Wvhen the Avions Came Over

As Told by M. M.

It was fighting all day and marching all night. Everybody was all

- in. We slept a couple of hours near a bridge then moved into a hollow

a couple of kilometers away. All night there was speculation what was going to be next. Some of the guys said it was a new military"trick-bo- rrolwed from the Red Army; we were to creep up behind the enemy and catch ’em in the rear.

There we were in the hollow, lying there all day, just lying there, hanging around. The sun was beating down on us, it was hotter than a furnace, everybody was tired and miserable. We were in support and nobody knew whether we’d have to go back the lines or be with- drawn for a rest. We needed a rest bad, we’d been fighting without a stop3 for two Weeks. We made no effort to dig in; it was too hot and everything was too uncertain.

The guys in my group got into arguing, nothing serious, just che- wing the rag. They were arguing who were the intellectuals and I paid no attention because I didn’t give a damn one way or another. We had

‘quite a number of those guys all good comrades and good soldiers

"so why not leave them alone; let ’em be intellectuals if they want to. Then one of the guys who is from Brooklyn and another fellow from Chicago started an argument over Al Capone — was he really a tough guy, but everybody said he was only a big stiff who got his break with prohibition; he was just a yellow rat who’d have turned tails here in the first half hour.

We were just talking sort of quiet like when all of a sudden a shell exploded about a hundred yards away. A couple of other shells follo- wed right after. This sort of disturbed us but when we saw where they all landed nobody bothered much. We were right in a hollow, in a dead area and no shells could reach us.

We were watching the shells, nobody was talking now, and we saw a plane coming up. It was alone, flying very high, it looked like a small bird; we didnit know whether it was our’s, or their’s. One of the comrades, a former soldier, yelled out: “Look out comrades, it’s an

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