A view from the foxholes of 1st platoon of E company, 506 PIR.

 

It was hard to believe I was standing there.  Clancy no doubt had stood there, probably never fully upright, but hunched over to avoid being a target and likely moveing either very fast or very slow to avoid detection. The village of Foy is within view of this postion and all along this treeline. The foxholes are still there.  Night and day the same view was only interrupted by patrols and being cycled back off the line. To me it was remarkable because this was only a few hundred feet back from where they were dug in.

 

It was one thing that struck me... how close some of the positions were, not only of friend to foe, but from being on the front line to being "off the front line".  It was often only a couple hundred feet. Here the foxholes were so close. And I wondered why. Not only the nature of the defense, but the size and distance of the evergreens had an impact on the positioning of foxholes. The trees standing now are not the original ones which stood in December 1944. It was not because they had all been destroyed by barrage, though many hand been mangled. They had been harvested though many remained unusable for lumber or other wood source items because of the shrapnel imbedded in them. The steel could ruin saw blades in an instant and the lumber was not worth the cost to repiar the mill blades.

 

To take a step back from the front and from the time and plae, Clancy had been recovering from wounds he received in Holland, but was now back at Mourmelon. Most of the weapons and equipment  of the unit had been turned in, he recalled. When word came to move out, they were told to grab anything they could carry. Clancy thought himself the most armed among them with an M-1 and ammunition.  He belives that contributed to why he was up front on point when they were sent into position and on patrol after walking some miles from where the trucks dropped them off. 

 

It was misty raining cold and foggy as only the Bastogne region can be at that time of year.