World Battlefronts: In a Norman Village

For a while there was hope among the German soldiers in the little village of Saint-Lambert-sur-Dives. Squatting in the winding, narrow, tree-lined lanes were hundreds of tanks, lorries, guns and horse-drawn vehicles. Their crews, from ten divisions of the broken German Seventh Army, had driven out of a succession of Normandy traps. Could they get back to the Seine?

The column began to move: it ground out, tightly packed, onto the main road to the northeast. Then hope died forever.

Canadian artillery had been ranged on the road for days. Now it opened up on the road with flaming fury. The first salvos tore the column apart, littered the fields with twisted guns, tanks, the dresses, coats, blankets and chinaware the Germans had pilfered.

Sweating Canadian gunners, beyond sight of their target, poured in more fire. Men and machines were ripped to bits, screaming horses reared and plunged through the wreckage. Trucks caught fire. Ammunition exploded and wild-running vehicles spilled over into the slime-covered Dives River. The guns thundered until the column was no more.

“About all that was left,” cabled TIME Correspondent William W. White, “were the silent vehicles and the burned, twisted bodies. Through the orchards a few horses wandered, nosing their dead harnessmates. A handful of Canadian and Polish officers picked their way through the wreckage, stepping carefully over shapeless lumps of men who had been killed by the barrage, then smashed into the mud by drivers trying to get out of the trap.

“Farther down the evil-smelling road a fridenly brown-&-white puppy whose master lay under a dead horse, begged us to play with him. We paased on, untied a cavalry horse whose rider lay near by, his legs drawn up.

“The hot sun, the buzzing flies, the acrid, sickening stench made a horrible fantasy that our eyes could not accept. German tank in the road. Close by it were the three charred naked bodies of it crew. Near by, a troop carrier had plunged off the road. Its headless driver was still at the wheel.

“At the main crossroads in Cahmboise we heard the clop-clop of horses, and the sad, sweet music of the mouth organ. It was Home on the Range.

“The horses passed—two dozen German cavalry mounts ridden now by U.S. infantrymen. The man with the mouth organ stopped playing as he passed. He winked and grinned. ‘Hiya, Yink,’ he said “Texas was never like this.”