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Hold Your Breath
Finally Costain sent me out to find the 343rd CP and get the message from the
horse's mouth. "And hurry back," he told me. "This might make a difference in our
move."
One thing about the trip - it wasn't very far. You couldn't go very far without
running out of American-held territory. But I certainly did not hurry. The night was dark
as the inside of a Black Angus, we had to drive without lights, and the country was
infested with soldiers nervous enough to shoot anything that moved. Joe B. Davis kept
his foot very lightly on the gas pedal, so he could slap on the brakes quickly if someone
hollered "Halt" or if I thought I saw a clue as to which way to go. Every couple of
hundred yards we'd stop so I could look at my map by the faint glow of my flashlight. All
our flashlights had red plastic disks over the lenses, so they'd be hard for Bedcheck
Charley to pick up.
Having studied how to avoid overloading myself, I had by now hung my musette
bag on the jeep, tossed my gas mask in between the two front seats, taken off the
suspenders to my pistol belt, and made myself generally more comfortable.
Earlier in the evening the Germans had fired considerable artillery into the area,
and the smoke still hung along the ground, mixing with the evening fog. It smelled sharp,
but not really unpleasant, unless you thought of what had caused it.
It was Joe B. Davis who saw the glow of the 343rd fluorescent CP sign. I got out
and led the jeep into the field through a break in the hedgerow. That was necessary at
night. There might be chuck holes or men sleeping on the ground.
Once the jeep was parked, I went in search of the CP tent. Each person I asked
sent me somewhere else, but after I had blundered around for perhaps fifteen minutes, I
finally came in sight of the square black shadow of the light-proof tent. Then a weird
figure stepped from behind a tree and nearly ran into me. It was as tall as me, had a trunk
like a small elephant and eyes like a man from Mars. This apparition blubbered, "Bubba
babba, bo boo babba gab bab?" It took me a few seconds to translate this as "What's the
matter, don't you have a gas mask?"
The first thing you do is hold your breath. Then you remove your helmet and put
on your mask. But my jeep, containing aforesaid mask, was about two hundred yards
away, and getting there without breathing was out of the question. The problem was:
Should I run there, thus getting to the mask more quickly, but necessarily speeding up my
breathing, or should I walk, breathing shallowly all the while? Considering the fact that it
was pitch dark, I would quite probably stumble and fall down several times if I ran, and
might possibly run past the jeep besides. So I walked as briskly as I could. Nevertheless,
by the time I got to the jeep, I had bootlegged myself several small breaths, smelled
nothing but the HE smoke I had been smelling all along, and still seemed healthy. So I
was able to say rather casually to Joe B. Davis, "These jokers seem to think there's some
gas around, so I guess we'd better put our masks on.”
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