Читать книгу Brave Men - Ernie Pyle - Страница 12

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At one time in central Sicily we correspondents were camped in a peach orchard behind the country home of an Italian baron. Apparently the baron had skedaddled, as royalty has been known to do, before the fighting started. Anyhow, the baron had built himself a big stone house that was pink and palatial, with a marvelous view over miles of rolling country. It had the usual royal peacocks strutting around but not a bath in the place. The dining room ceiling was hand-painted and the staircase gigantic, yet the royal family used porcelain washbowls and old-fashioned thundermugs. It was the perfect shabby rococo domicile of what H. R. Knickerbocker calls the “wretched aristocracy of Europe.”

While the baron lived in this comparative luxury his employees lived in sheds and even caves in the big rocky hill just back of the house. They looked like gypsies.

German and Italian troops had been occupying the place before we came. When we arrived, the interior of the castle was a wreck. I’ve never seen such a complete shambles. Every room was knee-deep in debris. The enemy had thoroughly looted the place before fleeing. And servants gave us the shameful news that most of the looting and destruction was done by Italian soldiers rather than German. They’d gone through the house shelf by shelf, drawer by drawer. Expensive dishes were thrown on the tile floor, antique vases shattered, women’s clothes dumped in jumbled heaps, pictures torn down, medicine cabinets dashed against walls, dressers broken up, wine bottles dropped on the floor, their contents turning the trash heap into a gooey mass as it dried.

It was truly the work of beasts. We tiptoed into the place gingerly, suspecting booby traps, but finally decided it had not been fixed up. Then some of us rummaged around the debris to see if anything left was worth taking as souvenirs. As far as I have observed, Americans have been good about not looting. Usually they take only what is left from the Germans’ and Italians’ destruction or what the inhabitants voluntarily give them. All I could salvage was a few pieces of lace I found on the baroness’s sewing-room floor.

Then we decided the dining room was the least messy place in the building, so we set to with grass brooms and shovels and water and cleaned it up. Thus it became our press room. The Signal Corps ran wires from a portable generator to give us light so we could work by night.

One day while I was writing in there and all the other correspondents were away, a stray soldier peered in at me after having wandered with astonishment through the jumbled house.

He asked, “What is this place?”

I told him it was the former home of an Italian baron. His next question was so typically American I had to laugh despite a little shame at the average soldier’s bad grammar and lack of learning.

He said, “What is these barons, anyway? Is they something like lords in England?”

To avoid a technical discussion, I told him that for all practical purposes they were somewhat along the same line. He went away apparently satisfied.

Our orchard bivouac behind the castle was fine except for one thing. That was the barnyard collection that surrounded us. About an hour before dawn we were always awakened by the most startling orchestra of weird and ghoulish noises ever put together. Guinea hens cackled, ducks quacked, calves bawled, babies cried, men shouted, peacocks jabbered and turkeys gobbled. And to cap it all a lone donkey at just the right dramatic moment in this hideous cacophony would let loose a long sardonic heehaw that turned our exasperation into outraged laughter.

The baron’s servants were a poor-looking lot, yet they seemed nice enough. Their kids hung around our camp all day, very quiet and meek. They looked at us so hungrily we couldn’t resist giving them cans of food. We tried to teach them to say grazie (thanks, in Italian) but with no success.

One day some of us correspondents were doing our washing when one of the Sicilian women came up and took it away from us and washed it herself.

When she finished we asked her, “How much?”

She said, “Nothing at all.” We said, well, then, we’d give her some food. She said she didn’t expect any food, that she was just doing it for us free. We gave her some food anyway.

Stories like that were countless. The Army engineers told me how the Sicilians would come up where they were working, grab shovels and start digging and refuse to take anything for it. Whatever else you can say about them the Sicilians don’t seem lazy. One soldier summed it up when he said, “After living nine months with Arabs the sight of somebody working voluntarily is almost too much for me.”

