NOTHING EVER SEEMED to go right for the 57th Division. It had come overseas just in time to take heavy casualties in the Battle of the Bulge; then, too-quickly strengthened with masses of new replacements, it had plodded through further combat in eastern France and in Germany, never doing badly but never doing especially well, until the war was over in May.

And by July of that year, when service with the Army of Occupation had begun to give every promise of turning into the best time of their lives—there were an extraordinary number of unattached girls in Germany then—all the men of the luckless 57th were loaded into freight trains and hauled back to France.