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During the latter days of the Sicilian campaign, I spent all my time with the combat engineers of two different divisions. The engineers were in it up to their ears. Scores of times during the Sicilian fighting I heard everybody from generals to privates remark that “This is certainly an engineers’ war.” And indeed it was. Every foot of our advance upon the gradually withdrawing enemy was measured by the speed with which our engineers could open the highways, clear the mines, and bypass the blown bridges.

Northeastern Sicily, where the mountains are close together and the valleys are steep and narrow, was ideal country for withdrawing, and the Germans made full use of it. They blew almost every bridge they crossed. In the American area alone they destroyed nearly 160 bridges. They mined the bypasses around the bridges, they mined the beaches, they even mined orchards and groves of trees that would be logical bivouacs for our troops.

All this didn’t fatally delay us, but it did give the Germans time for considerable escaping. The average blown bridge was fairly easy to bypass and we’d have the mines cleared and a rough trail gouged out by a bulldozer within a couple of hours; but now and then they’d pick a lulu of a spot which would take anywhere up to twenty-four hours to get around. And in reading of the work of these engineers you must understand that a 24-hour job over there would take many days in normal construction practice. The mine detector and the bulldozer were the two magic instruments of our engineering. As one sergeant said, “This has been a bulldozer campaign.”

In Sicily, our Army would have been as helpless without the bulldozer as it would have been without the jeep. The bridges in Sicily were blown much more completely than they were in Tunisia. Back there they’d just drop one span with explosives. But in Sicily they’d blow down the whole damned bridge, from abutment to abutment. They used as high as a thousand pounds of explosives to a bridge, and on one long, seven-span bridge they blew all seven spans. It was really senseless, and the pure waste of the thing outraged our engineers. Knocking down one or two spans would have delayed us just as much as destroying all of them.

The bridges of Sicily were graceful and beautiful old arches of stone or of brick-faced rubble fill, and shattering them so completely was something like chopping down a shade tree or defacing a church. They’ll all have to be rebuilt after the war and it’s going to take a lot more money to replace all those hundreds of spans than was really necessary. But I suppose the Germans and Italians figured dear old Uncle Sam would pay for it all, anyhow, so they might as well have their fun.

Frequently the Germans, by blowing up a road carved out of the side of a sheer cliff, caused us more trouble than by bridge-blowing. In those instances, it was often impossible to bypass at all, so traffic had to be held up until an emergency bridge could be thrown across the gap.

Once in a while we would come to a bridge that hadn’t been blown. Usually that was because the river bed was so flat, and bypassing so easy, it wasn’t worth wasting explosives. Driving across an occasional whole bridge used to make me feel queer, almost immoral. There was even one whole bridge the Germans didn’t count on our having. They had it all prepared for blowing and left one man behind to set off the charge at the last moment. But he never got it done. Our advance patrols spotted him and shot him dead.

The Germans were also more prodigal with mines in Sicily than they had been in Tunisia. Engineers of the Forty-fifth Division found one mine field, covering six acres, containing eight hundred mines. Our losses from mines were fairly heavy, especially among officers. They scouted ahead to survey demolitions, and ran into mines before the detecting parties got there.

The enemy hit two high spots in their demolition and mine-planting. One was when they dropped a fifty-yard strip of cliff-ledge coast road, overhanging the sea—with no possible way of bypassing. The other was when they planted mines along the road that crosses the lava beds in the foothills north of Mount Etna. The metal in the lava threw our mine detectors helter-skelter, and we had a terrible time finding the mines.

Sicily was known to be short of water in summertime, so our invasion forces brought enough water with them to last five days. In the case of the Forty-fifth Division, this amounted to 155,000 gallons, transported both in tanks and in individual five-gallon cans. There were three ships with tanks of 10,000 gallons each. On the transports there were 125,000 gallons, all in five-gallon cans. That meant that this one division brought with it from Africa 25,000 cans of water. And other divisions did the same.

