World: DUSK IN THE RHONE VALLEY

Well up the Rhone valley toward Lyons, a U.S. motorized cavalry reconnaissance troop, feeling the way for the main body, was stopped before a German resistance pocket. After sundown, TIME Correspondent John Osborne dropped in at the troop’s farmhouse command post, saw the following little scene in the great drama of war.

The lieutenant, his sergeant and I sit down together. They both drop into silence. Soon I realize that they are half asleep, hunched on the boxes that serve for chairs. A German shell bursts in the air just over the house and they tiredly dive for the floor. The lieutenant smiles but does not speak when he resumes his seat before a wall map.

Over his shoulder, I can see on the map that we have very little between ourselves and the Germans. But that is not the thing which fills this room with a kind of spiritual blackness. What I sense in this room is weariness—the final weariness which men can endure while they still move, talk when they have to, or even fight again if they must. That weariness is in their faces, their bodies, their khaki clothes clotted with dust and dried sweat. This troop has been constantly rolling and fighting for eight days and nights.

A tall officer—another lieutenant—walks into the C.P. He limps. He stares at me in the half light—it is now dusk—and seems to expect me to say something. So I ask him how he’s doing. “Not so good,” he says. He sits, and holds his head in his hands a while. Another shell bursts overhead; he falls rather than dives to the floor. Still lying beside him, the other lieutenant asks how things have been going. The lieutenant with the limp says that he has lost two of his three armored cars. He says his men have had enough of this mucking stuff and have got to rest.

A pfc., a messenger, has come in. He takes one look at the tall lieutenant and suddenly he is holding a bottle of cognac toward the officer. The officer carefully pours a tiny glassful, drinks, and hands the glass and bottle first to the pfc., then to me. As I drink, I hear the first version of a question which I am to hear many times in the next few days: “What in goddamned hell are you doing here?” I say I have come up for dinner and he says: “Dinner!” Another shellburst leaves nothing to be added to this remark.

“The Overall Situation.” We learn more about what soldiers laughingly call the “the overall situation,” which is strictly bad. German “S.P.s” (self-propelled artillery) are in the town and on the hills on two sides of us. They have accurately “zeroed” the only road which the troop can take, and , which it is now holding. That is, the sergeant morosely explains, the Huns’ artillery can fan a fly’s tail in mid-flight if it is so foolish as to venture up the road. Now and then a burst of gunfire, flatter and nearer than the noise of the S.P.s signals a sally of German heavy tanks from Sauzette. They sneak out, fire a few rounds at our lighter armored cavalry cars and tanks, then rush back to cover under bursts of our noisy but ineffective reply.” Somewhere along that road, between us and the town, is a small unit of infantry, prudently silent in the gathering darkness.

Another lieutenant appears. Now only flashlights light our blacked-in room, and in their dimness the new arrival looks completely grey. He is all dust, from helmet to boots. He commands the troop’s light tanks, which have been up against the Germans’ heavier Mark IVs and VIs since the column left the beach. The only break in the tank commander’s greyness is a red gash in his right index finger. He inspects the gash and says he got it buttoning up his tank. He tells his story briefly, tiredly, carefully.

“They Just Bounced Off.” His column had run into some German heavies. Before the tank commanders could get under cover, the captain of the unit had the top of his head taken off, at turret line. At that point the lieutenant had taken over. He had fired four rounds from his 37-mm. gun against a German heavy’s hide. “They bounced off just like tennis balls,” he said, “and we got to hell out of there.” He gazed at his hand some more, and said again: “They bounced off, sons of bitches, just bounced off.”

We felt, rather than saw, another man enter the room. For a moment, he did not sit. He stood, swaying and staring about the room. The pfc., the sergeant, the three lieutenants and I stared back at him. The lieutenant who had lost the armored cars was pouring another drink of cognac. The captain saw him. He said: “Well, I see you’re all right. Lose any men?”

The lieutenant said that he’d got all of his men back, and the captain nodded. My presence was explained. The captain just looked at me, and went over to the map.

He explained to his officers that the Germans were pushing out of the town in more and more strength, and that if they chose to attack we’d be in trouble. Some medium tanks, attached to his unit but not in his command, were, in his perhaps biased opinion, being hesitant about coming on up the road and engaging heavier German tanks. Furthermore, said the captain, the little infantry he had attached to the troop, and the little more in position just outside the town, were not enough to keep the Germans back.

Guests and Hosts. The sergeant, a squat Pennsylvanian with a blackly bearded chin and soft black eyes, said that if I’d come out to his jeep I could have some fried potatoes and coffee. As I walked out, I became aware that we were guests. The family whose house the troop had taken was seated in a thickly walled and ceilinged room on the ground level. A young girl, perhaps 15, sat perfectly still and rigid, stretched out in an armchair. As I stepped across her legs, she did not move or speak. All her words were in her shocked eyes. The rest of the family—Papa, who had put his savings into this farm, Mama, a scraggly woman who was calmly assembling the dejeuner, a leggy boy of 16 or so and a baby girl—chattered in the passageway, and fell silent only when a soldier passed or a shell burst.

As I gobbled potatoes by the sergeant’s jeep, complete darkness and the last shell came together. After that, the only thing bothering the troop commander and his officers was the news from the road. The mediums went up, met the enemy’s heavies, had to fall back.

The troop commander told the sergeant, the troop recorder, to be ready to burn his papers. One of the lieutenants looked over at the sergeant, quietly sorting documents into two piles on a table, and said: “It will be the first time this C.P. ever pulled out of any place.”

Decision: Retreat. The troop commander put off the first retirement for two more hours. His tired old-young face, lean as a shell splinter, mirrored his doubt, his brief hope that he could hold, and finally his resolve to save what he had left for another day. He made that decision only after an infantryman from the fragile line near the town burst into the C.P. His face was bleeding slightly, his eyes were glazed. He could hardly talk until the troop medico had patched and soothed him. Then he said, still stammering, that German tanks had broken into the infantry line.

“Point-blank!” he said, “pointblank, sir. We had to get out the best way we could.”

Our troop commander told his officers to pass the word to assemble the troop. The limping lieutenant, the tank commander, and the second in command followed him into the darkness. Only the sergeant was left in the room. “It’s tough on them,” he said. Soon the troop’s armored cars, tanks and bantams (cavalry slang for jeeps), were rolling up the dark road, toward the rear. As we turned into the field where we would bivouac, the bearded sergeant said: “Well, it usually ends like this.” He meant, not that it usually ended in retirement, but that any ending is an anticlimax for men who have survived the near brush of death.

That was all, except that the troop, promised a rest, got exactly half an hour of “rest,” after they went into a rear area the next morning. When I last saw them, the column was on the road again, forming up for a counterattack in our valley.