The "Bulge"
Part Two - Chateau Roumont
Saturday finally came with everyone making arrangements for the dance - rigging up ironing boards out of packing boxes and GI blankets so that we could press our OD trousers for the dance. About noon disquieting rumors started floating around - the Germans were shelling Malmedy - There were German patrols in the wooded sections around Clervaux - Clervaux was being shelled! - Rumors - yes, but where were they coming from? No one could find out, and no one knew for sure what was true and what was false. Then at 1700 confirmation of part of the rumors arrived in the persons of three officers from the Engineer outfit which was giving us the dance. There would be no dance because the building had been wrecked by shells from German artillery! Close on the heels of this came the order from Headquarters to be ready to move at 0500 17 December because the Germans were counter-attacking all along our section of the Siegfried Line.
The half-dim light of early morning found us dressed and our equipment packed and waiting. The waiting was hard part of it all. We didn't have enough trucks to move us - so we sat on our bedding rolls and waited. As it grew light we heard plane motors and craned our neck to see the flashing silver of slender P-38s overhead - watched them wing over then dart down to strafe what we knew must be German troops just at the horizon line.We watched the black puffs of smoke from the German ack-ack probe up at them, catching our breaths in a prayer for those silver dragon-flies.
Word went the rounds that our Chief Nurse, Captain Hay, wanted to talk to us, so we crowded into one of the rooms in the barracks to find out what was new. It will be a long time before many of will forget that moment when Captain Hay started by saying, "Girls, I find I must tell you some things you are to do if ----". There was some pause here -- " any of you should be captured by enemy forces". That is an idea that hits you a little beow the belt - you hadn't quite gotten to that stage of your thinking; up to now this was a little like a football match that you watched from the safety of the bleachers. Now it begins to register that the "boom" of artillery that you hear isn't all coming from the west anymore; there's an answering "boom" from the east, and you realized that it is German lead that's zinging by over your head to as well as Yank lead.
Captain Hay finished her short talk and started checking for Red Cross brassards, AGO Cards, dog tags, etc. A lot of brassards had been packed into bedding rolls and duffel bags in the rush, so out comes a store of muslin which is torn into arm bands and lip sticks serve to make very attractive Red Crosses. The word came to load the ambulances and get ready to move out. Again there was a wait while we watched tanks roll down the road to other points along the line, saw truck lods of infantry moving down the line between our sire and the Germans, heard messengers arriving asking for ambulances until there were only two of he ten ambulances left. As each ambulance pulled out there were more nurses to be crowded into the remaining ambulances, until finally they overflowed, of necessity, to nearby trucks. At last we finally pulled out, leaving 18 enlisted men behind us who were to wait until their trucks arrived to finish loading the rest of our equipment.
After a hectic ride we arrived at the Chateau Roumont, near Libin, Belgium, which was our new home. This was a five story building which had been a hunting lodge for some Duke. There were wide marble steps sweeping up from the entryway and hall which we used as an admitting room. The operating room was set up in a rose and pearl gray banquet room which had about a 30 foot ceiling with windows running from practically floor level, almost to the ceiling. By 2000 the hospital was in operation and the casualties pouring in. At 2330 the 18 men we had left behind at Clervaux came in and brought an end to our anxiety on that account. Some time during the night which followed the personnel of the 42nd Field Hospital joined us after having lost all their equipment when the Germans overran their hospital site new Wiltz, Luxemburg.
From the minute we got to the Chateau until we left four days later, it was one continual rush, rush, rush. There seemed always a little too much to do. You could never quite finish your work - there was always something more to do. Throughout all the work, ran a feeling of suspense, of unreality. It was as though the brain recognized the danger signals and has shifted your consciousness into neutral and you were working in a sort of dream-like concentration. It's a very difficult thing to explain - you can only know it if you have felt it yourself.
Up and down, up and down - five stories, and patients all the way to the fifth story! Up and down, continuously for 12 hour shifts - soon the men acting as litter bearers looked as exhausted and sick as the walking wounded we were admitting. Working in the receiving room, helping the Red Cross girls pass out hot coffee - catching snatches of this and that. All of it fitting like pieces in a kaleidoscope - a big tanker, burned to the waist,crying like a small child - because of his burned eyes? NO!! Because Jerry had knocked out his beautiful tank. Another soldier, a boy of nineteen, with a laceration on his forehead, walking up and down the stairs looking for his buddy. This boy was the only one to get out of a half-track when it received a direct hit and he was looking for the rifleman who had "aided" him back to the hospital and had been hit himself. "No, Ma'am", he drawled in a soft Georgia twang, "I don't know his name nor his outfit, but he saved my life and I jus gotta find him." You sensed the urgency under his casual tone; it's might important to keep track of your buddies. So you wish him luck and hurry on to your duty while the TD boy starts into another ward to look for his friend.