Actually we didn’t have as much trouble finding water as we’d expected, and we needn’t have brought so much with us, but you never know. Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach, but I think you could almost say an army marches on its water. Without water you’re sunk. (As an old punster, how in the hell can you sink without water?)

Throughout the Sicilian campaign, the Forty-fifth Division used about 50,000 gallons of water a day, or two gallons per man. Just as a comparison, the daily water consumption in Las Vegas, New Mexico, a city of 12,000, is a million gallons a day, or almost a hundred gallons a person. Although the difference seems fantastic, still our troops used more than absolutely necessary, for an army can exist and fight on one gallon a day per man.

It fell to the engineers to provide water for the Army. Engineer officers scouted the country right behind the retiring enemy, looking for watering places. They always kept three water points set up constantly for each division—one for each of the three regiments—and usually a couple of extra ones. When a water point was found, the engineers wheeled in their portable purifying unit. This consisted of a motorized pump, a sand filter, a chlorinating machine, and a collapsible 3,000-gallon canvas tank which stood about shoulder-high when put up. Purified water was pumped into this canvas tank. Then all day and all night vehicles of the regiment from miles around lined up and filled their cans, tanks, and radiators.

Painted signs saying “Water Point,” with an arrow pointing the direction, were staked along the roads for miles around.

The sources of our water in Sicily were mainly wells, mountain springs, little streams, shell craters, and irrigation ditches. The engineers of the Forty-fifth Division found one shell crater that contained a broken water main, and the seepage into this crater provided water for days. They also discovered that some of Sicily’s dry river beds had underground streams flowing beneath them, and by drilling down a few feet they could pump up all they needed.

Another time they put pumps into a tiny little irrigation ditch only four inches deep and a foot wide. You wouldn’t have thought it would furnish enough water for a mule, yet it kept flowing and carried them safely through.

In their municipal water system the Sicilians used everything from modern twenty-inch cast-iron pipe down to primitive earthen aqueducts still surviving from Roman days. But our engineers made it a practice not to tap the local water supplies. We made a good many friends that way, for the Sicilians said the Germans used no such delicacy. In fact we leaned over the other way, and furnished water to scores of thousands of Sicilians whose supply had been shattered by bombing.

It didn’t make much difference what condition the water was in when we found it, for it was pumped through the filter machine and this took out the sediment. Then purifying substances were shot in as it passed through the pumps. The chlorine we injected came in powder form in one-gallon cans. We generally used one part of chlorine to a million parts of water. The Forty-fifth’s engineers had brought with them enough chlorine to last six months. In addition to chlorine, alum and soda ash were injected into the water. After a while we didn’t even notice the odd taste.

The Forty-fifth also brought along six complete water-purifying units and also a unit for distilling drinking water out of sea water. The latter never had to be used.

When he marches or goes into battle, an infantryman usually carries two canteens instead of one, but there in the hot summer it wasn’t unusual at all to see a soldier carrying six canteens tied to the end of a leather strap like a bunch of grapes—half his canteens being captured Italian ones covered with gray felt for keeping the water cool.

And, I might add out of the side of my mouth, if a person had got real nosey he might have discovered that a couple of those canteens, instead of holding our beautiful pure water, were bearing a strange red fluid known colloquially as “vino,” to be used, no doubt, for rubbing on fleabites.

I lived for a while on the Sicilian front with the 120th Engineers Battalion, attached to the Forty-fifth Division. The bulk of the 120th hailed from my adopted state of New Mexico. They were part of the old New Mexico outfit, most of which was lost on Bataan. It was good to get back to those slow-talking, wise and easy people of the desert, and good to speak of places like Las Cruces, Socorro, and Santa Rosa. It was good to find somebody who lived within sight of my own picket fence on the mesa.

The 120th was made up of Spanish Americans, Indians, straight New Mexicans, and a smattering of men from the East. It was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Frantz, who was superintendent of the Las Vegas (New Mexico) Light and Power Company before entering service. Colonel Frantz had then been in the Army for three years and had not been home during all that time. The Forty-fifth Division spent nearly two and a half years in training, and everybody almost went nuts thinking they’d never get overseas.

