Show ft i. i i J c 1 Ernie Pyle Countryside Heals Quickly From Scars of Artillery IN ITALY Dec 28 By Wireless Wire- Wire less The less The little towns of Italy that have been In the path of this war from Salerno northward northward northward north north- ward are nothing more than great rubble heaps There is hardly enough left of most of them to form a framework for rebuilding When the Germans occupied the towns we rained artillery on them for days and weeks at a time Then after we captured a town the Germans would shell is heavily They got it from both sIdes Along the road for 20 or 30 miles behind the fighting front through one demolished demolished demolished demol demol- you pass town after another Most of the inhabitants take to the hills after the first shelling At least they did up here Some go to live In caves some go to relatives in the country A few fewin fewin fewin in every town refuse to leave no matter what happens and many of them have been killed by the shelling and bombing from both sides A countryside is harder to disfigure than a town You have to look closely and study in detail to find the carnage wrought upon the green fields and the rocky hillside It is there but it is temporary temporary like like a skinned finger finger and and time and the rains will heal it Another year and the countryside will cover its own scars If you wander on foot and look closely you will see the signs the signs the limb of an olive tree broken off six swollen dead horses in the corner of a field a straw stack burned down a chestnut tree blown clear out with its roots by a German bomb little gray patches of powder burns on the hillside snatches of broken and abandoned abandoned abandoned aban aban- rifles rifles' rifles and and granades In the bushes grain fields patterned with a million crisscrossing ruts from the great trucks crawling frame-deep frame through the mud empty gun pits and countless foxholes and rub rubbish heap b I s h-h h e a p stacks of empty ration C cans and now and then the lone grave of a German soldier The apple season Is on now and in the cities cities' a and n d those towns that still exist there are hundreds of little curbside I stands selling apples oranges and hazelnuts The apples are areto areto areto to us here what the tangerines were in north Africa a year ago and the tomatoes and grapes in Sicily last summer I 1 haven't been in Italy long enough really to know much about the people but I do know that the average soldier likes Italy a great deal better than he did Africa As one soldier said They seem more I Our Our soldiers s are are a little con con- con of the Italians and i dont don't trust them and yet with Villi 1 the typical American tenderheartedness tenderheartedness tender tender- tender 1 heartedness they feel sorry fora for them and little by little they are becoming sort of fond of them They seem to Us a pathetic pa pa- people not very strong in j character but fundamentally kind-hearted kind and friendly A lot of our Italian American-Italian taking to the j soldiers are land of their fathers like ducks to water 1 but not all of them The other night I was riding in a Jeep with an officer and an enlisted man of Italian extraction both from New York The officer Wash was talking about the plenitude of I girls in Naples and he said most moat of the soldiers there had girls 1 I Not me said the driver I wont won't have anything to do with them The minute they find out outI I speak Italian they start givIng Ing m me a sob story about how hove j poor an and starved they are and why dont don't the he Americans feed I them faster I look at It this way waY 1 they've been poor for a long time and It wasn't us that made them poor They started this war and they've killed plenty of our soldiers sol sol- diers and now that they're whipped they expect us to take care of them That kind of talk gives me a pain I 1 tell them to togo togo togo go to hell I dont don't like em em But our average soldier cant can't seem to hold an animosity very long And you cant can't help liking a lot of the Italians For instance instance in in- stance when I pull pulI back back to to write for a few days I 1 stay in a bare cold room of a huge empty house out in the country My roommates roommates room room- mates are Reynolds of the United Press and Clark Lee of the International News Service ice We have an Italian boy 24 years old who takes care of the room I dont don't know whether the army hired him or whether he Just walked In and went to work At any rate hes he's there all day and he cant can't do enough for us He sweeps the room six times and mops it twice every day He boards up out blown-out win windows dows does our washing a and and n d deven even picks up the scraps of wood and builds a little fire to take the chill off When he runs out of anything to do he just sits around always in sight await awaiting await ing our pleasure His name is Angelo He smiles every time you look at him We talk to each other all the time without knowing what were we're saying He admires my two fin speed on the typewriter He comes and looks over my rny shoulder while Im I'm writing which drives me crazy but hesso hes he's hesso so M eager and kind I cant can't tell him to go away Its It's hard rd to hate a guy like that 4 3 |