in with a bang and a flat tire.