The strangest case of self-consciousness along that line that I’d run into was Captain Waldo Lowe of Las Cruces. He had had a chance to go home on furlough the previous Christmas, but didn’t because he was ashamed to be seen at home after spending two years in the Army and still not getting out of the United States. Then after he had leaped the overseas hurdle and felt qualified to go home he couldn’t get there, of course.

The executive officer of the unit was Major Jerry Hines, for many years athletic director of the New Mexico Aggies. Major Hines was expecting a football player in his family about mid-September. He said he hoped to get home in time to see him graduated from college.

Two of my Albuquerque home-towners were Captain James Bezemek, 2003 North 4th Street, whose father was county treasurer there, and Captain Richard Strong, 113 Harvard Street.

Captain Strong was company commander when I saw him, but shortly after was promoted to the battalion staff. He and his two sergeants had one of the narrowest escapes in the battalion when their jeep (which they’d abandoned for a magnificent ditch about two seconds before) got a direct hit from an “88” and blew all to pieces. The sergeants were Martin Quintana, who used to be a machinist for the Santa Fe at Albuquerque, and John W. Trujillo, of Socorro.

A few days later, a similar narrow-escape happened to Captain Ben Billups, of Alamogordo, when his brand-new amphibious jeep which he’d had just one day was hit and burned up. I would have been with him if I hadn’t got sick and gone to the hospital that morning.

It’s a smart guy who knows just when to get sick.

The unit’s losses from mines and shellfire were moderately heavy. Colonel Frantz estimated that half their work had been done under at least spasmodic shellfire, and at one time his engineers were eight and a half miles out ahead of the infantry.

The colonel himself was a big, drawling, typical Southwesterner whose stamina amazed everybody, for he was no spring chicken. During the critical periods he would be on the go till 4 a.m., snatch a couple of hours’ sleep on the ground, and be off again at seven.

In action, the officers just flopped down on the hard rocky ground like everybody else, but when they went into reserve they fixed up bedrolls on smooth places under trees, with blankets and mosquito nets. In fact a few of the battalion officers sported the luxury of white silk sheets. They found a torn parachute and, for the price of some canned food, got a Sicilian woman to cut it up and sew it into sheets for them.

A large percentage of the battalion spoke Spanish, and occasionally I heard some of the officers talking Spanish among themselves, just to keep in practice, I suppose. That New Mexico bunch missed more than anything, I believe, the Spanish dishes they were accustomed to back home. Their folks occasionally sent them cans of chili and peppers, and then they had a minor feast. Captain Pete Erwin, of Las Vegas and Santa Fe, had a quart of chicos—New Mexico dried corn—which he was saving for Christmas dinner.

You may seldom have seen it mentioned, but a map is as common a piece of equipment among front-line officers as a steel helmet. A combat officer would be absolutely useless without his map.

It is the job of the engineers to handle the maps for each division. Just as soon as a division advances to the edge of the territory covered by its maps, the map officer has to dig into his portable warehouse and fish out thousands of new maps. The immensity of the map program would amaze you. When they went to Sicily, the Forty-fifth Division brought along eighty-three tons of Sicilian maps! I forgot to ask how many individual maps that was, but it would surely run close to half a million.

The Forty-fifth’s maps were far superior to any we’d been using and here’s the reason: Formerly our maps were essentially based on old Italian maps. Then for months ahead of the invasion our reconnaissance planes flew over Sicily taking photographs. These photos were immediately flown across the Atlantic to Washington. There, if anything new was discovered in the photographs, it was superimposed on the maps.

They kept this process of correction open right up to the last minute. The Forty-fifth sailed from America only a short time before we invaded Sicily, and in the last week the Map Section in Washington printed, placed in waterproofed cases, and delivered to the boats those eighty-three tons of maps, hot off the presses.

