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Show Ernie Pyle's Slant on the War: Wounded Fight to Return Early to Battle Fronts Exhausted and Wounded GIs Carry On Beyond All Human Endurance By Ernie Pyle (Editor t Note); Pyte retell somm of his experiences while he was with the : Doughboys during the Sicily campaign. lie is now taking a long-needed rest in l'eic Mexico. SOMEWHERE IN SICILY. It was flabbergasting to lie among a tentful of wounded soldiers recently and hear them cuss and beg to be sent right back into the fight. Of course not all of them do. It depends on the severity of their wounds, and on their individual indi-vidual personalities, just as it would in peacetime. But I will say , that at least a third of the moder- ' ately wounded men ask if they can't be returned to ! rZr7 duty immedi- atcly. , 1 When I took - sick I was with I -:;;-(ttf j the 45th division, I- pTH made up lareely I t ., '. :vv v J of men from f , Oklahoma and -ii's f0i west Texas. You ; K-'t don't realize how ' I... A hi-J djnerent certain Ernie Pyle parts of our country coun-try are from others oth-ers until you see their men set off in a frame, as it were, in some strange faraway place like this. The men of Oklahoma are drawling drawl-ing and soft-spoken. They are not smart-alecks. Something of the purity puri-ty of the soil seems to be in them. Even their cussing is simpler and more profound than the torrential obscenities of Eastern city men. An , Oklahoman of the plains is straight and direct He is slow to criticize and hard to anger, but once he is convinced of the wrong of some- , thing, brother, watch out. These wounded men of Oklahoma have got madder about the war than anybody I have seen on this side of the ocean. They weren't so mad before they got into action, but now to them the Germans across the hill are all devils. It was these men from the farms, ranches and small towns of Oklahoma Okla-homa who poured through my tent with their wounds. I lay there and j listened for what each one would say first. One fellow, seeing a friend, called out. "I think I'm gonna make her." Meaning he was going to pull through. Another said, "Have they got beds in the hospital? Lord how I want to go to bed." Another said, "I'm hungry, but I j can't eat anything. I keep getting ' sick at my stomach." Another said, as he winced from their probing for a deeply buried piece of shrapnel in his leg, "Go ahead, you're the doc. I can stand it" Another said, "I'll have to write the old lady tonight and tell her she missed out on that $10,000 again." Another, who was put down beside me, said, "III, Pop, how yon getting along? I call you Pop because you're gray-headed. gray-headed. You don't mind, do you?" I told him I didn't care what he called me. lie was friendly, bat you can tell from his forward attitude that he was not from Oklahoma. It turned out he was from New Jersey. One big blond Oklahoman had slight flesh wounds in the face and the back of his neck. He had a patch on his upper lip which prevented pre-vented his moving it, and made him talk in a grave, straight-faced manner man-ner that was comical. I've never seen anybody so mod In my life. He went from one doctor to another trying to get somebody to sign his card returning him to duty. The doctors explained patiently that if he returned to the front his wounds would get infected and he would be a burden on his company. They tried to entice him by telling him there would be nurses back In the hospital. But he said, "To hell with the nurses, I want to get back to fightin'." Dying men were brought Into our tent, men whose death rattle silenced the conversation and made all the rest of us grave. When a man was almost gone the surgeons would put a piece of gauze over his face. He could breathe through it but we couldn't see his face welL Twice within five minutes chaplains chap-lains came running. One of these occasions haunted me for hours. The man was still semi-conscious. The chaplain knelt down beside him and two ward boys squatted alongside. The chaplain said: "John, I'm going to say a prayer for you." y Somehow this stark announcement hit me like a hammer. He didn't say. "I'm going to pray for you to get well," he just said he was going to say a prayer, and it was obvious he meant the final prayer. It was as though he had said, "Brother, you may not know it, but your goose is cooked." He said a short prayer, and the weak, gasping man tried in vain to repeat the words after him. When he had finished the chaplain said, "John, you're doing do-ing fine, you're doing fine." Then he rose and dashed off on other business, and the ward boys went about their duties. The dying man was left utterly alone, just lying there on his litter on the ground, lying in an aisle, because be-cause the tent was full. Of course it couldn't be otherwise, but the awful aloneness of that man as he went through the last few minutes of his life was what tormented me. I felt like going over and at least holding his hand while he died, but it would have been out of order and I didn't do it. I wish now I had. Outside of the occasional peaks of bitter fighting and heavy casualties that highlight military operation, I believe the outstanding trait in any campaign is the terrible weariness that gradually comes over everybody. every-body. Soldiers become exhausted in mind and in soul as well as physically. physi-cally. They acquire a weariness that is mixed up with boredom and lack of all gaiety. To lump them all together, to-gether, you just get damn sick of it all. The Infantry reaches a stage of exhaustion that is incomprehensible incompre-hensible to you folks back home. The men In the First division, for instance, were in the lines 28 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 docs and because you can't really do anything else. Have you ever in your life worked so hard and so long that you don'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 came slogging up to a certain captain and said, excitedly, ex-citedly, "I've got to find Captain Blank right away. Important message." mes-sage." The captain said, "But I am Captain Cap-tain 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 en-gineers they too become exhausted ex-hausted but not so inhumanly. With them and with us correspondents it's the ceaselessness, the endlessness of everything that finally worms its way through you and gradually starts to devour you. It's the perpetual dust choking chok-ing you, the hard ground wracking wrack-ing your muscles, the snatched food sitting ill on your stomach, the heat and the flies and dirty feet and the constant roar of engines en-gines 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 tomor-row and Troina is Randazzo and when will we ever stop and I'm so tired. I've noticed this feeling has begun to overtake the war correspondents themselves. vIt is true that we don't fight on and on like the infantry, that we are usually under fire only briefly and that, indeed, we live better bet-ter than the average soldier. Yet our lives are strangely consuming in that we do live primitively and at the same time must delve into ourselves and do creative writing. |
