Today's reading is from Fighting with the Screaming Eagles by Robert Bowen, an account of fighting

with a 101st airborne from Normandy to Bastoin.

Robert has been captured in the Battle of the Bulge.

Chapter 14 into the frying pan.

The ambulatory wounded were marched through the knee-deep snow with a biting wind tearing

our uniforms.

Most of the men had discarded overcoats during the battle and were now paying for it.

We were taken to a hillside from which the German infantry had been firing into our positions.

The snow was trampled, torn and blackened from mortar and artillery shells, and some

German corpses lay sprawled in the snow.

At other places were bits of uniform, and bloody stains left by the wounded had been taken

away.

We were lined up by angry Germans, who shouted such things as, for damped Americana Schweinhunt,

once a Cameradon kaput, and shied in the Americana Bastaden.

It was a tense moment for us.

The enemy soldiers were so angry anything could have happened.

After all, just days before one German had shot down nearly 100 American POWs, in cold

blood at Malmady, and other Germans had killed numerous Belgian civilians, many of them

women and children, for little or no cause.

However, a sergeant suddenly appeared and calmed his men.

He allowed them to strip us of any valuables and I lost a nice but broken wristwatch that

my wife had sent me.

...