Читать книгу Brave Men - Ernie Pyle - Страница 13

Table of Contents

The north coast of Sicily is a strange contrast to the south. On the south coast the towns were much filthier and the people seemed to be of a lower class. Coming from the south to the north there was a freshness about the country and the people. The macadam road that follows the sea all the way from Palermo to Messina is a scenic one. I heard a dozen soldiers say, “If you could only travel this road in peacetime it would be a nice vacation, wouldn’t it?”

The interior roads through the mountains are few, mostly gravel and quite rough. All through the campaign we had to use mules to get supplies up to our troops in the mountains, and three times during the battle men went without food and water for as long as sixty hours. How they kept going is beyond me, but I’ve reached the point where nothing the infantry does startles me any more.

The Third Division had more than five hundred mules at the end of the campaign. They brought thirty burros with them from Africa but discovered the burros couldn’t keep up with the infantry so they had to abandon them for the stronger Sicilian mules. Most of the mules were pretty poor and we lost lots of them both by artillery fire and by plain exhaustion. Toward the end of the campaign the division got so it hauled mules in 2½-ton trucks, right up to the foot of the mountains, so the poor beasts could start all fresh on their pack journey.

The American doughboy’s fundamental honesty shows up sometimes in comical ways. All through the campaign the various Army headquarters were flooded with Sicilians bearing penciled notes written on everything from toilet paper to the backs of envelopes saying, “I owe you for one mule taken for the U. S. Army on Aug. 2. Signed, Private John Smith.”

Actually the appropriating of captured enemy equipment (including mules) for military use is legitimate and no restitution needed to be made, but the doughboys—in their simplicity—never thought of that.

Captured supply dumps were impounded by the Army for re-issue later but our soldiers often got in to help themselves before the Army took over officially. For example, at one time practically every soldier I saw was carrying a packet of German bread—thin, brittle stuff that resembled what we call Ry-Krisp at home. The soldiers seemed to like it or maybe it was just the novelty of the thing.

The Germans, as usual, were well-equipped and we were soon sporting lots of their doodads. Many of the officers’ outdoor field messes were furnished with brand-new German folding tables and the diners sat on individual, unpainted German stools. Also I saw quite a few officers sleeping in German steel cots with German mosquito-net framework above them.

Speaking of mosquitoes, by the end of August the heat and the lack of sanitation began to take their toll. Diarrhea was common, there was a run of the same queer fever I, and a good many men came down with malaria. In fact, in the last weeks of the campaign, the correspondents themselves dropped off like flies with malaria. Usually they went to the Army hospital for a few days until the attack passed, and then returned to work.

Our soldiers were careless about their eating and drinking but I couldn’t blame them. One of the most touching sights was to see a column of sweat-soaked soldiers, hot and tired, march into a village and stop for rest. In a moment the natives were out by the hundreds carrying water in glass pitchers, in earthen jugs, in pans, in anything—filling the men’s empty canteens. It was dangerous to drink the water, but when a man’s really thirsty he isn’t too particular.

Most of the time I approached native food and drink pretty much like a persnickety peacetime tourist who avoids all fresh vegetables and is very cagey about drinking water, but despite my caution I came down with the fever. A couple of days after getting back to normal I was hit with the “GIs,” or Army diarrhea.

Half our camp had it at the same time. We all took sulfaguanidine but still mine hung on. Then I moved into the field again with the troops, feeling like death, and getting weaker by the moment. One day we drove into a mountain village where the Americans hadn’t been before and the natives showered us with grapes, figs, wine, hazelnuts and peaches, and I finally said, “Oh, the hell with it,” and started eating everything in sight. Within two days I felt fine again.

On the whole our troops found Sicily perhaps a little better than North Africa. Certainly the people were just as friendly, if not more so. If only there were a little more modernity and sanitation in Sicily I think a good many of us would have mildly liked the place. The whole thing seemed kind of ridiculous, when I sat down and thought about it. Those people were our enemies. They declared war on us. We went clear over there and fought them and when we had won they looked upon us as their friends.

If anything, their attitude was more that of a liberated people than was the case in French North Africa, and they seemed to look to us more eagerly for relief from their hunger. In several of the smaller mountain towns our troops were greeted by signs saying “Welcome,” in English, pasted on the walls of buildings, and American flags were fluttering from windows.

Of course there were some Sicilians who treated us as enemies. There was some small sabotage, such as cutting our phone wires, but on the whole the Sicilians certainly were more for us than the French and the Arabs of Africa had been. Actually most of us felt friendlier toward the Sicilians than we had toward the French. And in comparison with the Arabs—well, there just wasn’t any comparison.

Sicily is really a beautiful country. Up in the north it is all mountainous, and all but the most rugged of the mountains are covered with fields or orchards. Many of the hillsides are terraced to prevent erosion. By August everything was dry and burned up, as we so often see our own Midwest in dry summers. They said it was the driest summer in years.

