 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Upstarts
southern Belgium and Luxembourg, which had not only already been passed over, but
were many miles north of anywhere we would be likely to go. Pretty crummy maps, too.
The scale was 1 to 25,000, same as the French ones, but the printing was fuzzy, the
locations vague, and the contour lines haphazard.
I was about half way through the job when the blow fell. All German vehicles had
to be turned in. The division had so many by now that it took up too much road space,
and the G-3's march schedules were completely upset. We would have to get along with
the vehicles the Army authorized us. That meant Lt Troxell would not have his VW bug
any more, and I wouldn't have a truck for my maps. Where should all those maps go? The
CP truck was always full of FDC equipment when we moved.
I picked up the phone and asked for Universe 2. When Capt Saegert, the new Div
Arty S-2, answered, I said, "Say, Jesse, I've got a few maps I don't need. When can I turn
them in?"
"Forget it. I've got maps of my own I can't use. " "Can't you turn them in to
engineer supply?"
"I already thought of that. They won't take them either. They say the Third Army
map supply is bulging at the seams. "
"But I have more maps than we can transport. What the hell am I supposed to do
with 'em?"
"That's your problem."
I communed with myself and came up with no satisfactory solution. Maps seemed
to be a drug on the market. I sought advice from my friends. Don Thomson suggested
burning them - that was what you did with classified documents, and these were papers
that might be of use to the enemy.
I thought that over. There were a couple of tons of tightly packed sheets of a kind
of paper that burns poorly. The weather was damp. It would probably take a week or
more to burn them all, one sheet at a time, for I was sure that they would not burn in
reams. And the fire would have to burn day and night, a beacon to any German artillery
or aircraft looking for something to shoot at. No good. A few sheets might be rolled up
and used in the barrel stove in lieu of firewood, but not many.
Capt Jacobs came up with the solution. "Why don't you bury 'em? I have a couple
of disciplinary cases that need some extra duty, and they could each dig you a hole six by
six by six, slide in the maps, and cover 'em up."
It was wasteful, and it went against the grain. But what else was there? And so
there are several thousand dollars worth of maps entombed in a little grove somewhere in
Lorraine. They have been there fifty years, and from what I hear about the
biodegradability of paper in the absence of oxygen, it may be centuries - even millennia
before they turn completely to mulch. It is interesting to guess what some archaeologist
digging into them in the thirty-fifth century might make of these strange artifacts. Would
he think he had discovered the equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls?
114
|
 |
|