Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in North Africa – (by wireless)
There wasn’t any real reason for me to go to the Belgian Congo, since we have only a handful of troops in that area now, but when I got to a spot only 1,500 miles away, I said to myself:
Gee, I hate to be this close and not see the Congo.
So, I just got in a plane and flew an extra 3,000 miles and saw the Congo. Just as I had expected, the Congo looks like a river, that being what it is. It is wide and pretty muddy. It looks a good bit like the Mississippi, only it’s darker. It didn’t look either very dangerous or very romantic where I saw fit.
I stayed down there for a week. We planned to take a launch and go upriver about a hundred miles to see some flora and fauna, but at the last minute the launch broke down and we didn’t get to go. But I did ride across the Congo twice in the motorboat, and I saw the mast out of Stanley’s ship which they have planted on the shore at Leopoldville. We spent 10 minutes walking around and around the mast, looking at it from a sense of dirty, but it was just another mast to me.
Leo is genuine surprise
Leopoldville was a big surprise. I expected to find just a large village with a few tin-roofed trading posts, such as you see in tropical movies. But actually “Leo” is a beautiful city of 50,000. It has shipyards, big river docks, and a modern textile factory with 4,000 workers. It has 3,000 white inhabitants and scores of homes as beautiful as you would find in Pasadena. Its streets are of macadam. It has fine big stores in buildings of brick and stone and concrete. Huge trees like maples line the streets. There are many parks, and lovely statues.
There are movies and a zoo and a big tropical museum. Bougainvilleas and other flowers of all kinds splash the city with color. People sit and drink in sidewalk cafés. Autos dash along the streets at astonishing speed. You are suddenly amazed to see so many white women again.
A big ell-shaped hotel sits in the center of town, with its lovely garden right on the river bank. You could sit in your room at the hotel and throw an inkbottle out of the window and it would go kerplunk right into the Congo.
Not as hot as Washington
The city is always referred to by the shortened term “Leo,” just as Elizabethville is almost always called “Eville.”
The very words Belgian Congo have always suggested the most insufferable kind of tropics, where white people sit and rot with the heat. Yet when I was there it was not as hot as Washington in summertime, and during half of my week it was almost chilly, with frequent cloud-bursting rains.
If you are careful, it need not be an especially unhealthy place, although the climate is energy-sapping and people work with probably half of their normal efficiency.
The war seems pretty far away at Leo. The Belgian Congo did send an army up to help the British retake Ethiopia, and Congo troops were with Gen. Jacques Leclerc’s army when it marched up from Lake Chad, and the Congo is producing to the limit of its natural resources – tin, rubber, cotton and other goods – for the war effort. But still the war seems pretty far away.
No rationing to worry about
They don’t ration gasoline or tires in Leo. I saw some new-looking autos there. There is plenty to eat. There is liquor to drink. The stores have nearly everything you want. And all the physical labor is still done by natives.
The Belgian people have been grand to our troops, inviting them into their homes, and turning over to them the one big club in town. But the Belgians are strict about their women, and a soldier can’t have a date unless the whole family sits around. And if it gets to the point where you are trusted alone with a girl, then you’re practically married.
At one time, there were quite a lot of American soldiers in Leo, but the need for them has ceased and they have now been moved out. When I was there about three dozen men were living in a camp built to hold thousands. It was like living with a couple of friends in the Empire State Building.
They had a few trucks left, but no jeeps, so for personal transportation they gave me a two-and-a-half-ton truck, in which I noisily whisked back and forth between the camp and the town and was the cynosure of all eyes, I assure you.
