Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
NOTE: Mr. Pyle wrote this column for use following a previous article on Lt. von Ripper, which appeared Saturday, March 18. In the meantime, however, Ernie’s report of the bombing in which he suffered a slight personal injury was received and because of its timeliness published ahead of the Von Ripper story, which is concluded herewith.
In Italy – (by wireless)
You know Lt. Rudolf C. von Ripper, the soldier-artist about whom we were writing yesterday. Well, we’ll finish him up today.
Von Ripper is a soldier of fortune, in a way, yet he doesn’t look or act like one. He is intelligent, and his approach is simple rather than adventurous. He is 39, but seems younger.
He is medium tall, slightly stooped, and one eye has a cast that makes it appear to be looking beyond you. His face is long and thin, and his teeth are prominent. His knowledge of the English language is profound and his grammar perfect, but he still pronounced his words with a hissing imperfection. He swears lustily in English.
Von Ripper is as much at home discussing philosophy or political idealism as he is in describing the best way to take cover from a machine gun.
He is meticulous in his personal appearance, yet doesn’t seem to care whether he sleeps between satin sheets or in the freezing mud of the battlefield.
It is hard to reconcile the artist with the soldier in Von Ripper, yet he is obviously professional at both. It may be that being a fine soldier makes him a better artist.
His long experience at warfare has made him as cunning as a fox. You can’t conceive of his being rattled in a tight spot, and he seems to have been born without the normal sense of fear that inhabits most of mankind.
Has become legend at front
Von Ripper is so calm and so bold in battle that he has become a legend at the front. High officers ask his advice in planning attack. He will volunteer for anything.
Being wounded four times hasn’t touched his nerve in the slightest. In fact, he became so notorious as an audacious patrol leader that his division finally forbade his going on patrol unless by specific permission.
One night Von Ripper was returning from patrol and was stopped by an itchy-fingered sentry who called, “Who goes there?” The answer came back in a heavily German accent, “Lt. von Ripper.” He was wearing lieutenant bars, but his dog tag showed him to be a sergeant. It took an hour to get it straightened out.
Some sentries would have shot first and then investigated.
Out of this background as a proven fighting man, Von Ripper is painting the war. He has produced more than a hundred pictures already. His work goes to the War Department in Washington, but he hopes an arrangement might be made whereby a book of his war drawings could be published.
I believe that Von Ripper, like most of us over here, has finally become more interested in the personal, human side of war than in the abstract ideals for which wars are fought.
Trying to take heroics out of war
He says that in his paintings he is trying to take the applesauce out of war, trying to eliminate the heroics with which war is too often presented. From what I’ve seen of the work of other artists, Von Ripper is not alone in this sincerity. It’s hard to be close enough to war to paint it, and still consider it heroic.
Von Ripper’s dead men look awful, as dead men do. Live soldiers in foxholes have that spooky stare of exhaustion. His landscapes are sad and pitifully torn.
His sketches aren’t photographic at all. They are sometimes distorted and grotesque, and often he goes into pen-and-ink fantasy.
He has given me one of these, labeled “Self-Portrait in Italy,” which shows himself and another wounded man, against a background of wrecked walls and starving children, being led downhill by the bony arms of a chortling skeleton representing ultimate and inevitable death.
You get used to seeing things like that when you’re a soldier for a long time.
