"There will be a slight delay while we get our helmets on..." by Zen Karp (excerpt from H.L.I. and WWII)

"There will be a slight delay while we get our helmets on..."

The burial party looked up to the sky, responding automatically to the peculiar sound of air being cut through by one or more shells sailing in a gentle arc towards them. Trying to maintain an air of placid reflection, Padre Jock exclaimed to the small group:
"There will now be a slight delay while we get our helmets on..."
Later in life, an officer named Bill Rollufson would joke about the moment he shared with Jock. It was an incident looked on with dark humor, but also a grim irony that the sound of a mortar shell may have been the last thing the young rifleman who died may have heard.
Jock received his initiation of combat at Les Buissance as much as any rifleman. For him, it meant a body wrapped in a blanket and a standard military burial. Some of the casualties he knew very well, and the faces of the soldiers were mostly recognizable as they had all been together in England. From Les Buissance to the end of the war, it would be the burden of Padre Jock Anderson to see the remains of each and every man to die in the HLI of C.
Private Nels Hilborn had dug in with mortar platoon inside the village. They would also suffer their first losses in this village:
"Mortar platoon's first death was Private Lawrence S. Butters. He was sitting on the edge of his slit trench when an 88 shell landed and took his leg off. We tried to stop the bleeding but we couldn't, so he died. We buried him right there...It was hell at that damn orchard."
For mortar platoon, and for the rest of the battalion, their greatest sufferings yet were to come.
The rifle companies had dug slit trenches along hedge lines and in the apple orchards within the tiny hamlet, which was nothing more than a few buildings and barns separated by old walls and fences. In the front line trenches, a soldier could see to their immediate front open fields of short, unripe wheat. Visibility was clear for both sides, clear to the enemy.
Maps showed Buron to be made up of several dozen buildings, much larger than the two tiny hamlets which the 9th Brigade occupied. The tower of Buron's single chateau could be seen from Les Buissance, and a large ancient wall surrounded much of the oldest portion of the village. In front of the village, outside the wall, was a perpendicular running road with several houses dotted alongside it. Also outside of the wall, but on the opposite end, grew the ubiquitous apple orchards of the region.
At any time, an observer in Les Buissance's church tower could plainly see enemy activity in Buron. An ambulance provided regular shuttle service for clearly unwounded German personnel, but no one on the HLI of C side would do anything about it. Other daily activities were observed and sometimes the 3" mortars would a mission just to keep the Germans as harassed as they were.