Most newlyweds in 1947 chose beaches or mountain resorts for their honeymoon. Ernest Kreiling chose the foxholes, ruined towns, and military cemeteries of Western Europe. Two years after the end of World War II, the Bronze Star–decorated American veteran returned to the battlefields of France, Belgium, and Germany — this time with his new wife beside him and a LIFE magazine photographer named Anthony Linck following close behind.
Ernest had served in the U.S. Army from 1941 to 1945, fighting across the same European terrain he and his wife now explored by bicycle. The couple pedaled through the countryside, stopping at sites that held deep personal meaning for him. For his wife, each stop was a window into a chapter of her husband’s life she had never witnessed firsthand.
The tour was not purely somber. The couple interacted with local people along the way — French farmers, elderly villagers, and families who had lived through the same battles Ernest had fought. Some of those encounters carried real emotional weight, including reunions with French families he had met during the war.
Ernest also walked his wife through the practical realities of wartime survival. At one stream, he demonstrated how soldiers washed their socks in the field — a small, unglamorous detail that made the daily grind of combat life concrete and real.
Reconnecting with French civilians was a significant part of the trip. Ernest had forged bonds with local families during the fighting, and returning to see them in peacetime gave those relationships a new meaning. His wife met people who had sheltered, aided, or simply crossed paths with American soldiers during the darkest years of the occupation.
One of the most personal stops on the entire trip was the grave of Ernest’s best friend. Two years had passed since the end of the war, but the loss was still immediate. His wife stood beside him at the grave — a quiet, unscripted moment that Linck’s camera captured without ceremony.
Ernest retraced not just the battles but the quiet moments between them. He brought his wife to the hayloft where he and his fellow soldiers had spent Thanksgiving in 1944. During that winter, American forces were grinding through France and pushing toward Germany, and a barn loft was where the holiday meal happened — if there was one at all.
The couple moved between locations by bicycle and by train, navigating a Europe still visibly scarred by the war. Train stations, bridges, and roads carried the physical marks of bombing raids and artillery. Every platform they passed through, every valley they looked over, had been part of a larger theater of destruction just two years before.
Scattered across the landscape were the remnants of the fighting itself — wrecked jeeps, abandoned tanks, and downed aircraft. These were not museum exhibits. They sat where they had been left when the fighting stopped, rusting in fields and on roadsides.
Ernest returned to the specific field where he had taken his first prisoner during the war. It was a landmark moment for any soldier — the first time the enemy became a person rather than an abstract threat. Standing on that ground again, with his wife, gave the memory a different kind of weight.
The foxholes were still there, dug into the earth across northern France. Ernest climbed into the same holes he had once used for cover, and his wife climbed in with him. In one of the more striking moments of the trip, she placed a helmet on his head and laughed — standing in the very foxhole where he had first heard an enemy shell fly overhead.
The roads of the French countryside were lined with graves — both Allied and German. The couple rode past German burial sites on their bicycles, the markers standing just off the road in the same fields where men had died fighting on opposite sides.
Throughout the journey, the couple stopped frequently to speak with locals. Elderly French men and women remembered the occupation and the liberation with great clarity. For many of them, seeing an American veteran return — not as a soldier, but as a husband on his honeymoon — was its own kind of remarkable thing.
From high ground, Ernest pointed out the valleys below where specific engagements had taken place. These were not abstract points on a history map. He had been in those valleys, moving under fire, watching men fall. Standing above them in peacetime, showing his wife what those landscapes meant to him, was a different kind of reckoning.
Abandoned tanks — both German and American — dotted the countryside and remained accessible to anyone willing to climb on them. The Kreilings did exactly that, clambering up onto the hulls of machines that had been left behind when the armies moved on.
The destruction in the towns and villages was still widespread. Two years was not enough time to rebuild what years of artillery, bombs, and ground combat had reduced to rubble. The couple stood before the ruins of buildings and streets, taking in the scale of what total war had done to civilian communities.
Ernest and his wife also took time to speak directly with local communities. These conversations connected the personal story of one American veteran to the broader experience of European civilians who had endured occupation and combat on their own soil.
Train travel connected the larger legs of the journey. The rail network, heavily bombed during the war, was slowly returning to operation. Stations like Sarreguemines — close to the German border and heavily contested during the war — served as both transit hubs and living reminders of how thoroughly the fighting had reached into every corner of the region.
Navigation was a constant task. The couple relied on maps to move between sites, many of which were not tourist destinations in any traditional sense — just fields, streams, and tree lines that Ernest recognized from memory. Without a map and his own recollections, finding these places would have been nearly impossible.
Beyond the graves and foxholes, the wreckage of aircraft added another layer to the landscape. Downed planes had crashed in fields across France and Belgium, and many still lay where they had fallen. The Kreilings stopped to examine the debris of at least one such crash site during their tour.
When familiar landmarks were hard to identify or roads had been altered by bombing or reconstruction, the couple asked locals for directions. The people of rural France and Belgium proved willing to help, and many had their own connections to the events of the war that Ernest was retracing.
I think the author forgot to give titles on some photographs.
Wonderful if between us we can map his route.