Free Before Their Time: A Memoir by Robert Kotlowitz

Yeasty and pungent and alien—but indisputably French. Overhead, the gulls were still with us. I watched them trying to keep pace, circling in formation, then swooping independently from one truck to another. They seemed to be in better order than we were. What a noise we made, what an engine roar! My eyes began to close. Sleep moved in, but first I wanted to reach out and embrace the strange city that lay around us and, like a fool, shout, “I’m here!”
Me voici!
But it was too late for that. My attenuated French had vanished with the day’s struggles. I was already half-dead to the world.

FOUR
Short-Arms
    WE SOON learned that Antonovich liked to talk about Kansas and Nebraska, where he had triumphed at football, and by implication about the whole Midwest and its dependencies; and with so much time on our hands in Normandy, so much waiting time, he had all the opportunities he needed.
    In theory, he was supposed to be lecturing C Company on infantry tactics (there was really no other subject in the YD), but after completing basic training and Tennessee maneuvers, as well as two months at Camp Jackson refining details before we shipped overseas, there was not much left—in the abstract, at least—to learn about infantry tactics. We knew it all, was the general attitude in the Yankee Division; all that was left was to apply what we knew.
    Gradually then, Antonovich’s daily class, held right after the midday meal within the cramped apple orchard in which C Company was bivouacked, began to drift in otherdirections, according to Antonovich’s whim, and before long we were engaged by an intellectual syllabus that might have been entitled The Great American Plains and Their Incomparable Metropoli, most particularly the cities of Omaha, Kansas City (the wrong one), and Abilene, glorious gateways to the glorious west. Those were Michael Antonovich’s favorite towns, his American urban lode-stones, the homes of the really free and the truly truly brave.
    Of course it was absurd, the whole idea of Michael Antonovich lecturing us about anything. (How he chewed away, bite by bite, at the substance of that beefy geography while we struggled to stay awake after the midday meal in the late summer heat.) We all knew that we were waiting at that moment for orders to join the new Ninth Army, which was slowly being formed with fastidious care under the command of General Simpson, whose name we had never heard before. Nobody tried to keep our situation secret. It was probably common knowledge all over the ETO, on both sides of the lines, American and German. Several other divisions were also waiting on the Normandy peninsula, as we were, camped in a patient cluster near the sea. We had already been there two weeks, living a privileged life. The word was that the Ninth Army, when its time came, would join the Allied forces somewhere in northern France, near the Belgian border.
(“Ro-ses are smiling in Pi-car-dy,”
I sang to myself as the rumor spread; it was a sentimental old tune from World War I that my father had become attached to during his own Army days overseas, and it had stuck to me through childhood like a birthmark.) The cities of Lille, Amiens, and Roubaix were mentioned. So was the Ardennes.
    It could take months to put a new Army together, while we waited for fresh divisions to arrive from the UK and the States, and nearly as long to get it into action. So there was no hurry. That was what Lieutenant Gallagher told us—more, certainly, than he should have—and it was what we wanted to believe. Waiting: that suited us fine. We lived in a kind of trance-like state, camped in the midst of heady calvados country, near the village of Montebourg, hidden from the road by thick hedgerows, and always a little high from the pungent smell of rotting apples and smoky wood fires that never quite burned out. It was a classic bivouac camp, perfect in almost every detail. Even our mail reached us soon after we arrived, bringing on a