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Show Ernie Pyle's Slant on the War: Officer Won Lasting Respect of His Soldiers Wounded GI Artist Becomes Most Popular Cartoonist to Soldiers . By Ernie Pyle (Editor's Note): Pyle retells some oj his experiences while he was with the doughboys during the Italian campaign. He is now taking a long-needed rest in Neto Mexico. AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY. In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by soldiers sol-diers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas. Captain Waskow was a company commander in the 36th division. He lllllpliilll had led his company com-pany since long ; before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle 20s, but he carried in him a sincerity land gentleness that made people want to be guided by him. Ernie Pyle "After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me. "He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He'd go to bat for us every time." "I've never known him to do anything any-thing unfair," another one said. I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Captain Waskow Was-kow down. The moon was nearly full, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows shad-ows as they walked. Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly down across the wooden packsaddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mules, their stiffened stif-fened legs sticking out awkwardly awkward-ly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mules walked. The Italian mule skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans Ameri-cans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies, when they got to the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself and ask others to help. The first one came down early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule, and stood him on his feet for a moment while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road. I don't know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and you don't ask silly questions. We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all . went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules. Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We talked soldier talk for an hour or more; the dead man lay all alone, outside in the shadow of the wall. Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We . went out into the road. Four mules stood there in the moonlight, moon-light, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting. "This one is Captain Waskow," one of them said quietly. One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud: "Damn it!" That's all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came, and he said, "Damn it to hell anyway!" He looked down for a few last moments and then turned and left. Another man came. I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers offi-cers from men in the dim light, for all were bearded and grimy. The man looked down into the dead captain's cap-tain's face and then spoke directly to him, as though he were alive: "I'm sorry, old man." Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, ten-derly, and he said: "I sure am sorry, sir." Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently s into the dead face. And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there. Finally he put the hand down. He reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then i he sort of re-arranged the tat- tered edges of the uniform around the wound, and then he j got up and walked away down j the road in the moonlight, all alone. The rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line end to end in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep. Sgt. Bill Mauldin appears to us over here to be the finest cartoonist the war has produced. And that's not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are also terribly grim and real. Mauldin's cartoons aren't about training-camp life, which you at home are best acquainted with. They are about the men in the line the tiny percentage of our vast army who are actually up there in that other world doing the dying. His cartoons car-toons are about the war. Mauldin's central cartoon character is a soldier, unshaven, un-shaven, unwashed, unsmiling. He looks more like a hobo than like your son. He looks, in fact, exactly like a doughfoot who has been in the lines for two months. And that isn't pretty. His maturity comes simply from a native understanding of things, and from being a soldier himself for a long time. He has been in the army three and a half years. Bill Mauldin was born in Mountain Moun-tain Park, N. M. He now calls Phoenix home base, but we of New Mexico could claim him without much resistance on his part. Bill has drawn ever since he was a child. He always drew pictures of the things he wanted to grow up to be, such as cowboys cow-boys and soldiers, not realizing that what he really wanted to become was a man who draws pictures. He graduated from high school in Phoenix at 17, took a year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, Chi-cago, and at 18 was in the army. He did 64 days on K. P. duty in his first four months. That fairly cured him of a lifelong worship of uniforms. uni-forms. Mauldin belongs to the 45th division. divi-sion. Their record has been a fine one, and their losses have been heavy. Mauldin's typical grim cartoon soldier is really a 45th division infantryman, and he is one who has truly been through the mill. Mauldin was detached from straight soldier duty after a year in the infantry, and put to work on the division's weekly paper. His true war cartoons started in Sicily and have continued on through Italy, gradually gaining recognition. Capt. Bob Neville, Stars and Stripes editor, edi-tor, shakes his head with a veteran's vet-eran's admiration and says of Mauldin: Maul-din: "He's got it. Already he's the outstanding out-standing cartoonist of the war." Mauldin works in a cold, dark little studio in the back of Stars and Stripes' Naples office. He wears silver-rimmed glasses when he works. His eyes used to be good, but he damaged them in his early army days by drawing for too many hours at night with poor light. He averages about three days out of 10 at the front, then comes back and draws np a large batch of cartoons. If the weather weath-er is good he sketches a few details at the front. But the weather is usually lousy. "You don't need to sketch details anyhow," he says. "You come back with a picture of misery and cold and danger in your mind and you don't need any more details than that." |