In the winter of 1944 during World War II, I was in France, a platoon sergeant in the Yankee Division under General Patton. About mid-December I received a letter from my mother back in the States.<\/p>\n
“Can you remember,” she asked, “where you were on Thanksgiving Day?”<\/p>\n
Could I remember?<\/em> How could I forget the odd thing that happened that day. At dawn I was sent to check out a crossroads where an enemy strongpoint was suspected. Normally I would have had my men fan out so that they could move with the cover of the trees. But just before we started out that Thanksgiving morning, I stopped. I stood stark still, arguing with myself about what I should do.<\/p>\n Then, going strictly against the book, I walked my men right down the middle of a road in an exposed column. No one fired at us; there was no evidence of the enemy. We found the crossroads unoccupied and turned to walk back. <\/p>\n There, on the backside of the trees where only the German soldiers would have seen, were signs cautioning minen.<\/em> The woods were mined. We could have been blown to bits!<\/p>\n Mother’s letter continued. She told me how she awakened after midnight on Thanksgiving Eve when it would have been daylight in France:<\/p>\n “I had a strong feeling that you were in great danger,” she wrote. “When I opened my Bible, a phrase in Second Chronicles [20:17] gleamed on the page: ‘Stand ye still and see the salvation of the Lord with you…’”<\/p>\n Stand ye still. Stark still.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the winter of 1944 during World War II, I was in France, a platoon sergeant in the Yankee Division under General Patton. About mid-December I received a letter from my mother back in the States. “Can you remember,” she asked, “where you were on Thanksgiving Day?” Could I remember? How could I forget the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[150],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[2025],"class_list":["post-15740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gods-grace"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n