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Once off the beach they drove into a field,where they assembled.
A number of French Resistance workers, all armed with rifles, came towards them.
They were told to cover the French and ordered to disarm them - much to the dismay
of the Resistance people. Then they remounted and set off for Hermanville.
All the time Bell, a good soldier as he was, kept them moving at a good clip.
As they approached the outskirts of the town, they saw 4 women at the gate of a
farm. One of them was obviously pregnant, and all of them began to wave, but
when the pregnant woman waved, she was suddenly set upon by the other three.
Baxter and Bell thought this odd, but decided that she was either married to a
German or that she was a collaborationist. Baxter remembers this conversation
because for the first time he and Bell had talked civilly to each other that
morning.

It was while he was thinking that maybe he and the sergeant were finally becoming
friendly that the next incident occurred. Their column was bing lead by a
dispatch rider. Suddenly the dispatch rider veered off the road and stopped,
because he had seen what he thought was amine -- or the impression of a mine lying
ahead in the road. The carrier in front came to a half and Sgt. Bell, [crossed out] [illegible] [end crossed out]
banging Baxter on the head with his fist, yelled, “Stop, stop, stop!”
Baxter at that moment knew that he could never be friends with Dinger Bell.

Then an engineer ahead moved out of the hedge and roared at the column, "Get on,
Get on, keep moving, what are you afraid of?" The column rattled on -- everybody
under the impression that at this pack they would be in Caen in a matter of hours.
Much later that evening, still in their carrier, they saw the formations of
planes and gliders passing over in the waning light , bringing in the reinforcements
of the 6th Airborne Landing Division. When they saw these planes, Bell and Baxter
for the moment forgot their antagonism again. Said Baxter,
"Serge, look at those,
German Paratroopers -- we've had it now." Said Bell: "If it is, we're in real
trouble." Then a dispatch rider driving down the road from vehicle to vehicle
yelled to them, "They're ours, they're ours." Some of the gliders landed within
2 or 3 hundred yards of them, and were hit by shell fire and began to burn.

They saw French women running towards the parachutists presumably to get the
silk the moment the troopers dropped their chutes. The other thing which
amazed Baxter during that day was to see French women calmly picking potatoes
in the fields whilst under mortar fire.

That night from high ground near Caen Canal, they could see the spires of the city
on one side, gliders burning on the other side, and around where they were there
were many dead, both British and German. Baxter decided that night that he
actually liked the sgt. but he never would tell himjust as long as he kept banging
him on his helmet and yelling "Bash on!"