I ran across Bob Hope and his crew. In fact for a couple of days we did the highlights and shadows of one bombed Sicilian city in such hilarious conjunction that it looked as though I were becoming a member of the troupe.

There were certain dissenters to the policy of sending American entertainers overseas to help brighten the lives of our soldiers. Now and then I heard some officer say, “After all, we’re over here to fight, not to be entertained. Don’t they know there’s a war on?” But it was my experience that the most confirmed users of such phrases were usually a good many miles behind the lines. I was all for giving the troops a little touch of America through those movie stars, and I can testify that the boys enjoyed and appreciated it.

Bob Hope was one of the best that ever went to Africa. He had the right touch with soldiers. He could handle himself as well in a hospital full of suffering men as before a rough audience of ten thousand war-coarsened ones. When Hope went into a hospital he was likely to go up to a poor guy swathed in bandages, and instead of spreading out the old sympathy he would shake hands and say something such as, “Did you see my show this evening, or were you already sick?”

At his regular show, Hope carefully explained the draft status of his troupe, so that the soldiers wouldn’t think they were draft dodgers. He said that his singer, Jack Pepper, had been classified 5-X, or “too fat to fight.” Hope himself was in class 4-Z, meaning “Coward.” And their guitar player, Tony Romano, was Double S Double F, meaning “Single man with children.” Sure, it got a laugh.

The Hope troupe, which included lovely Frances Langford as the fourth member, really found out about war. Every time they’d stop in a city, there’d be a raid there that night. Actually it got to look as though the Germans were deliberately after them. I was in two different cities with them during raids, and I will testify that they were horrifying things.

The troupe had the distinction, while in Sicily, of playing closer to the front lines than any other entertainers, and playing to the biggest audiences. One afternoon they did their outdoor show for nineteen thousand men. Everywhere they went, both in public and in private, the Hope gang was popular—mainly because, clear down (or up) to Frances, they were regular and natural.

Let this be taken as legal testimony in verification: no matter what narrow-escape story Bob tells about Sicily, it’s true.

Strange though it seems now, it used to be the fashion to sneer at the engineers, but that day has passed. The engineering forces with the Army are trained and organized to a high degree, and engineering morale is proud and high. In Sicily even the infantry took off its hat to them—for not infrequently the engineers were actually out ahead of the troops.

Each infantry division had a battalion of engineers which was an integral part of that division and worked and suffered with it. The battalion consisted of four companies totaling around eight hundred men. Sometimes all the companies were working in separate places with various infantry regiments. At other times, in mountainous country, when the whole division was strung out in a single line twenty miles or more long, the engineer companies kept leapfrogging each other, letting one company go into 24-hour reserve for a much-needed rest about every three days.

Behind the division engineers were the corps engineers. They were under control of the Second Army Corps and could be shifted anywhere at the corps’ command. Corps engineers followed up the division engineers, strengthening and smoothing the necessarily makeshift work of the division engineers.

Captain Ben Billups of Alamogordo, New Mexico, put it this way: “Our job is to clear the way for our division of roughly two thousand vehicles to move ahead just as quickly as possible. We are interested only in the division. If we were to build a temporary span across a blown bridge, and that span were to collapse one second after the last division truck had crossed, we would have done the theoretically perfect job. For we would have cleared the division, yet not wasted a minute of time doing more than we needed to do when we passed. It is the corps engineers’ job to create a more permanent bridge for the supply convoys that will be following for days and weeks afterward.”

Often there was jealousy and contempt between groups of similar types working under division and corps. But in the engineers it was a sort of mutual-esteem society. Each respected and was proud of the other. The corps engineers were so good they constantly tripped on the heels of the division engineers, and a few times, with the division engineers one hundred per cent occupied with an especially difficult demolition, they even pushed ahead and tackled fresh demolitions themselves.

