Four Thousand Men

Captain Lewis Harlan learned of the sinking of the Léopoldville between the turkey and the pudding, from a Signal Corps lieutenant who bent to the ear of the colonel on his left and spoke too low to be heard, but not quite low enough.

It was a little after seven in the evening, December 24, 1944, in the officers' mess of the Normandy Base Section, in Cherbourg. The mess took up the ballroom of an old harbor hotel; the Germans had ripped out the chandeliers, and the Americans had replaced them with bare bulbs hanging from wires. Somebody had put holly on the tables, candles in tin cans, a crèche made by the engineers' carpenters. A phonograph was playing Bing Crosby records someone had gotten from home. There was French wine, a lot of it, and the officers were laughing louder than usual because it was Christmas Eve and they were far away.