Back at Mon Repos in Normandy with the screenwriters of Brooksfilms production of The Elephant Man, Eric Bergren （right） and Christopher De Vore （left）。
* * *
—
There is more to this story than just being a soldier learning how to be a combat engineer in a little farmhouse in Normandy. Because, if I may digress, some thirty-five years later I had created a company called Brooksfilms and we were busy with David Lynch at the helm making a film called The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man screenplay was written by Eric Bergren and Christopher De Vore, based on the book by Frederick Treves. I was in England, where the sets were in the last stages of construction at Shepperton Studios. It would be ten days or so before we were to start shooting, so I had a brilliant idea. Eric and Chris had done such a wonderful job on the screenplay, and I was thinking of what I could do to give them a little extra something. And then it hit me. Bang! Why not go back to that little village of Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie and show them Mon Repos, the little farmhouse that I had trained in? The writers loved the idea of the trip. So before you could turn around we were on a ferry, then on a train to Paris, and from our hotel in Paris we hired a car for the journey to Normandy.
After a couple of hours we arrived. I got chills seeing that same little sign, MON REPOS, as we entered the property. The farmhouse had been repainted and a few things changed, but it was mostly just like I remembered as a kid in uniform back then. I knocked on the door. It opened to reveal a huge man sporting a big black beard framed in the doorway. I said in halting French, “J’étais un soldat en quarante-cinq stationné ici dans cette chambre à l’étage.” In English, “I was a soldier back in forty-five stationed here in that bedroom upstairs.” His eyes widened, he swallowed hard and shouted, “Mon dieu! Private Mel?”
And I replied, “Petit Henri?” He crushed me in his big bearlike arms. Little Henri was no longer petite.
It was one of the best afternoons I’ve ever spent. Henri showed us around. He took me to the little apple tree on the property that I used to eat green apples from （forgetting my vow at Camp Sussex never to eat little green apples again）。 It was now a huge tree sporting hundreds of apples. He fêted us with all kinds of charcuterie and fromage （which they were still making） and topped it all off with a toast with the great French apple brandy that Normandy is known for, calvados.
Okay, digression over. Back to being a soldier learning how to be a combat engineer.
* * *
—
We were taught to safely unearth land mines. Some of them were big and some of them were smaller. The big ones were called Teller mines. They are either named after a guy named Teller, or Teller could be a big dinner plate in German. Either way, they carried a lot of explosives in them. You would have to probe the earth lightly with your bayonet and if you heard Tink! Tink! Tink! you knew there was something dangerous underneath. You had to be very careful. So you would clear away the dirt and then ask the help of the one guy in your platoon who was an expert at defusing mines—who really knew what and where all the wires were. He would take out a whisk broom and lightly dust away the earth surrounding the mine and proceed to disengage the fuse. I couldn’t really see exactly what he was doing, because we were a good twenty yards away hunkered down beneath our steel helmets. Lucky for me, our expert always defused them without a mistake.
Other land mines were trickier. They were set up with trip wires. Soldiers could be walking, hit the trip wire near them, and then you’d hear a click and an S-mine, a canister filled with all kinds of shrapnel that we nicknamed a “Bouncing Betty,” bounced up about chest high and for a radius of twenty feet, destroyed anything around it. If you heard that click, you knew that the mine was in the air, and you hit the ground as quickly as you could and buried your face in the earth because it exploded in a conical manner, so as close as you could get to the ground, the safer you were. Running was not an option.
We were also taught to search and clear unoccupied houses of booby traps. What’s a booby trap? Well, for instance, if you were sitting on the john and pulled the chain behind you sometimes instead of the flushing sound you might hear a loud explosion and find yourself flying through the air. Which would mean that a booby trap was positioned in the water closet above the toilet. So before troops could occupy a domicile we had to be very sure it was cleared of booby traps.
Being a combat engineer was not easy, but one of the nice advantages was you didn’t have to carry an M1 Garand rifle, which was pretty heavy. You were supplied with an M1 carbine, which was a much lighter rifle and gave your shoulder a wonderful rest.