The 120th Engineers went back into antiquity to solve one of their jobs. They were scouting for a bypass around a blown bridge when they stumbled onto a Roman stone road, centuries old. It had been long unused and was nearly covered with sand grass. They cleaned up the old highway, and used it for a mile and a half. If it hadn’t been for this antique road, it would have taken 400 men 12 hours to build a bypass. By using it, the job was done in 4 hours by 150 men.

The engineers were very careful throughout the campaign about tearing up native property. They used much extra labor and time to avoid damaging orchards, buildings or vineyards. Sometimes they’d build a road clear around an orchard rather than through it. Consideration like this helped make us many friends.

I met a bulldozer driver who operated his huge, clumsy machine with such utter skill that it was like watching a magician do card tricks. The driver was Joseph Campagnone, of 14 Middle Street, Newton, Massachusetts. He was an Italian who had emigrated to America about seven years before, when he was sixteen years old. He was all American when I met him. A brother of his in the Italian Army had been captured by the British in Egypt. His mother and sisters lived near Naples, and he hoped to see them before the war was over. I asked Joe if he had a funny feeling about fighting his own people and he said, “No, I guess we’ve got to fight somebody and it might as well be them as anybody else.”

Campagnone had been a “cat” driver ever since he started working. I sat and watched him for two hours one afternoon while he ate away a rocky bank overhanging a blown road, and worked the stone into the huge hole until the road was ready for traffic again. He was so astonishingly adept at manipulating the big machine that groups of soldiers and officers gathered at the crater’s edge to admire and comment.

Joe had one close shave. He was bulldozing a bypass around a blown bridge when the blade of his machine hit a mine. The explosion blew him off and stunned him, but he was not wounded. The driverless dozer continued to run and drove itself over a fifty-foot cliff, turning a somersault as it fell. It landed right side up with the engine still going.

Our troops along the coast occasionally got a chance to bathe in the Mediterranean. (As an incidental statistic, during the campaign the engineers cleared mines off a total of seven miles of beaches just so the soldiers could get down to the water to swim.) Up in the mountains I saw hundreds of soldiers, stark-naked, bathing in Sicilian horse troughs or out of their steel helmets. The American soldier has a fundamental complex about bodily cleanliness which is considered all nonsense by us philosophers of the Great Unwashed, which includes Arabs, Sicilians and me.

When the Forty-fifth Division went into reserve along the north coast of Sicily after several weeks of hard fighting, I moved on with the Third Division, which took up the ax and drove the enemy on to Messina.

It was on my very first day with the Third that we hit the most difficult and spectacular engineering job of the Sicilian campaign. You may remember Point Calava from the newspaper maps. It is a great stub of rock that sticks out into the sea, forming a high ridge running back into the interior. The coast highway is tunneled through this big rock, and on either side of the tunnel the road sticks out like a shelf on the sheer rock wall. Our engineers figured the Germans would blow the tunnel entrance to seal it up. But they didn’t. They had an even better idea. They picked out a spot about fifty feet beyond the tunnel mouth and blew a hole 150 feet long in the road shelf. They blew it so deeply and thoroughly that a stone dropped into it would never have stopped rolling until it bounced into the sea a couple of hundred feet below.

We were beautifully bottlenecked. We couldn’t bypass around the rock, for it dropped sheer into the sea. We couldn’t bypass over the mountain; that would have taken weeks. We couldn’t fill the hole, for the fill would keep sliding off into the water.

All the engineers could do was bridge it, and that was a hell of a job. But bridge it they did, and in only twenty-four hours.

When the first engineer officers went up to inspect the tunnel, I went with them. We had to leave the jeep at a blown bridge and walk the last four miles uphill. We went with an infantry battalion that was following the retreating Germans.

When we got there we found the tunnel floor mined. But each spot where they’d dug into the hard rock floor left its telltale mark, so it was no job for the engineers to uncover and unscrew the detonators of scores of mines. Then we went on through to the vast hole beyond, and the engineering officers began making their calculations.

