Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
When my Father was a Police Officer in Marseilles
In 1945 The War was over
The survivors were trying to make life work
And occupation forces here and there were set
To guard the roads, the rails, the city streets
And so it was that Master Sergeant Hall -
Normandy, the Moselle, Belgium and the Bulge,
Munich, Dachau, Thuringen, and Zwickau -
Was sent to old Marseilles to be a cop
A watch commander, assigning patrols
And sending men to their various posts
Even to directing traffic in the streets
There was a complaint from a traffic hub:
The American soldier in charge there -
Sometimes he chose to block all traffic there
And swagger about and cuss ‘em out
Then laugh, and all at once turn ‘em loose again
And then one day there came an alarm:
Machine guns shooting at that intersection
A soldier from the colonies gone wild
And murdering people in the street
They sped to the scene, the scene of horror
And helped - but they could not find their soldier
Posted there at the beginning of the watch
Was he among the dead? The wounded? Where?
And they didn’t know until the end of the day
After the soldier returned, alive and well:
“When the shooting started, I ran down the street,
Found another spot, and directed traffic there.”
Note: As remembered, which makes this a secondary source, and adapted loosely to iambs. The quote from the soldier on traffic control, whose name I don't remember, was something like, "Well, Sergeant, when all that shooting started I ran like H*** down the street a few blocks, found me another intersection, and started directing traffic there."
I do not know if this soldier was the one whom on another occasion my father found blocking all the traffic at an intersection (I infer that it was a hub and possibly a traffic roundabout, with five or more streets meeting), striding around cussing everyone, then standing off out of the way and blowing his whistle for ALL the traffic to resume, and laughing at the chaos.
