Nothing could be farther from my wish or my intention than to publish an evaluation, let alone a criticism, of the Quartermaster Corps of the United States Army. It has warmed my belly and my heart at odd hours and in odd places, and if as a whole it sometimes seemed a little lacking in imagination, it was also capable on occasion of strokes of unexpected originality and brilliance.
It was thus that the QMC, last winter in the Vosges, scored an extraordinary triumph in the field of counter-intelligence, and this while employing one of its least appreciated weapons—C rations, in cans. The story was told me at Sixth Army Group Headquarters, and I have every reason to believe that it is true.
It appears that a German officer who had lived in America before the war somehow secured, for purposes of espionage, the uniform of an American lieutenant colonel and (which was a good deal more difficult) a jeep, which he hid in a wood behind the American lines. From time to time he would slip through the lines after nightfall and emerge from the wood at dawn, with jeep, uniform, and forged papers all in proper order. He would then proceed to visit all of the near-by enclosures in which German prisoners were kept, asking in each case to interview, for reasons of highly secret intelligence, the German officers who had been taken prisoner during the preceding three or four days.
He had apparently been carrying on this work successfully for some time when he ran into nemesis in the form of a QMC lieutenant. Arriving at a prisoner-of-war cage at noon, he found the American officers just sitting down to lunch, and was so cordially and insistently invited to join them that he found it impossible to refuse. C rations were served, and the German, who had gone along swimmingly until then, tasted them and remarked, casually but appreciatively, “Isn't this delicious?”
At which point the QMC lieutenant who was present got to his feet and pushed a .45 under the German's nose.
A quick investigation followed and within ten minutes the German was behind bars. The lieutenant was asked how he had been so certain that the impeccable colonel was a fraud.
“Well,” he said, “I've had a hell of a lot of people tell me that C rations were delicious, but that s.o.b. really meant it.”
Perhaps, in reality, it is not much of a compliment to army food to say that the Germans liked the little of it that they saw. The Germans have never gone overboard for much in the way of cooking except Säuerbraten and dumplings, but their soldiers would always take extraordinary risks in order to capture even small quantities of American rations. Many of those of us who landed in southern France were delighted to reciprocate, and I can recall more than one agreeable luncheon made up of captured Zwiebach and captured Emmenthaler cheese, washed down with one of the heady little vins rosés that they make on the Riviera, at Taradeau neat. Draguignan, for example.
The French impression of American army food was, on the other hand, a rather mixed one, and when a French WAC (or AFAT) lieutenant once assured me that we had a ravitaillement fou she was speaking, I am sure, in admiration tinged just a bit with sarcasm. A good many French units were under American command and therefore drew their supplies from American ration points or QMC depots. In general, they were amazed by the quantities they received of sugar and white flour, astonished by such novelties as dehydrated eggs (which they soon learned to use with surpassing skill), surprised by the excellence of refrigerated meat, disappointed to receive almost no salad oil. Tomato juice they took to be a wretched substitute for red wine, but they had nothing but praise for the canned fruit, especially the canned pineapple which they were issued. They put their cereal breakfast food in consommé (a little bewildered by the amounts of it they were given); they found the canned vegetables almost inedible, and canned corn altogether useless, until they learned they could trade it to peasants as chicken feed in exchange for a certain number of live chickens. Canned sweet potatoes, and the dehydrated cranberry sauce which they, like everyone else, received at Thanksgiving and Christmas, they attempted to use as pastry filler, with no great measure of success; they felt about peanut butter as a good many Americans feel about snails and sea urchins—that it was to be treated as an experience, not a food.
In addition, a fair amount of hilarious confusion was created by the fact that army canned goods are generally not labeled. Mess sergeants eventually learn to decipher the odd hieroglyphics stamped into the ends of cans (GPFJU means grapefruit juice, for example), but for all the good these did the French they might as well have been written in ancient Hebrew. I have seen a French army cook give up his search for confiture in despair and rage, after opening, in succession, cans of catsup, peanut butter, mixed relish, and pickled beets.