As they did so, the regiment of infantry crawled across the chasm, one man at a time. A man could just barely make it on foot by holding on to the rock juttings and practically crawling. Then another regiment, with only what weapons and provisions they could carry on their backs, went up over the ridge and took out after the evacuating enemy. Before another twenty-four hours, the two regiments would be twenty miles ahead of us and in contact with the enemy, so getting that hole bridged and supplies and supporting guns to them was indeed a matter of life and death.

It was around 2 p.m. when we got there and in two hours the little platform of highway at the crater mouth resembled a littered street in front of a burning building. Air hoses covered the ground, serpentined over each other. Three big air compressors were parked side by side, their engines cutting off and on in that erratically deliberate manner of air compressors, and jackhammers clattered their nerve-shattering din.

Bulldozers came to clear off the stone-blocked highway at the crater edge. Trucks, with long trailers bearing railroad irons and huge timbers, came and unloaded. Steel cable was brought up, and kegs of spikes, and all kinds of crowbars and sledges.

The thousands of vehicles of the division were halted some ten miles back in order to keep the highway clear for the engineers. One platoon of men at a time worked in the hole. There was no use throwing in the whole company, for there was room for only so many.

At suppertime, hot rations were brought up by truck. The Third Division engineers went on K ration at noon but morning and evening hot food was got up to them, regardless of the difficulty. For men working the way those boys were, the hot food was a military necessity. By dusk the work was in full swing and half the men were stripped to the waist.

The night air of the Mediterranean was tropical. The moon came out at twilight and extended our light for a little while. The moon was still new and pale, and transient, high-flying clouds brushed it and scattered shadows down on us. Then its frail light went out, and the blinding nightlong darkness settled over the grim abyss. But the work never slowed nor halted throughout the night.

The other men of the Third Division didn’t just sit and twiddle their thumbs while all this was going on. The infantry continued to get across on foot and follow after the Germans. Some supplies and guns were sent around the road block by boat, and even some of the engineers themselves continued on ahead by boat. They had discovered other craters blown in the road several miles ahead. These were smaller ones that could be filled in by a bulldozer except that they couldn’t get a bulldozer across that vast hole they were trying to bridge. So the engineers commandeered two little Sicilian fishing boats about twice the size of rowboats. They lashed them together, nailed planking across them, and ran the bulldozer onto this improvised barge. They tied an amphibious jeep in front of it, and went chugging around Point Calava at about one mile an hour.

As we looked down at them laboring along so slowly. Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Bingham, commanding officer of the Third Division’s 10th Engineers, grinned and said, “There goes the engineers’ homemade Navy.”

During the night the real Navy had carried forward supplies and guns in armed landing craft. These were the cause of a funny incident around midnight. Our engineers had drilled and laid blasting charges to blow off part of the rock wall that overhung the Point Calava crater.

When all was ready, everybody went back in the tunnel to get out of the way. When the blast went off, the whole mountain shook and we quivered too—with positive belief that the tunnel was coming down. The noise there in the silent night was shocking.

Now just as this happened, a small fleet of naval craft was passing in the darkness, just offshore. The sudden blast alarmed them. They apparently thought they were being fired upon from the shore. For just as our men were returning to their work at the crater edge, there came ringing up from the dark water below, so clear it sounded like an execution order, the resounding naval command, “Prepare to return fire.”

Boy, you should have seen our men scatter! They hit the ground and scampered back into the tunnel as though Stukas were diving on them. We don’t know to this day exactly what happened out there, but we do know the Navy never did fire.

Around 10:30 Major General Lucian Truscott, commanding the Third Division, came up to see how the work was coming along. Bridging that hole was his main interest in life right then. He couldn’t help any, of course, but somehow he couldn’t bear to leave. He stood around and talked to officers, and after a while he went off a few feet to one side and sat down on the ground and lit a cigarette.

A moment later, a passing soldier saw the glow and leaned over and said, “Hey, gimme a light, will you?” The general did and the soldier never knew he had been ordering the general around.

