George Davis

            On Tuesday I finally memorized the fifteenth verse of “Ballade de la chnoufe” (Ballad of the Snuff) by Boris Vian. There are four verses left but some have repeated lines I already know and so it’s more like two more verses to learn. 

            I continued to search online for vintage photos to add to my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. I’ve got 120 so far. 

            I weighed 90.2 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since February 14. 

            I played my Kramer electric during song practice and it stayed in tune about every third song. I had my voice back after the stitches came out yesterday. For the last couple of weeks I’ve had to be careful not to stretch my mouth too much while singing and I couldn’t whistle at all. 

            Around midday I painted the second coat of Blue Bliss on the undersides of my upper shelves in the bathroom. It looks like two coats are enough and so tomorrow I’ll start painting the lower shelf.

            I weighed 90.75 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 90.55 kilos at 18:30. February 13 was the last evening when I was that easy on the scale. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:38. 

            I recorded from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity and then extracted to my hard drive a recording of my daughter Astrid and I talking and singing around Christmas of 1994. I tried it last night but thought there was something wrong so I tried again. But it came out at low volume again except that the parts that were from a pre-recorded documentary about China was loud and clear and so the problem seems to be with the original recording. Anyway it came out better than what I got from the cassette to MP3 converter. I might be able to clean it up later in Audacity. 

            I made a couple more sub-folders for photos in my SSD. 

            I boiled the good parts of three potatoes and then baked them in the oven with five-year-old cheddar on top. I had supper while watching season 1, episode 30 of Combat. 

            Saunders hurts his leg in a German attack and so he hitches a ride in an ambulance to the aid station in Orre. In the back is the doctor Captain August, his nurse and partner Lieutenant Ann Hunter, and a wounded patient on IV drip. 

            When he gets to Orre the aid station is gone but he thinks he can catch up as he splits from the ambulance. But then German bombers attack and Saunders gets knocked out. When he comes to he sees the ambulance is still there but when he goes to it there is only the patient inside. He changes the bottle on the man’s drip and then gets in the cab to start driving the ambulance out of Orre. On the way he sees the driver, August and Hunter and he orders them in the back even though he’s outranked by two of them. 

            On the road the ambulance blows a tire. Saunders confronts August about abandoning his patient. The captain argues that the soldier doesn’t have a prayer and he left to help the other men in the convoy who had a chance of survival. Saunders says he’s going to Layelle even though they have to go through German lines.

            After the tire is changed Saunders drives on but has to stop for a horse and wagon in the middle of the road. In the back is a dying old Frenchman who wants them to leave him there because he’s tired of the war. 

            Saunders explains to Jones the driver that he is risking court martial by being rough on the captain because he recognizes that he has combat fatigue and that’s the only way to get him out of it. If he gets enough spine to have Saunders arrested then he’s cured. 

            That night there is a rain storm and they get stuck in the mud. They spend the night in a nearby barn. Jones admits that he abandoned the ambulance out of cowardice. Saunders tells him it’s easy to run but if you stand your ground just once it becomes easier after that. Ann tells Saunders that August is a brilliant and dedicated neurosurgeon who before the war saved lives no one else could. She says the day of the landing at Normandy he crawled on his stomach and saved the lives of fifty men. But as the war went on and he started losing lives he gave up. 

            In the morning Saunders sees four German soldiers struggling to get the ambulance out of the mud and after they succeed Saunders guns them all down from the loft of the barn. The Germans have had plenty of opportunities to just shoot Saunders like that over the course of the war. He should be glad they were more merciful than he is. 

            On the last stretch to Layelle the Allies begin bombarding the Germans on the road but Saunders drives past them. At the hospital August is able to save his patient and himself. 

            The old Frenchman was played by George Davis who was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He started in Vaudeville and made his film debut in The Yellow Traffic in 1914. He co-starred in The Wagon Show and Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus.