The View From Ernie Pyle’s Pen

Excerpts from Ernie Pyle’s dispatches:

* From North Africa, 1943:

“I’ve written that war is not romantic when a person is in the midst of it. Nothing happened to change my feeling about that. But I will have to admit there was an exhilaration in it; an inner excitement that built up into a buoyant tenseness seldom achieved in peacetime.”

* “Gypsying around the front” in Tunisia:

“The danger came in spurts; discomfort was perpetual. Dirt and cold were almost constant. Outside of food and cigarettes there were none of the little things that made life normal back home. There were no chairs, lights, floors or tables. There wasn’t any place to set anything, or any store to buy things. There were no newspapers, milk, beds, sheets, radiators, beer, ice cream or hot water. A man just sort of existed, either standing up working or lying down sleeping. There was no pleasant in-between. The velvet was all gone from living.”

* Recovering from illness in a field hospital in Sicily, Pyle watched a chaplain praying over a badly wounded GI:

“When he had finished, the chaplain said, ‘John, you’re doing fine, you’re doing fine’ . . . the dying man was left utterly alone, just lying there on his litter on the ground, lying in an aisle, because the tent was full. Of course it couldn’t be otherwise, but the awful aloneness of that man as he went through the last few minutes of his life was what tormented me. I felt like going over and at least holding his hand while he died, but it would have been out of order and I didn’t do it. I wish now I had.”

* At Naples, combat veterans joked about the need for a “second draft” to get cooks, clerks and drivers to the front, but Pyle figured most would volunteer anyway:

“One of the paradoxes of war is that those in the rear want to get up into the fight, while those in the lines want to get out.”

* On a military policeman from New York:

“He was a coffee merchant by profession, a radio actor by avocation, and a soldier by the trend of events.”

* In Italy, he described “the look” of combat soldiers:

“Lack of sleep, tension for too long . . . fear beyond fear, misery to the point of numbness, a look of surpassing indifference to anything anybody can do to you.”

* After watching the D-day invasion from a ship, Pyle went ashore the next day and walked Omaha Beach. Despite sporadic hostile fire, he called it “a lovely day for strolling along the seashore”:

“Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead. . . . “

“Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out--one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.

“Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. . . . I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it and put it in my jacket. I carried it for half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down. . . . “

* In Normandy, Pyle helped some American soldiers carry German bodies to the site for a new cemetery:

“The boys made wisecracks along the way to cover up their distaste for the job. When we got to the field we weren’t sure where the lieutenant wanted the cemetery started. So we put our man down on the ground and went back for instructions. And as we walked away, the funny guy of the group turned and shook a finger at the dead German and said: ‘Now don’t you run away while we’re gone.’ ”

* In an unfinished column on the end of war in Europe, found in his pocket, Pyle told of having seen “dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them,” but told readers they need not think of that:

“To you at home . . . he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference. . . . “