General Truscott, like many men of great action, had the ability to refresh himself by tiny catnaps of five or ten minutes. So instead of going back to his command post and going to bed, he stretched out there against some rocks and dozed off. One of the working engineers came past, dragging some air hose. It got tangled up in the general’s feet. The tired soldier was annoyed, and he said crossly to the dark, anonymous figure on the ground, “If you’re not working, get the hell out of the way.”

The general got up and moved farther back without saying a word.

The men worked on and on, and every one of the company officers stayed throughout the night just to be there to make decisions when difficulties arose. But I got so sleepy I couldn’t stand it, and I caught a commuting truck back to the company camp and turned in. An hour before daylight I heard them rout out a platoon that had been resting. They ate breakfast noisily, loaded into trucks, and were off just at dawn. A little later three truckloads of tired men pulled into camp, gobbled some breakfast, and fell into their blankets on the ground. The feverish attack on that vital highway obstruction had not lagged a moment during the whole night.

It wasn’t long after dawn when I returned to the crater. At first glance it didn’t look as though much had been accomplished, but an engineer’s eye would have seen that the ground-work was all laid. They had drilled and blasted two holes far down the jagged slope. These were to hold the heavy uprights so they wouldn’t slide downhill when weight was applied. The far side of the crater had been blasted out and leveled off so it formed a road across about one-third of the hole. Small ledges had been jackhammered at each end of the crater and timbers bolted into them, forming abutments of the bridge that was to come. Steel hooks had been embedded deep in the rock to hold wire cables. At the tunnel mouth lay great timbers, two feet square, and other big lengths of timber bolted together to make them long enough to span the hole.

At about 10 a.m. the huge uprights were slid down the bank, caught by a group of men clinging to the steep slope below, and their ends worked into the blasted holes. Then the uprights were brought into place by men on the banks, pulling on ropes tied to the timbers. Similar heavy beams were slowly and cautiously worked out from the bank until their tops rested on the uprights.

A half-naked soldier, doing practically a wire-walking act, edged out over the timber and with an air-driven bit bored a long hole down through two timbers. Then he hammered a steel rod into it, tying them together. Others added more bracing, nailing the parts together with huge spikes driven in by sledge hammers. Then the engineers slung steel cable from one end of the crater to the other, wrapped it around the upright stanchions and drew it tight with a winch mounted on a truck. Now came a Chinese coolie scene as shirtless, sweating soldiers—twenty men to each of the long, spliced timbers—carried and slid their burdens out across the chasm, resting them on the two wooden spans just erected. They sagged in the middle, but still the cable beneath took most of the strain. They laid ten of the big timbers across and the bridge began to take shape. Big stringers were bolted down, heavy flooring was carried on and nailed to the stringers. Men built up the approaches with stones. The bridge was almost ready.

Around 11 a.m., jeeps had begun to line up at the far end of the tunnel. They carried reconnaissance platoons, machine gunners and boxes of ammunition. They’d been given No. 1 priority to cross the bridge. Major General Truscott arrived again and sat on a log talking with the engineering officers, waiting patiently. Around dusk of the day before, the engineers had told me they’d have jeeps across the crater by noon of the next day. It didn’t seem possible at the time, but they knew whereof they spoke. But even they would have had to admit it was pure coincidence that the first jeep rolled cautiously across the bridge at high noon, to the very second.

In that first jeep were General Truscott and his driver, facing a 200-foot tumble into the sea if the bridge gave way. The engineers had insisted they send a test jeep across first. But when he saw it was ready, the general just got in and went. It wasn’t done dramatically but it was a dramatic thing. It showed that the Old Man had complete faith in his engineers. I heard soldiers speak of it appreciatively for an hour.

Jeeps snaked across the rickety bridge behind the general while the engineers kept stations beneath the bridge to watch and measure the sag under each load. The bridge squeaked and bent as the jeeps crept over. But it held, and nothing else mattered. When the vital spearhead of the division got across, traffic was halted again and the engineers were given three hours to strengthen the bridge for heavier traffic. A third heavy upright inserted in the middle of the span would do the trick.