Particularly at first, all the officers of the engineers’ battalion were graduate engineers in civil life, but with the Army expanding so rapidly and professional experience running so thin, some young officers assigned to the engineers had just come out of officers’ school and had little or no engineering experience. Of the enlisted men only a handful in each company ever had had any construction experience. The rest were just run of the mine—one-time clerks, butchers, cowpunchers. That little handful of experienced enlisted men carried the load and they were as vital as anything in the Army.

Practically every man in an engineering company had to double in half a dozen brasses. One day he’d be running a mine detector, next day he’d be a stonemason, next day a carpenter, and the day after a plain pick-and-shovel man. But unlike the common laborer at home, he was picking and shoveling under fire about half the time.

In the Table of Organization the duties of the engineers are manifold. But in the specialized warfare in Sicily many of their official duties just didn’t exist and their main work was concentrated into four vital categories: road building and bridge by-passing; clearing mine fields; finding and purifying water for the whole division; and providing the division with maps. The last two don’t sound spectacular but, believe me, they’re important.

The awarding of bravery medals is a rather dry and formal thing and I had never bothered to cover any such festivities. One night, however, I learned that three old friends of mine were in a group to be decorated, so I went down to have supper with them and see the show.

My three friends were Lieutenant Colonel Harry Goslee, 3008 Neil Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, Major John Hurley, 66 Rockaway Avenue, San Francisco, California, and Major Mitchell Mabardy, of Assonet, Massachusetts. Goslee was headquarters commandant of one of the outfits, and Hurley and Mabardy were provost marshals in charge of military police. (Major Hurley was later killed in Italy.)

They were camped under big beech trees on the Sicilian hillside just back of the battlefront. I went down about 5:30 and found my friends sitting on folding chairs under a tree outside their tent, looking through field glasses at some fighting far ahead.

Any soldier will agree that one of the outstanding traits of war is those incongruous interludes of quiet that pop up now and then in the midst of the worst horror. That evening was one of them. Our troops were in a bitter fight for the town of Troina, standing up like a great rock pinnacle on a hilltop a few miles ahead. That afternoon our High Command had called for an all-out air and artillery bombardment of the city. When it came it was terrific. Planes by the score roared over and dropped their deadly loads, and as they left our artillery put down the most devastating barrage we’d ever used against a single point, even outdoing any shooting we did in Tunisia.

Up there in Troina a complete holocaust took place. Through our glasses the old city seemed to fly apart. Great clouds of dust and black smoke rose into the sky until the whole horizon was leaded and fogged. Our biggest bombs exploded with such roars that we felt the concussion clear back where we were, and our artillery in a great semicircle crashed and roared like some gigantic inhuman beast that had broken loose and was out to destroy the world.

Germans by the hundreds were dying up there at the end of our binocular vision, and all over the mountainous horizon the world seemed to be ending. And yet we sat there in easy chairs under a tree—sipping cool drinks, relaxed and peaceful at the end of the day’s work. Sitting there looking at it as though we were spectators at a play. It just didn’t seem possible that it could be true. After a while we walked up to the officers’ mess in a big tent under a tree and ate captured German steak which tasted very good indeed.

Then after supper the six men and three officers who were to receive awards lined up outside the tent. They were nine legitimate heroes all right. I know, for I was in the vicinity when they did their deed:

It was the night before my birthday and the German bombers kept us awake all night with their flares and their bombings, and for a while it looked as though I might never get to be forty-three years old. What happened in this special case was that one of our generator motors caught fire during the night and it had to happen at a very inopportune moment. When the next wave of bombers came over, the Germans naturally used the fire as a target.

The three officers and six MPs dashed to the fire to put it out. They stuck right at their work as the Germans dived on them. They stayed while the bombs blasted around them and shrapnel flew. I was sleeping about a quarter of a mile away, and the last stick of bombs almost seemed to blow me out of the bedroll—so you can visualize what those men went through. The nine of them were awarded the Silver Star.

They lined up in a row with Colonel Goslee at the end. The commanding general came out of his tent. Colonel Goslee called the nine to attention. They stood like ramrods while the citations were read off. There was no audience except myself and two Army Signal Corps photographers taking pictures of the ceremony.

