Worm's Eye Ernie's War

By John Skow

Ernie Pyle, the best-known, most-admired newspaper correspondent of World War II, spent most of his time with the infantry, often in the front lines and under fire. He wrote down the names and hometowns of G.I.s he found eating cold C rations in muddy foxholes, and his stories rarely mentioned anyone above the rank of captain. It was, as he said, a "worm's-eye view" of the war, and in this deftly edited collection of his dispatches, Pyle's view of what is now an ancient campaign returns as a haunting narrative. A column written from Tunisia in 1943 was titled "The God-Damned Infantry" -- rough language for those days -- and it told of an endless line of bone-tired foot soldiers slogging forward across rolling hills after four days of battle.

"Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary . . . Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion. On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing. They don't slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged . . . All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men."

There is a dogged quality to this gentle description, an absolute determination not to let go of the reader before he is made to understand what these infantrymen are enduring. Pyle himself, like the soldiers he covered, was new to war, and only recently rid of the romantic, patriotic belligerence of the Stateside noncombatant. His writing at this period sometimes lapsed into a chatty journalese. A few months before, in Algeria, sounding like a reporter quoting a football coach, he had written cheerily of wounded soldiers who were "busting to get back into the fray again." This was the conventional remark to make about wounded soldiers. But the peppy "busting" clanks falsely against the too elegant "fray," and what is suggested is a well-meaning visitor standing ill at ease in a hospital ward, not knowing what to say.

The North African campaign against Rommel's troops taught Pyle how to write about the dead. A long, impressionistic list of what war was composed of ("blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tents") ended with the words "and of graves and graves and graves."

Anyone who is good with words can manufacture eloquence when it is required, but by now the war had burned away this old feature writer's professional glibness. What Pyle had begun to send back home was some of the finest war reporting ever done. His folksiness fit the slow, edgy lulls between battles, and he knew how to suggest, in spare language that avoided Hemingway's staginess but clearly was learned from the early best of Hemingway, how it felt to stumble through the bloody fog of war.

There was no bravado to his own courage, and his stories never hid his fear when, as happened regularly, he had been shelled or bombed or shot at. Now and then he described someone who had done something crazily brave, but more often he stuck to his worm's-eye view. His heroes were men who were cold and numb from fatigue but who went on doing jobs that frightened them. He went on doing his own job, writing down names and hometowns through the Sicilian campaign, through the protracted horror of Anzio, through the invasion of Normandy from D-day plus one. By this time his dispatches carried the clear confidence that the Allies would win, but there was a dark undertone, the knowledge that he was taking too many chances.

When he returned to the U.S. after the liberation of Paris, rattled and shaky and drinking too much, he was greeted as a hero. He had a private audience with Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Chesterfield paid him $1,000 to pose for a cigarette ad. He had become a public person, though the truth was that his private life in the U.S. had long since turned thin and bitter. Even before the war his marriage had soured. He was impotent, as the editor of this moving collection relates in a melancholy biographical sketch, and his wife Jerry was suicidal and spent much of the war years in mental hospitals.

Pyle wrote that war for him had become "a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit." But he went back to war, this time in the Pacific. As he boarded ship, a 50-piece band played in his honor. In the Pacific theater by January of 1945, he found Navy life embarrassingly soft. He had time to describe the routine on an aircraft carrier and to land with the Marines on Okinawa. Then, on April 18, 1945, on the small island of Ie Shima, he was killed by a sniper's bullet. An unfinished column found on his body brooded about the dead, "in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous . . . in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them." A wooden sign hammered into the ground near the site of his death read, AT THIS SPOT THE 77TH INFANTRY DIVISION LOST A BUDDY.