That, too, was a terrific job, but at exactly 4 p.m. the first ¾-ton truck rolled across. They kept putting over heavier and heavier loads until before dark a giant bulldozer was sent across, and after that everything could follow.

The tired men began to pack their tools into trucks. Engineer officers who hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours went back to their olive orchard to clean up. They had built a jerry bridge, a comical bridge, a proud bridge, but above all the kind of bridge that wins wars. And they had built it in one night and half a day. The general was mighty pleased.

I don’t know what it is that impels some men, either in peace or in wartime, to extend themselves beyond all expectation, or what holds other men back to do just as little as possible. In any group of soldiers you’ll find both kinds. The work of combat engineers usually comes in spurts, and it is so vital when it does come that the percentage of fast workers is probably higher than in most other branches. I’ve never seen men work any harder than the engineers I was with. On the Point Calava road crater job there were two men I couldn’t take my eyes off. They worked like demons. Both were corporals and had little to gain by their extraordinary labors, except maybe some slight future promotion. And I doubt that’s what drove them. Such men must be impelled by the natures they’re born with—by pride in their job, by that mystic spark which forces some men to give all they’ve got, all the time.

Those two men were Gordon Uttech, of Merrill, Wisconsin, and Alvin Tolliver, of Alamosa, Colorado. Both were air-compressor operators and rock drillers. Uttech worked all night, and when the night shift was relieved for breakfast, he refused to go. He worked on throughout the day without sleep and in the final hours of the job he went down under the frail bridge to check the sag and strain, as heavier and heavier vehicles passed over it.

Tolliver, too, worked without ceasing, never resting, never even stopping to wipe off the sweat that made his stripped body look as though it were coated with olive oil. I never saw him stop once throughout the day. He seemed to work without instruction from anybody, knowing what jobs to do and doing them alone. He wrastled the great chattering jackhammers into the rock. He spread and rewound his air hose. He changed drills. He regulated his compressor. He drove eye-hooks into the rock, chopped down big planks to fit the rocky ledge he’d created. Always he worked as though the outcome of the war depended on him alone.

I couldn’t help being proud of those men, who gave more than was asked.

Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Bingham, commander of the 10th Engineers, who bridged the Point Calava crater, was a Regular Army man and therefore his home was wherever he was, but his wife lived in St. Paul, at 1480 Fairmount Avenue, so he called that home. We usually picture Regular Army officers as cut in a harsh and rigid cast, but that has not been my experience. I’ve found them to be as human as anybody else and the closer I got to the front the finer they seemed to be. Colonel Bingham, for instance, was the kind of man who was so liked and respected by his subordinates that they took me aside to ask that I give him credit. He worked all night along with the rest, and he never got cross or raised his voice.

The commander of the company was Lieutenant Edwin Swift, of Rocky Ford, Colorado. In civil life he was a geophysicist, and just before the war he spent two years in Venezuela with Standard Oil. He hadn’t discovered oil in Sicily, but some German-blown holes he filled were almost deep enough to hit oil.

Lieutenant Robert Springmeyer was from Provo, Utah. He was an engineer by profession and a recent father. When he got the parental news, he somehow managed to buy a box of cigars, but he ran out of recipients when the box was about half gone. So thereafter, when a hard day’s work was done, he would go back to base, shave, take a helmet bath, put on clean clothes, sit down against a tree and light a big gift cigar in his own honor.

Lieutenant Gilmore Reid came from 846 North Hamilton, Indianapolis. His dad ran the Purity Cone & Chip Company, which made potato chips. Young Reid was an artist and also a railroad hobbyist. He studied railroads with the same verve that some people show in collecting stamps. He once did a painting of a freight train at a small midwestern station, and when he got word overseas that it had been printed in color in a railroad magazine he felt he’d practically reached the zenith of his heart’s desire.