Besides the three officers, the six who received medals were Sergeant Edward Gough, 2252 East 72nd Street, Brooklyn, New York, Sergeant Charles Mitchell, 3246 Third Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, Sergeant Homer Moore, of Nicholls, Georgia, Sergeant Earl Sechrist, of Windsor, Pennsylvania, Pfc. Barney Swint, of Douglasville, Texas, and Pfc. Harold Tripp, of Worthington, Minnesota.

I believe those men went through more torture receiving the awards than they did in earning them, they were all so tense and scared. It was either comical or pathetic, whichever way it happened to strike you. Colonel Goslee stared rigidly ahead in a thunderstruck manner. His left hand hung relaxed, but I noticed his right fist was clamped so tightly his fingers were turning blue. The men were like uncomfortable stone statues. As the general approached, each man’s Adam’s apple went up and down two or three times in a throat so constricted I thought he was going to choke.

The moment the last man was congratulated, the general left and the whole group broke up in relief. As a spectacle it was sort of dull, but to each man it was one of those little pinnacles of triumph that will stand out until the day he dies. You often hear soldiers say, “I don’t want any medals. I just want to see the Statue of Liberty again.” But just the same you don’t hear of anybody forgetting to come around, all nervous and shined up fit to kill, on the evening he is to be decorated.

My friends and I went back to the tent where one of them lived and sat there talking about old times and how good it was to get together again. One officer had a bottle of champagne he had been saving for some occasion and since this seemed to be at least a good imitation of an occasion he got it out and we passed it around, the half dozen of us drinking it warm and out of the bottle. My palate has never been educated up to champagne and I’d just as soon have had a good swig of Bevo—but an event is an event.

We sat out under the trees and a chill wind came up and somebody brought me a jacket to slip on. It had lieutenant colonel’s leaves on the shoulders and I suppose I could have been arrested for impersonating an officer, but I was in a nice position, having the head military policeman of the area sitting next to me, so I just flaunted my colonel’s leaves and hoped some stranger would come by to salute me.

Our host, Lieutenant Colonel Goslee, called himself a professional reserve officer as he had been on active duty for ten years. He was with us back in the first days at Oran, then got shunted off to another job and missed the fighting in Tunisia. But that summer he got switched back onto the main track again and he’d been making hay fast while the bombs fell.

Back home he had a wife, and a daughter of fifteen who kept writing him, the lovely child, asking if he’d seen me. He also had a Dalmatian dog named Colonel who volunteered—or was volunteered—in the Dogs for Defense Army and was then serving somewhere in Virginia. Colonel Goslee’s home flew two service stars in the front window—one for the man and one for the dog.

Dusk came on and we moved inside the tent so we could light our cigarettes. Our conversation drifted back to other days—Oran in November and bitter cold Tebessa in January and the sadness of our retreat from Sbeitla and the chill sweeping winds of Gafsa and later in the spring the beauties of Béja and the final wonderful feeling of victory at Ferryville.

And we talked of how tired we had all gradually become, and nobody seemed like a hero who’d just been decorated for bravery. We talked of the miles we’d covered and the moves we’d made in the previous nine months, of countries we’d seen and how the whole war machine, though it grew dirtier and tireder month after month, also grew mature and smooth and more capable.

In that long time all of us overseas had met thousands of different soldiers and officers. Yet those of us who became friends right at the very beginning in Africa or even back in England seemed to share a bond as though we were members of a fraternity or a little family, and getting back together again was comfortable and old-shoelike. We talked of people no longer with us—such people as Lieutenant General Lloyd Fredendall and Major Ed Adkins, both on duty back in Memphis then. Ed, in his job as headquarters commandant, used to be a focal point of the little sitting-around group in Tunisia, just as Colonel Goslee was in the same job there in Sicily.

