OCR Text |
Show With Ernie Pyle at the Front Brave Medics Carry On Under Heavy Nazi Shelling While Hundreds Are Hit, Ernie Has Charmed Life and Escapes By Ernie Pyle ON THE WESTERN FRONT. The afternoon was tense, and full of caution and dire little might-have-beens. I was wandering up a dirt lane where the infantrymen were squatting alongside in a ditch, waiting their turn to advance. ad-vance. They always squat like that when they're close to the front. Suddenly German shells started banging around us. I jumped into a ditch between a couple of soldiers and squatted. Shells were clipping clip-ping the hedge- F"TZZZri 1ps risht over U: our heads and "" VI crashing into the M next pasture. 'sJi Then suddenlv i ' ,SX X l onc exploded, not L LWl vith a crash but As f with a ring as f X ' though you'd I V7 struck a high-toned high-toned belL The Eruie Pyle ' debris of burned wadding and dirt came showering down over us. My head rang, and my right ear couldn't hear anything. The shell had struck behind us, 20 feet away. We had been saved by the earthen bank of the hedgerow. hedge-row. It was the next day before my ear returned to normal. A minute later a soldier crouching crouch-ing next in line, a couple of feet away, turned to me and asked, "Are you a war correspondent?" I said I was, and he said, "I want to shake your hand." And he reached around the bush and we shook hands. That's all either of us said. It didn't occur to me until later that it was a sort of unusual experience. And I was so addled by the close explosions that I forgot to put down his name. A few minutes later a friend of mine, Lieut. Col. Oma Bates of Gloster, Miss., came past and said he was hunting oar new battalion command post. It was supposed to be In a farmhouse about a hundred yards from us, so I got up and went with him. We couldn't find ft at first. We lost about five minutes, walking around in orchards looking for it. That was a blessed five minutes. min-utes. For when we got within 50 yards of the house it got a direct shell hit which killed one officer and wounded several men. The Germans now rained shells around our little area. You couldn't walk 10 feet without hitting the ground. They came past our heads so quickly you didn't take time to fall forward I found the quickest way down was to flop back and sideways. side-ways. In a little while the seat of my pants was plastered thick with wet red clay, and my hands were scratched from hitting rocks and briars to break quick falls. Nobody ever fastens the chin straps on his helmet in the front lines, 'for the blasts from nearby bursts have been known to catch helmets and break people's necks. Consequently, when you squat quickly you descend faster than your helmet and you leave it in midair mid-air above you. Of course in a fraction frac-tion of a second it follows you down and hits you on the head, and settles sideways over your ear and down over your eyes. It makes you feel silly. Once more shells drove me into a .roadside ditch. I squatted there, just a bewildered guy in brown, part of a thin line of other bewildered guys as far up and down the ditch as you could see-It see-It was really frightening. Our own shells were whanging overhead and hitting just beyond. The German shells tore through the orchards around us. There was machine gunning gun-ning all around, and bullets zipped through the trees above us. I could tell by their shoulder patches that the soldiers near me were from a division to our right, and I wondered what they were doing do-ing there. Then I heard one of them say: "This is a fine foul-up for you! I knew that lieutenant was getting lost. Hell, we're service troops, and here we are right in the front lines. Grim as the moment was, I had to laugh to myself at their pitiful plight. I left a command post in a farmhouse and started to another an-other about 10 minutes away. When I got there, they said the one I bad just left had been hit while I was on the way. A solid armor-piercing shell had gone right through a window and a man I knew had his leg cut off. That evening the other officers took the big steel slug over to the hospital so he would have a souvenir. When I got to another battalion command post, later in the day, they were just ready to move. A sergeant ser-geant had been forward about half a mile in a jeep and picked out a j farmhouse. He said it was the clean- ; est, nicest one he had been in for a long time, I So we piled into several jeeps and drove up there. It had been only j about 20 minutes since the sergeant had left. But when we got to the new house, it wasn't there. A shell had hit it in the last 20 minutes and set it afire, and it had burned to the ground. So we drove up the road a little farther and picked out another one. We had been there about half an hour when a shell struck in an orchard 50 yards in front of us. In a few minutes our litter bearers bear-ers came past, carrying a captain. He was the surgeon of our adjoining adjoin-ing battalion, and he had been looking look-ing in the orchard for a likely place to move his first-aid station. A shell hit right beside him. That's the way war is on an afternoon after-noon that is tense and full of might-have-beens for some of us, and awful realities for others. It just depends on what your number num-ber is. I don't believe in that number num-ber business at all. but in war you sort of let your belief hover around it, for it's about all you have left. One afternoon I went with our battalion medics to pick up wounded men who had been carried back to some shattered houses just behind our lines, and to gather some others right off the battlefield. The battalion surgeon was CapL Lucien Strawn, from Morgantown, W. Va. He drives his jeep himself and goes right into the lines with his aidmen. We drive forward about a mile in our two jeeps, so loaded with litter bearers they were even riding on the hood. Finally we had to stop and wait until a bulldozer filled a new shell crater in the middle of the road. We had gone only about a hundred yards beyond the crater when we ran into some infantry. They stopped us and said: "Be careful where jou're going. go-ing. The Germans are only 200 yards up the road." Captain Strawn said he couldn't get to the wounded men that way so he turned around to try another way. A side road led off at an angle from a shattered village we had just passed through. He decided to try to get up that road. But when we got there the road had a house blown across it, and it was blocked. We went forward a little . on foot and found two deep bomb craters, also impassable. So Captain Strawn walked back to the bulldozer, and asked the driver if he would go ahead of us and clear the road. The first thing the driver asked was. "How close to the front is it?" The doctor said, "Well, at least it isn't any closer than you are right now." So the dozer driver agreed to clear the road ahead of us. While we were waiting a soldier came over and showed us two eggs he had just found in the backyard of a jumbled house. There wasn't an untouched house left standing in the town, and some of the houses were still smoking inside. At the far edge of" the town we came to a partly wrecked farmhouse farm-house that had two Germans in it-one it-one was wounded and the other was just staying with him. We ran our jeeps into the yard and the litter bearers went on across the Geld. The doctor took his scissors and began cutting his clothes open to see if he was wounded anywhere except in the arm. He wasn't. But he had been sick at his stomach and then rolled over. He was sure a superman sad sack. |