Most French combat troops, including the Colonials, had the lowest possible opinion of K rations (an opinion fully shared, I may add, by the majority of Americans), and in sectors where foraging was at all possible, most of the grim little waxed boxes issued to French troops went to the civilian population in exchange for something in the way of a less monotonous and less scientifically balanced diet.
The ubiquitous Vienna sausages, the sausage meat in cans, and the eternal Spam were not too unfavorably received by the French at the beginning, but even the resources of the French cuisine were exhausted at length, and the stuff began to pall on them as it did on us. Luckily they discovered, early in the game, that Spam makes a not unacceptable stuffing for choux farcis, that out of chopped fresh cabbage and Vienna sausages something could be produced that was fairly comparable to choucroute alsacienne, and that sausage meat, sliced thinly, dipped in a batter of powdered eggs, and fried, would get by at least once a week if served between adequate hors d'oeuvres and a fair salad. All of this information passed rapidly from one French popote to another, and made the life of the junior officer in each mess tolerable, if not always agreeable.
There are few things so completely French and so pleasant as a French officers' popote in a quiet sector, especially the regimental popotes of a crack division, when there is not too much action and the officers can take a couple of hours off with a clear conscience. I suppose much of the charm would be lost in peacetime—the meals would be more standardized, the regimental raconteur would have no fresh incidents to work with, and the toubib, as they call the doctor, would not be able to comment on the courage of the petits he had cared for that day. But such messes, in wartime, are about the most cheerful and amusing places one is likely to find—so amusing, in fact, that many American officers unfamiliar with French character and with the French army, regarded them as frivolous and unmilitary.
To begin with, whenever it was at all possible, there was at least one woman present in uniform. Her rank was of no importance whatsoever and an AFAT typist would be seated with the field grade officers if she was attractive. Frenchmen always talk best when there are women around, and the presence even of a middle-aged nurse would always produce a little additional sparkle in the conversation.
Traditionally, the junior officer in a popote is mess officer. Actually, as might be expected, sergeants do most of the work. But the youngest officer is required to read the menu aloud at the beginning of each meal, with such comments or apologies as he feels appropriate, and the menu gets, from everybody present, an outspoken and extremely critical going-over. Actually the fare, in the vast majority of cases was astonishingly good, and even allowing for such local products as the mess sergeants could find, almost unrecognizable as GI. French officers who have private means often give their entire pay to the regimental mess fund, with the result that the wines and brandies served in a good popote are generally better than you can get these days in a first-class restaurant.
In a few isolated instances, inter-Allied messes acquired a well-deserved reputation for excellence. One of the best of these, prior to the invasion of France, was at Elmas, just outside Cagliari, in southern Sardinia. This was an important base for medium bombers, but fifty or sixty Italian officers had stayed on, maintaining all their little local combinazioni for procurement, and the whole kitchen staff intact. The result was something like what one used to get in the best Italian-American restaurants before the war, with fresh pasta every day, good Italian bread, a little Marsala occasionally used in the cooking, and a quite passable Sardinian wine on the table. Both the Italians and the Americans were delighted with the arrangement, and after two or three weeks of it they became fast friends. I once sat, at this mess, between an American colonel and an Italian major, fighter pilots both, who, two months before, had engaged in a thirty-minute dog-fight, to a draw.
Another such pleasant spot, especially during last winter's bitter weather, was the famous old Hôtel de la Cloche, in Dijon. This was an outstanding example of Allied cooperation at its best—the Americans ran the heating and the plumbing, and the French ran the mess. As a result, the Cloche was about the only place in central France where a man could be perfectly certain of a hot bath, a decent apéritif, a really good dinner, and a sound bottle of fairly priced wine. As such it was what the army used to call a “silver foxhole.”