Ed Adkins was a favorite and his name came up frequently in our conversation. He was crazy to get back to the States and we knew he was happy there, and yet we laughed and prophesied that when he read about us—read how we were still going on and on, still moving every few days, still listening now and then for the uneven groan of the German night bombers, still fighting dust, darkness, and weariness and once in a while sitting around talking after supper, on cots in a blacked-out tent—when he read about it, and visualized us, he would be so homesick for the front that he’d probably cry.

They tell me all the soldiers who have been through the mill and have returned to America are like that. They get an itch for the old miserable life—a disgusting, illogical yearning to be back again in the place they hated. I’m sure it’s true, but I know a lot of soldiers who would like a chance to put that theory to the test.

Outside of the occasional peaks of bitter fighting and heavy casualties that highlight military operations, I believe the outstanding trait in any campaign is the terrible weariness that gradually comes over everybody. Soldiers become exhausted in mind and in soul as well as physically. They acquire a weariness that is mixed up with boredom and lack of all gaiety. To sum it all up: A man just gets damned sick of it all.

The infantry reaches a stage of exhaustion that is incomprehensible to folks back home. The men in the First Division, for instance, were in the lines twenty-eight days—walking and fighting all that time, day and night.

After a few days of such activity, soldiers pass the point of known human weariness. From then on they go into a sort of second-wind daze. They keep going largely because the other fellow does and because they can’t really do anything else.

Have you ever in your life worked so hard and so long that you didn’t remember how many days it was since you ate last or didn’t recognize your friends when you saw them? I never have either, but in the First Division, during that long, hard fight around Troina, a company runner one day came slogging up to a certain captain and said excitedly, “I’ve got to find Captain Blank right away. Important message.”

The captain said, “But I am Captain Blank. Don’t you recognize me?”

And the runner said, “I’ve got to find Captain Blank right away.” And he went dashing off. They had to run to catch him.

Men in battle reach that stage and still go on and on. As for the rest of the Army—supply troops, truck drivers, hospital men, engineers—they too become exhausted, but not so inhumanly. With them and with us correspondents it’s the ceaselessness, the endlessness of everything that finally worms its way through us and gradually starts to devour us.

It’s the perpetual, choking dust, the muscle-racking hard ground, the snatched food sitting ill on the stomach, the heat and the flies and dirty feet and the constant roar of engines and the perpetual moving and the never settling down and the go, go, go, night and day, and on through the night again. Eventually it all works itself into an emotional tapestry of one dull, dead pattern—yesterday is tomorrow and Troina is Randazzo and when will we ever stop and, God, I’m so tired.

I noticed this feeling had begun to overtake the war correspondents themselves. It is true we didn’t fight on and on like the infantry, that we were usually under fire only briefly and that, indeed, we lived better than the average soldier. Yet our lives were strangely consuming in that we did live primitively and at the same time had to delve into ourselves and do creative writing.

That statement may lay me open to wisecracks, but however it may seem to you, writing is an exhausting and tearing thing. Most of the correspondents actually worked like slaves. Especially was this true of the press-association men. A great part of the time they went from dawn till midnight or 2 a.m. I’m sure they turned in as much toil in a week as any newspaperman at home does in two weeks. We traveled continuously, moved camp every few days, ate out, slept out, wrote wherever we could and just never caught up on sleep, rest, cleanliness, or anything else normal.

The result was that all of us who had been with the thing for more than a year finally grew befogged. We were grimy, mentally as well as physically. We’d drained our emotions until they cringed from being called out from hiding. We looked at bravery and death and battlefield waste and new countries almost as blind men, seeing only faintly and not really wanting to see at all.

Suddenly the old-timers among the correspondents began talking for the first time about wanting to go home for a while. They wanted a change, something to freshen their outlook. They felt they had lost their perspective by being too close for too long.

I am not writing this to make heroes of the correspondents, because only a few look upon themselves in any dramatic light whatever. I am writing it merely to let you know that correspondents, too, can get sick of war—and deadly tired.