Submitted by: agcomm,  Thu Dec 18 12:35:24 1997


Plains Folk: Christmas Eve, 1944
 
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
COPYRIGHT 1997 Plains Folk
  
     At Christmastime, 1944, around a Belgian convent called the
St. Elisabeth Kloster, the 18th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron
Mechanized was fighting the latter stages of the Battle of the
Bulge.  Inside the convent, squadron headquarters, a young
soldier-clerk from Hastings, Neb., was having a busy holiday,
shoveling through snowdrifts of orders directing the American
counter attack.
     Back home in Nebraska, where he had been born on his
parents' homestead, the clerk, Marvin Cruse, was regarded as an
eccentric.  A newspaper reporter, he moved around town in a
shuffling, stooped trot.  He covered the courthouse assiduously. 
During court proceedings he not only took his notes but also made
sketches of participants, showing quite a talent for caricature.
     All the time he was in the service, Cruse wrote faithfully
home to his mother and sister, Irma.  Irma dutifully pasted his
letters and enclosed sketches into scrapbooks which now grace the
collections of the Adams County Historical Society, Hastings. 
     The scrapbooks are how we know that on Christmas Eve, 1944,
Cruse was called upon by the senior sister of the convent, who
addressed him through an Army interpreter.  She recounted how
every year the nuns told the Christmas story to the orphans
sheltered in the convent, and how they illustrated the story with
Christmas cards placed into the shoes--sabots- -of the children.
     Now, after years of Nazi occupation, they were out of cards. 
The shops had not opened this year.  The sisters had but three
cards, and there were 16 children, or perhaps only 15, if the
child hit by mortar fire did not survive the night. 
     Someone had shown the sisters the colorful cards Cruse had
made to send to his family and friends back home in Nebraska. 
The old nun drew her three cards from the folds of her habit and
showed them, tan around the edges, to Cruse.  Could he make cards
like these for the children?
     The soldier Cruse found the situation uncomfortable. 
Outside, the men of his squadron were fighting not only the enemy
but also a blizzard.  Here he was in the relative comfort of
headquarters, and now the nuns wanted him to lay aside his duties
and draw pictures.  He was about to tell them no.
     But the old nun was insistent.  Leaning toward him,
disregarding the interpreter, she said directly to Cruse, "Zur
Verpflichtung der Jugend," a phrase the soldier was given to
understand as something like, "For the sake of the children." 
     So Cruse made the cards, and perhaps yet today they rest
between the pages of old scrapbooks somewhere in Belgium, as his
letters rest in Nebraska. 
     Marvin Cruse returned home to Nebraska after the war, worked
on several newspapers in Nebraska and Illinois, never married,
and died in 1974 in a veteran's hospital in Waukegan, Ill.  I
have always thought, after contemplating his papers, that the
Belgian Christmas of 1944 was the most sublime moment of his
life.
                              ###
NDSU Agriculture Communication
Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866