The backbone of any Army company is the first sergeant. The 10th Engineers had a beaut. His name was, of all things, Adelard Levesque. He pronounced it “Levek” but the soldiers called him “Pop.” He was forty-two years old, but didn’t begin to look it. Of all the thousands of men I’ve met in the Army, he comes the nearest to being the fictional version of the tough, competent, old-line first sergeant. Levesque was in the last war as a mere boy. He fought in France and stayed on with the Army of Occupation in Germany until 1921. He wasn’t a Regular Army man. Between wars he spent twenty years out in the big world, raising a family, making a living, and seeing and doing things. He had been a West Coast iron worker and practically anything else you can mention. He had four sons in the Army and, if I remember correctly, one daughter in the Navy.

The sergeant called Marysville, California, his home. He was a ruggedly handsome fellow with a black mustache and clothes that were always neat, even when dirty. His energy never ran down. He talked loud, and continuously; he cussed fluently, and he ordered everybody around, including officers.

At first my mouth hung open in amazement but gradually I began to catch the spirit of Levesque. He wasn’t smart-alecky or fresh. He was just a natural-born center of any stage, a leader, and one of those gifted, practical men who could do anything under the sun, and usually did it better than the next fellow. To top it all off he spoke perfect French and was picking up Italian like a snowball. One of his commanders told me, “He talks too much and too big, but he can back up every word he says. I sure hope we never lose him.”

I asked the enlisted men about him, since they were the ones his tongue fell on most heavily. One man said, “Hell, I don’t know what this company would do without him. Sure he talks all the time, but we don’t pay any attention. Listen at him beatin’ his gums now. He musta got out on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”

Actually, the sergeant wasn’t so ferocious. He was widely informed, and his grammar was excellent. He could discuss politics as well as bulldozers and was alert to every little thing that went on. One day on a mountain road he stopped our jeep and asked the driver some questions. As he walked back to his own jeep, he turned and ordered my driver, “Go get those maps. Send a bulldozer back up here. Bring five gallons of gas, and get your spare tire fixed. Goddammit, why don’t you take care of your vehicle?”

“Spare tire?” the driver asked.

“Yes, goddammit,” the sergeant roared. “It’s flat.”

He had discovered it merely by the slight pressure of his hand is he leaned against it while talking to us. Everything he did was like that.

During the last half hour of work on the Point Calava bridge, I saw as fine a drama as ever I paid $8.80 a seat for in New York: The bridge was almost finished. The climax of twenty-four hours of frenzied work had come. The job was done. Only one man could do the final touches of bracing and balancing. That man was sitting on the end of a beam far out over the chasm, a hammer in his hand, his legs wrapped around the beam as though he were riding a bronco.

The squirrel out there on the beam was, of course, Sergeant Levesque. He wore his steel helmet and his pack harness. He never took it off, no matter what the weather or what he was doing. His face was dirty and grave and sweating. He was in complete charge of all he surveyed. On the opposite bank of the crater, two huge soldier audiences stood watching that noisily profane craftsman play out his role.

Their preoccupation was a tribute to his skill. I’ve never seen a more intent audience. It included all ranks, from privates to generals.

“Gimme some slack. Gimme some slack, goddammit,” the sergeant yelled to the winch man on the bank. “That’s enough—hold it. Throw me a sledge. Where the hell’s a spike, goddammit? Hasn’t anybody got a spike?

“How does that look from the bank now, colonel? She about level? Okay, slack away. Watch that air hose. Let her clear down. Hey, you under there, watch yourself, goddammit.”

Sergeant Levesque drove the final spike deeply with his sledge. He looked around at his work and found it finished.

With an air of completion, he clambered to his feet and walked the narrow beam back to safety. You could almost sense the curtain going down, and I know everybody in the crowd had to stifle an impulse to cheer.

If somebody writes another What Price Glory? after this war I know who should play the leading role. Who? Why, Sergeant Levesque, goddammit, who do you suppose?