Up to the Front

Arden T. Schofield, my assistant, had the jeep ready and we were soon off to the front. Chaplain Taylor had been to the 591st Battalion and knew the way and since they were in a seemingly more dangerous position, he being the senior chaplain, chose that and sent me to the other three. We had to stop several times because of bursting shells and to make sure the way was still open. At one stop I met Captain Cagle of the 589th Service Battery on the cut off around Purple Heart crossing and he said the way was still clear. Purple Heart Corner was a curve, a curve and a stretch that the enemy had under observation and shelled often. So many men were wounded there that we nicknamed it "Purple Heart Corner." It was one place where I did not have to tell "Scho" to speed up. He wanted to get over that stretch just as much as I did. The next time I met Capt. Cagle was in a prison camp and he told me of the stand made by that part of his battery. Nineteen men held the company position against many attacking Germans and in so doing, they killed thirty-three and wounded many others without losing a man. I had spent a lot of time with these men and learned to like and understand them and it made me feel good to know that during that battle they thought of me. Cagle said the men kept saying, "I wish Chaplain Moore were here. Do you think he will come?" They did so well, I don't think they needed me. I was the one needing them.

Many were the times that I looked at Scho and asked him if he could get his carbine out if we were fired upon. Often when we were stopped I had him go through the procedure to make sure he could. That carbine may not have been able to stop a German tank, but when I didn't have the sign of a gun, it did lend its shining moral sup- port. Only a chaplain or a medic can understand my feeling of being under fire and near the enemy and yet without any means of offering resistance. It wasn't too much fun to think of being fired upon and nothing to do but duck. As we rode on to the battalion, that afternoon of the sixteenth, I thought of how we would either speed up if fired upon or if too much fire how we would jump out and scramble into a ditch. I even asked Scho what he would do and told him to be ready to act if the occasion called for it.

We were not long in coming back to the company position of the 590th Battalion after leaving "Purple Heart Corner." I went in and asked about the situation and found that the Germans were closing in.

They told me I could not get through to the other two battalions—the 592nd and 589th. Later they were ordered to move the alternate positions and 592nd did, but only about one-half of the 589th got through.