Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
NOTE: The Press today begins a new series of columns by Ernie Pyle, the report of a 13,000-mile trip into the heart of Africa. The trip was made before the heavy fighting in Tunisia and until now Ernie hasn’t had time to tell about it.
Somewhere in Africa –
During a lull in the Tunisian fighting, I let the old wanderlust get the better of me as usual, and took myself a trip.
It was just a little trip – only 13,000 miles. If I’d thought to go in a different direction, I could have traveled from Tunisia to California and back to Tunisia again in the same direction. Yet all I did was fly around Africa.
The reason for the trip was twofold – to get a breathing spell from the front, and to try to get warm. I hadn’t been warm in nearly nine months, and one way to get warm is to go south.
So, I went down to the tropics. I slept under mosquito netting, swam in the Gold Coast surf, bought ivory carvings in the Congo, watched native jungle dances, took after-lunch siestas, had my own houseboy, and really lived the life of Reilly on my small world tour.
It wasn’t entirely a vacation trip, for I wrote columns as I went along. So now I’ll be telling you about the trip, and also how some of our American soldiers live in the other half of this vast and strange continent.
Our trip took us over mountains, ocean, jungle and desert. It was a sort of pioneer version of peacetime traveling with Pan American Airways, except that it was all by Army plane. We’d fly all day, go to bed early, and get up anywhere from 3:30 on for another early start.
You almost always take off before daylight, for distances are vast in Africa and you cover a lot in one day. Rolling out of bed at inhuman hours gets to be almost normal for you after a while.
I remember one morning at a little jungle camp down in the Congo. We were sitting at a mess-hall bench eating breakfast. Our pilot, Capt. Johnnie Warren of Columbia, South Carolina, was sitting next to me. We were both half-asleep.
Daylight spoils the ‘fun’
A faint dawn began to show in the sky. I said:
Look, it’s getting daylight.
Whereupon Capt. Warren looked out the window, threw down his spoon, and said:
Aw shucks, that takes all the fun out of his takeoff. Now we can see where we’re going.
We flew across the Sahara. We landed at little pinpoints populated by a lonely dozen or two Americans in khaki shorts, holding these far outposts that must be held by somebody.
The desert was stifling when we came down upon it, and each time we pitied the fellows stationed there, and were glad to leave and climb back into the cooler skies.
The Sahara is hard to see from the air, because the wind keeps a constant haze of sand hanging above it. After you’ve risen a couple of thousand feet, you don’t see anything.
For a long time, I forced myself to stay awake and keep looking out the window, for fear I’d miss something interesting. But finally, I gave up hope of seeing anything, and plunked myself upon an inviting stack of gray sacks piled along one side of the cabin.
And thus, cuddled down into a nice form-fitting nest, I slept most of the way across the Sahara Desert upon the United States mail.
I should have abandoned my long underwear and heavy uniform the day after starting. But I figured on the coolness of flying at high altitudes the following days, and left them on.
Long live Liberia!
On the third day, we were deep in the tropics. We stopped at a jungle field for lunch. It was hotter than hell. Most of the black natives were semi-naked. The whites were sitting around in a sort of boiling stupor. The sweat poured off us newcomers, and that woolen underwear began to wriggle. I felt as though somebody had poured hot gravy down my back.
And then the pilot decided to stay there overnight. We were assigned to barracks, and carried our luggage about a quarter of a mile to them through the blasting sun.
I flopped on my cot a few moments and shut my eyes, just long enough to roll over in my mind the delightful anticipation of the bath I was going to have,
In the tropics, bathwater is never heated. It’s just right without heating. The water came pouring out of the showers over me, and water has never felt so good. Baths had been few and unsatisfactory for me during the past winter. But there in the tropics I washed and washed until I was weak from over-cleansing.
And then I put on summer underwear and thin khaki, abandoning long heavy underwear for the first time since last July. For a couple of hours, I felt the way one feels after fever – light and floating and strange. But I felt good.
That transition from heavies to lights, from months of cringing against the cold, to the sudden freedom of true warmth, is an experience that sticks in your mind for weeks above the ordinary happenings of the days.
Liberia is where I became a sanitary human being again. Long live Liberia!
