Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Naples, Italy – (by wireless)
A Red Cross worker rides each hospital ship, not only to do anything for the wounded she can, but also to help keep the ship’s staff and crew happy.
On our ship, the Red Cross girl was Percy Gill of Palo Alto, California. She used to teach physical education at Castilleja School for Girls.
After supper, she passed out a bottle of Coca-Cola to every man on the ship. It was the first time most of the boys had had one since leaving America. The Merchant Marine seamen in the crew always help her pass the cokes around.
Miss Gill has a tiny office filled with books, toilet supplies, musical instruments and magazines. As soon as the wounded men are brought aboard, she gives everyone a pack of cigarettes and a toothbrush, for most of them have lost their gear.
Some completely empty-handed
As they were swung aboard, you see some completely emptyhanded and others carrying their pitiful little possessions in their tin hats, balanced on their stomachs. Some have on hospital pajamas, some just OD shirts, some only their dirty gray underwear.
Miss Gill does not intrude herself on the men, for she knows that the most badly wounded want to be left alone. Now and then she’ll give a boy a book and discover that he’s still looking at the same page three hours later. Another boy used his as a fan all afternoon.
Miss Gill has books in French, and in German too. Every shipload has a few wounded prisoners. We had two on my trip. One was a startled-looking German kid whose card showed him to be only 17. The prisoners are treated just the same as anybody else.
Miss Gill’s musical warehouse includes an accordion, four guitars, a violin, two saxophones, a clarinet, a trombone, and two dozen harmonicas. She doesn’t have many requests for either the musical instruments or the books on these short trips between the beachhead and Naples, for there’s hardly time. But on the long trip back to America they are a godsend, for the men are feeling better by then and time goes slowly. On one 16-day trip across the ocean the wounded men read 3,000 books – an average of six to a man.
Relief from mud and cold
It is a relief and a comfort for men to be on a hospital ship after their months of mud and cold and misery and danger and finally the agony of their wounding. It is a relief because the hospital ship is so little like war, and because those who operate it are in a world apart from the world these men have known.
There’s no blackout at all. Nobody is ever dirty or cold. Cabin windows have no shutters. You can smoke on deck. Big spotlights slung on brackets point their dazzling beams at the big red cross painted on the ship’s sides.
The ship takes its course far outside the channels of regular war shipping, and instead of keeping radio secrecy we broadcast our position every 15 minutes. The hospital ship wants the enemy to know where it is so no mistake can be made.
Our ship has had several “incidents.” It has been stopped by surfaced submarines and been circled by enemy planes. But the enemy has always respected it. The greatest danger is going to such places as Anzio, or standing in ports during air raids.
Scene of quiet and peace
Usually, the ward lights are left on until 10:30 p.m. But on our trip, they were turned off at 9:30, for we were to dock very early next morning and the men had to wakened by 5:00 a.m. to give the nurses time to get the wounded all washed and fed.
By 10 o’clock, the inside of the ship was dim and quiet. Nurses went about softly in the faint glow of the blue nightlight. The doctors, all through, were playing chess and solitaire in their small salon on the top deck. A few soldiers strolled on deck or hung over the rail. It was warm and gentle outside. The washing of the water seemed like a purring against the ship’s sides.
It was wonderful to be going away from war instead of toward it. For the badly wounded there was a sense of completion of a task, for the others a sense of respite. And the sheets and the soft beds and the security of walls lent a confidence in things present and to come.
There was intense suffering aboard that ship. But by 10:30, you could somehow feel the quiet, masked composure that comes to men of turmoil when they settle down for the night in the clasp of a strange new safety.
And early next morning we were here.