Most of the really outstanding messes at which I had the good fortune to lunch or dine while overseas were, however, French. His love of la bonne chère is something that never seems to desert a Frenchman, even in combat areas, and I have heard infantrymen under fire planning to piquer (a maquis term which means “requisition”—the quotation marks are mine) a chicken for dinner and discussing how they proposed to cook it. When such unquenchable enthusiasm was combined, as it sometimes was, with the specialized knowledge of a competent mess officer, the results were something quite memorable.
The officers' mess at Orléans, one of the best in France, was run, for example, by Captain Vrinat—in happier days he had been the proprietor of a little hotel in St. Quentin which, in the Guide Michelin, had two well-merited stars for the excellence of its cuisine. His commanding officer at Orléans gave him a car and a good deal of liberty. Before long the mess had a collection of Burgundies, Vouvrays, and Cognacs of which a great restaurant could well have been proud, plus little local cheeses and patés de campagne such as, alas, you can no longer find in France except in farmers' homes.
Despite everything that has been written about French undernourishment and starvation (much of which, especially as concerns the north of France, Paris, Marseille, and the Riviera, is tragically true), there are considerable areas in France where food supplies are not too far from normal and where, in the small towns and villages, one eats well. This is especially the case along the whole Atlantic seaboard south of the Loire—the Vendée, the Deux Sèvres, the Charentes, and the Gironde. The great Allied sweep through France in the summer of '44 left behind it in this district a whole series of small enemy pockets which, until March of this year, remained pretty well forgotten and which were contained almost entirely by French troops, largely the poorly equipped troops of the maquis. Most of these had never heard of the U. S. Quartermaster Corps—they lived off the country, and lived well.
One of the most famous of the maquis leaders was a young career officer, Colonel de Milleret, who was not only a first-class soldier but a “short snorter,” an excellent host, and a great lover of good wine. Working under cover during the German occupation, and using his nom de guerre, Colonel “Carnot,” he had recruited an entire brigade of tough maquisards in the Pyrenees and Landes and gone into action shortly after the first Allied landings in France. The brigade liberated Bordeaux and then proceeded to drive the Germans northward through the Médoc, fortunately with almost no damage to the vines. The Germans settled down in heavily fortified positions in the Pointe de Grave, and Colonel “Carnot,” having no artillery, settled down to an eight months' siege. Meanwhile, he could see no reason why his officers should not be properly fed. He accordingly requisitioned the best restaurant of Bordeaux and perhaps of France—the ancient, august, and famous Chapon Fin.
Not even four years of German thirst during the occupation had served materially to deplete the Chapon Fin's great cellar, and the quality of the cuisine was remarkably close to what it used to be before the war. Meat was occasionally short, sugar often unavailable, and the “coffee” as everywhere in France, was made of toasted barley—“le café du Maréchal,” as they like to call it. But in exchange there were crevettes grises, the delicious little gray shrimps of the French coast, there were Arcachoan oysters, moules, and dry white Graves. There was even an occasional gigot of lamb with flageolets, such as I had not tasted since 1939. And there were, of course, the best clarets in the world.
Colonel “Carnot's” field headquarters was in the northern part of the Médoc, and the popote was about two miles, as the crow flies, from Chateau Mouton Rothschild. It was there one evening over a good bottle and after a day's inspection tour of the front lines, that a French captain told me an amusing little anecdote which he attributed to a French general famous for his sharp tongue.
The general, it appears, had been asked by a group of officer candidates for his advice, as to what arm of the service they should join. He looked them over with a fairly jaundiced eye. and said,
“If you are intelligent, join the cavalry—you'll be the only one….
“If you are rich, join the infantry—you'll be the only….
“If you are élégant, join the engineers—you'll be the only one….
“If you are adroit, join the artillery—you'll be the only one….”
My friend the captain thought this over for a moment, smiled, and raised his glass. “The general forgot one important thing,” he said. “If you are a dyspeptic or a prohibitionist, join the maquisards—you'll be the only one….”