Our ceaseless convoys chewed up the gravel roads, and the dust became suffocating, but in springtime Sicily must look like the Garden of Eden. The land is wonderfully fertile. Sicilians would not have to be poor and starving if they were capable of organizing and using their land to its fullest.

Driving over the island, I had a feeling of far greater antiquity than I got even from looking at the Roman ruins in North Africa. Everything is very old and if only it were clean as well it would be old in a nice, gentle way. Towns sit right smack on the top of needle-point mountain peaks. They were built that way in the old days for protection. Today a motorcar can’t even get up to many of them.

In the mountain towns the streets are too narrow for vehicles, the passageways are dirty, and the goat and burro are common.

In the very remotest and most ancient town, we found that half the people had relatives in America, and there was always somebody popping up from behind every bush or around every corner who had lived for twelve years in Buffalo or thirty years in Chicago.

Farming is still done in Biblical style. The grain-threshing season was on then, and how do you suppose they did it? Simply by tying three mules together and running them around in a small circle all day long while a fellow with a wooden pitchfork kept throwing grain under their hoofs.

We had hit Sicily in the middle of the fruit and vegetable season. The troops went for those fresh tomatoes like sourdoughs going for gold in the Klondike. Tomatoes and watermelons too. I’ve never seen so many watermelons in my life, even if I did miss out on them that first day on the beach. They were mostly small round ones, and did they taste good to an old watermelon devourer like myself! Also we ate fresh peaches, grapes, figs and even mulberries.

At first when we hit a new town the people in their gratitude gave away their fruit to the troops. But it didn’t take them long to learn, and soon they were holding out for trades of rations or other Army stuff. The people didn’t want money. When we asked them to work for us they said they would but that we must pay them in merchandise, not money. The most sought-after thing was shoes. Most of the people were going around in sandals made of old auto tires. I believe you could have bought half the island of Sicily with two dozen pairs of GI shoes.

As the Sicilian campaign drew to an end and we went into our rest bivouac, rumors by the score popped up out of thin air and swept like a forest fire through the troops.

No. 1 rumor in every outfit, of course, was that ships already were waiting to take them back to the States. That one was so old I don’t think half the men will believe it’s true when the war ends and they actually do start back.

Other rumors had them staying in Sicily as occupation troops, going to England, going to China, and—ugly thought—going right on as the spearhead of the next invasion. Some people worry about rumors such as these, which are constantly sweeping our armies, but personally I think they are harmless. When the Army doesn’t have women, furloughs, ice cream, beer or clean clothes, it certainly has to have something to look forward to, even if only a faint hope for some kind of change that lies buried in an illogical rumor.

In fact, I don’t know how we would endure war without its rumors.

A few days after the Sicilian campaign had actually ended I went back to Palermo to get in touch with what we jokingly called “civilization.” The Army had commandeered several hotels, and I was put up in a dungeonlike cell that overlooked an alley inhabited by a melee of Sicilians who screamed constantly and never cleaned up anything. They apparently had the concession for raising and furnishing the hotel with mosquitoes, for these came floating up like smoke from that alley. I tried mosquito netting over my bed, and just before climbing in for my first repose off the ground in five weeks, I decided I had better inspect the lovely white sheets.

My haul was three bedbugs and a baby scorpion. Civilization, she is wonderful.

In the field, most of us had mosquito nets. The mosquitoes weren’t really so bad in the country but there were just enough to keep us worried about malaria. We strung up nets over our bedrolls in scores of fashions—all the way from tying them to tree branches to hanging them over Italian aluminum tent poles stuck in the ground.

The climate was ideal for our Sicilian campaign. The days were hot, but nothing approaching the summer heat of Kansas or Washington, D. C. Down on the coast the nights were just right for sleeping with one blanket. Up in the mountains, it actually got cold at night. There wasn’t a drop of rain. Every hour, the Army engineers thanked Allah for the dryness, because rains would have washed out their bypasses around the blown bridges and made the movement of our vehicles almost impossible.

Because of the climate, nobody used tents any longer for sleeping. We just threw our blankets down on the ground and slept in the open. Until you sleep under the open skies, you never realize how many shooting stars there are in the heavens.

And one night, there was a frightening red glow in the east that lasted only a couple of seconds. It colored the whole eastern heavens. It was neither flares nor gunfire, so it must have been Mount Etna, boiling and snarling.

In the Sicilian villages we passed through, the local people would take little embroidered cushions out of their parlors and give them to our soldiers to sit on while resting. It was funny to march with a sweaty infantry company, and see grimy doughboys with pink and white lacy cushions tucked under their harness among grenades, shovels and canteens.

The hazelnut and almond season reached its peak just as the campaign ended. Practically every camp had a hundred-pound sack of almonds lying on the ground where the soldiers could just sit and crack the nuts on rocks and gorge as though it were Christmas. The local people gave us hazelnuts as we passed through the towns. I saw one company in which nearly every man took off his steel helmet and filled it full of hazelnuts, and then marched on down the road with the heavily laden hat held in the crook of his arm.

Hazelnuts, red wine, hardtack and thou. Or what am I thinking of?