The school master

That's the nickname the locals in the small German town gave the man. He is old, very old and has had the nickname forever, they say.

It is a tribute to both his eloquence and his air of self-importance, they tell us. At around age ninety or so, the self-importance has diminished quite a bit, we'd say.

As to his eloquence, we can say that his knowledge of English beats that of lots of younger Germans.

He learned English in the United States, a time he looks back on with fondness and happiness. His face lit up so much as he recounted going into town on the weekends for a dance with the pretty girls in Texas, for a beer or two, you get the impression he probably had the time of his life.

He was a prisoner of war at the time.

A farm boy, drafted into Hitler's army at age 18, he ended up in Normandy, in France, in a church tower, right there next to the bells.

That's where he and a buddy of the same age where doing their guard duty shift on June 6, 1944.
Night had fallen, and then parachutes began to fall out of the dark skies, first a few, then so many you could not count them.

He did not say whether they had shot at the men, or whether they had alerted their German troops. He did say that their only thought at some point was to get the hell out of the tower.

The fastest way down was the rope of the bell.

Which they took.

Once they were down, he told, his buddy pleaded him to stop for a moment. Very awkwardly, his buddy walked up to the lectern and ripped a page out of the Catholic mass book open on the page for Sunday mass.

He continued, "when my buddy had cleaned up himself, we left the church, and he threw the paper into some bushes."

Not long after this, they were caught by the Americans somewhere in the vicinity, in one of hedges that line the fields of Normandy, shipped to England and then on to the United States.

If his story is true, there is a mass book in a small church in France with one page missing.