Down the stairs, through receiving on the way to surgery when suddenly your way is blocked by an expanse of dirty field jackets topped by a helmet marked with red crosses. "Hey, Lt., don't you remember me?" It's an ambulance driver who had driven us when we first landed in France. There are others with him who have been with us on other moves across France. There's just a minute for a few "How are you's?" and "Where you been's?" and then the rush of the moment closes in again and you hurry on trying to catch the fleeing seconds you've just spent.
So it went for four days and nights with never a let-up. Every day seeing someone you've known from somewhere else; every day seeing the boy from the TDs who is helping out as a litter bearer - still looking - No, Ma'am, I havn't found him yet", to your inevitable question - but never giving up the search. Then at 1050 on 21 December the hurriedly even tenor of things was blasted wide open - "Ten minutes to dress and get to the trucks - German with tanks just a mile down the road - Bastogne has been completely surrounded - the 101st Paratroopers are trapped in Bastogne". We thought there had been an urgency in our moves before, but it couldn't compare with this. Again the jumbled nightmare effect of pictures and sounds that flashed around us - 10 minutes - that's not long, yet it seemed an eternity - dressing in as many warm clothes as we could get on and still move - watching for a minute the chain of evacuation - wounded on litters streaming down the stairs into the waiting ambulances - 400 in the hospital, just 30 ambulances - have to get them out - doctors and corpsmen, regardless of rank, from an eagle colonel to a private, carrying litters down the stairs, into the ambulances sending them on the way and going back for more patients. Out to the two 6 x 6s that were waiting for the nurses, taking nothing but the clothes on your back and a musette bag. It was cold, starting to snow, and we had no protection from the winds except for some blankets which some one tossed into the trucks for us. Then we were on our way- where? - no one seemed to know - past villages where the inhabitants stood beside the road and waved to us as we rolled by. A mixture of emotions - a feeling of hate for the villagers who could smile as we fled, a determination that we'd be back through there again as conquerors, a scared feeling in the pitt of your stomach when you thought of being without male protection except for the two truck drivers, wondering whether you'd ever see again any of the officers and men you'd just left, skirting around the idea of running into a German column and being taken prisoner - all these thoughts and emotions and more running through your brain as you bounced in the rear of a 2-1/2 ton truck exceeding all Army speed limits.
The half-dim light of early morning found us dressed and our equipment packed and waiting. The waiting was hard part of it all. We didn't have enough trucks to move us - so we sat on our bedding rolls and waited. As it grew light we heard plane motors and craned our neck to see the flashing silver of slender P-38s overhead - watched them wing over then dart down to strafe what we knew must be German troops just at the horizon line.We watched the black puffs of smoke from the German ack-ack probe up at them, catching our breaths in a prayer for those silver dragon-flies.
Word went the rounds that our Chief Nurse, Captain Hay, wanted to talk to us, so we crowded into one of the rooms in the barracks to find out what was new. It will be a long time before many of will forget that moment when Captain Hay started by saying, "Girls, I find I must tell you some things you are to do if ----". There was some pause here -- " any of you should be captured by enemy forces". That is an idea that hits you a little beow the belt - you hadn't quite gotten to that stage of your thinking; up to now this was a little like a football match that you watched from the safety of the bleachers. Now it begins to register that the "boom" of artillery that you hear isn't all coming from the west anymore; there's an answering "boom" from the east, and you realized that it is German lead that's zinging by over your head to as well as Yank lead.
Captain Hay finished her short talk and started checking for Red Cross brassards, AGO Cards, dog tags, etc. A lot of brassards had been packed into bedding rolls and duffel bags in the rush, so out comes a store of muslin which is torn into arm bands and lip sticks serve to make very attractive Red Crosses. The word came to load the ambulances and get ready to move out. Again there was a wait while we watched tanks roll down the road to other points along the line, saw truck lods of infantry moving down the line between our sire and the Germans, heard messengers arriving asking for ambulances until there were only two of he ten ambulances left. As each ambulance pulled out there were more nurses to be crowded into the remaining ambulances, until finally they overflowed, of necessity, to nearby trucks. At last we finally pulled out, leaving 18 enlisted men behind us who were to wait until their trucks arrived to finish loading the rest of our equipment.
