We finally do get over. They’ve built temporary docks so we don’t need to splash through the water. They’ve had the Saint Malo breakthrough so we’ve missed all the fighting in the hedgerows. None of us are complaining about that. We bivouac in an apple orchard and are told we’ll be moving out soon.
We’re all concerned because the village church has a rooster on top of the steeple where a cross should be. We’re convinced the filthy, Godless Nazis have done this. Meanwhile, the people living around us are giving us bottles of what looks like apple cider. We’re all drinking it from the bottle. Some of our more knowing members, our native Tennessee guys, tell us this is applejack and they’re drinking it and falling all over the place. We, the less knowing in the company, think it’s just apple juice and are swilling it down until they pass on the word.
In the drunken mob we’ve become, we determine to take that Nazi rooster off the church and put a cross up there. One old timer buck sergeant convinces us all he had a job as a steeple jack in civilian life one time, and can get up to the top of the steeple. He points out a small door opening at the slanting top of the steeple, just under the rooster. We all join in this ‘Christian’ project. Someone finds the lock to the door up to the steeple and twists it off. Sergeant Billy Dan Gray takes the wooden cross somebody’s carved and starts up to the top of the church staggering on the steps. We all go outside and watch. None of us would really be heartbroken if he falls. He’s been making life miserable for his entire squad.
We watch as he climbs out of that small door way up there. Some villagers have gathered around to watch. One is a priest and he runs back and forth pointing up and babbling in French. He’s obviously trying to understand what’s going on.
Billy Dan climbs out of that little hole and, with his legs wrapped around the steeple, manages to hold onto the rooster and wind vane up there. He unhooks it somehow and throws it down to us. It almost beheads Smitherson who is standing and watching. Billy Dan has the wooden cross stuck in his back pocket and pulls it out. He seems to be jamming it into the holder for the rooster and vane. He manages to get it pretty straight. Everybody gives him a big hand when the wooden cross is in place, except for the priest who has gathered up the rooster and vane and run away with them. We figure he must have been a Nazi sympathiser. So ends our little ignorant experience with French churches. I find out later that roosters are normal on churches in France.
Two days later we’re packed into two ton trucks and start our tour across France following General Patton’s tanks. We’re headed for Paris.