Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
After the marching order came, it took our company about 15 minutes to get itself together, with the head of the line assembled at the appointed place in front of the kitchen tent at the edge of the olive grove.
It was midnight. The night was utterly black. It was the dark of the moon, and thick, low clouds further darkened the sky. One soldier said:
In two years overseas, this is the blackest night we’ve ever moved.
With a couple of others, I felt my way from our pig shed down to where we thought the kitchen tent was. We knew we were near it, but we couldn’t see it.
One soldier said:
It’s up ahead about 50 feet.
I butted in and said:
No, it’s over to the right about 30 feet.
Just at that moment, a flash of fire from one of our nearby cannon brightened the countryside for a split second, and we saw the tent. It was six feet in front of us. That’s how dark it was.
One by one the platoon leaders felt their way up to the head of the column, reported their platoons ready in line, and felt their way back. Finally, the lieutenant said, “Let’s go.”
Let’s get along
There’s no military formality about a night movement of infantry. You don’t try to keep step. Nobody says “Forward march,” or any of that parade ground stuff. After a rest, the lieutenant says, “All right, let’s get along.” And everybody gets up and starts.
In trying to get out of the orchard, we lost our various places. Finally, everybody stopped and called each other’s names in order to get reassembled. The lieutenant and the sergeant would call for me occasionally to make sure I was still along.
When we fell in again, I was marching behind Sgt. Vincent Conners of Imogene, Iowa. His nickname is “Pete.” We hadn’t gone far before I realized that the place behind Pete was the best spot in the column for me, for I had found a little secret.
He had a rolled-up map about two feet long stuck horizontally through the pack harness on his back. By keeping close to it, I could just barely make out the vague white shape of this map. And that was my beacon throughout the night.
It was amazing how you could read the terrain ahead of you by the movement of that thin white line. If it went down a couple of inches, I knew Pete had stepped into a hole. If it went down fast, I knew he had struck a slope. If it went down sideways, I knew his feet were sliding on a slippery slope.
In that split second before my own step followed his, I could correct for whatever had happened to him. As a result, I was down only once the whole night.
Magnificent cussing
We were startled to hear some magnificent cussing down at one side, and recognized the company commander’s voice. He had stepped right off into a narrow ditch about two feet deep and gone down on his back. Bundled as he was with packsacks, he couldn’t get out of the ditch. He finally made it on the third try.
The thing that always amazes me about these inhuman night movements of troops in war areas is how good-natured the men are about it. A certain fundamental appreciation for the ridiculous carries them through. As we slogged along, slipping and crawling and getting muddier and muddier, the soldier behind me said:
I’m going to write my Congressman about this.
Another soldier answered:
Hell, I don’t even know who my Congressman is. I did three years ago, but I don’t know.
The company’s first sergeant is Bill Wood of Council Bluffs, Iowa, a tall man who carried a heavy pack, and when he fell there was a lot of him to go down. Whenever Bill would fall, we’d hear him and stop. And then we could hear him clawing with his feet and getting part way up and then hitting the mud again, and cussing more eloquently with each attempt.
It really was so funny we all had to laugh. When Bill finally got back in line, he was good and mad, and he said he couldn’t see anything funny about it.
It took us half an hour to feel our way out of the big orchard and down a few feet onto the so-called road, which was actually not much more than a furrow worn by Italian mule carts. There were knee-deep ruts and bucket-sized rocks.
Once on the road, the column halted to let a train of pack mules pass. As we stood there, the thought occurred to all of us:
It’s bad enough to be floundering around on the ground and mud, but now it’ll be like groveling in a barnyard.