After a hectic ride we arrived at the Chateau Roumont, near Libin, Belgium, which was our new home. This was a five story building which had been a hunting lodge for some Duke. There were wide marble steps sweeping up from the entryway and hall which we used as an admitting room. The operating room was set up in a rose and pearl gray banquet room which had about a 30 foot ceiling with windows running from practically floor level, almost to the ceiling. By 2000 the hospital was in operation and the casualties pouring in. At 2330 the 18 men we had left behind at Clervaux came in and brought an end to our anxiety on that account. Some time during the night which followed the personnel of the 42nd Field Hospital joined us after having lost all their equipment when the Germans overran their hospital site new Wiltz, Luxemburg.
From the minute we got to the Chateau until we left four days later, it was one continual rush, rush, rush. There seemed always a little too much to do. You could never quite finish your work - there was always something more to do. Throughout all the work, ran a feeling of suspense, of unreality. It was as though the brain recognized the danger signals and has shifted your consciousness into neutral and you were working in a sort of dream-like concentration. It's a very difficult thing to explain - you can only know it if you have felt it yourself.
Up and down, up and down - five stories, and patients all the way to the fifth story! Up and down, continuously for 12 hour shifts - soon the men acting as litter bearers looked as exhausted and sick as the walking wounded we were admitting. Working in the receiving room, helping the Red Cross girls pass out hot coffee - catching snatches of this and that. All of it fitting like pieces in a kaleidoscope - a big tanker, burned to the waist,crying like a small child - because of his burned eyes? NO!! Because Jerry had knocked out his beautiful tank. Another soldier, a boy of nineteen, with a laceration on his forehead, walking up and down the stairs looking for his buddy. This boy was the only one to get out of a half-track when it received a direct hit and he was looking for the rifleman who had "aided" him back to the hospital and had been hit himself. "No, Ma'am", he drawled in a soft Georgia twang, "I don't know his name nor his outfit, but he saved my life and I jus gotta find him." You sensed the urgency under his casual tone; it's might important to keep track of your buddies. So you wish him luck and hurry on to your duty while the TD boy starts into another ward to look for his friend.
Down the stairs, through receiving on the way to surgery when suddenly your way is blocked by an expanse of dirty field jackets topped by a helmet marked with red crosses. "Hey, Lt., don't you remember me?" It's an ambulance driver who had driven us when we first landed in France. There are others with him who have been with us on other moves across France. There's just a minute for a few "How are you's?" and "Where you been's?" and then the rush of the moment closes in again and you hurry on trying to catch the fleeing seconds you've just spent.
So it went for four days and nights with never a let-up. Every day seeing someone you've known from somewhere else; every day seeing the boy from the TDs who is helping out as a litter bearer - still looking - No, Ma'am, I havn't found him yet", to your inevitable question - but never giving up the search. Then at 1050 on 21 December the hurriedly even tenor of things was blasted wide open - "Ten minutes to dress and get to the trucks - German with tanks just a mile down the road - Bastogne has been completely surrounded - the 101st Paratroopers are trapped in Bastogne". We thought there had been an urgency in our moves before, but it couldn't compare with this. Again the jumbled nightmare effect of pictures and sounds that flashed around us - 10 minutes - that's not long, yet it seemed an eternity - dressing in as many warm clothes as we could get on and still move - watching for a minute the chain of evacuation - wounded on litters streaming down the stairs into the waiting ambulances - 400 in the hospital, just 30 ambulances - have to get them out - doctors and corpsmen, regardless of rank, from an eagle colonel to a private, carrying litters down the stairs, into the ambulances sending them on the way and going back for more patients. Out to the two 6 x 6s that were waiting for the nurses, taking nothing but the clothes on your back and a musette bag. It was cold, starting to snow, and we had no protection from the winds except for some blankets which some one tossed into the trucks for us. Then we were on our way- where? - no one seemed to know - past villages where the inhabitants stood beside the road and waved to us as we rolled by. A mixture of emotions - a feeling of hate for the villagers who could smile as we fled, a determination that we'd be back through there again as conquerors, a scared feeling in the pitt of your stomach when you thought of being without male protection except for the two truck drivers, wondering whether you'd ever see again any of the officers and men you'd just left, skirting around the idea of running into a German column and being taken prisoner - all these thoughts and emotions and more running through your brain as you bounced in the rear of a 2-1/2 ton truck exceeding all Army speed limits.