Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England – (by wireless)
Well, here we are again in dear old London town. At least they still call it London, although you can hardly see the city for Americans. But before going into that, I’ll tell you about our trip up here.
The morning I left Italy, I had to get up at dawn to catch the plane. Sgt. Harry Cowe, who was a part of the gang I had been living with, somehow managed to get both himself and me up right on the dot.
It was so early I hadn’t wanted or expected anybody else to get up. But while I was still rubbing my eyes, in came Pvt. Donn Jordan with a beautiful breakfast tray of juice, eggs, bacon, toast and coffee, just as though we weren’t at war at all.
But that wasn’t all. Our Italian boy, Reif (pronounced “Rafe”), who ordinarily didn’t come to work till 8 o’clock, showed up just as it was starting to get daylight.
Reif was a grand kid, smart and agreeable and full of good humor, and I’m sure he had never been so happy in his life as when working in our little madhouse. He had come voluntarily to help rassle my luggage out to the airport.
And last but not least, in another minute here came prancing in my tiny little friend, Lt. Maxine Budeman, the nurse-dietitian from the nearby Army hospital. She is from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and everybody calls her Goldilocks. She is just shoulder-high and weighs approximately 90 pounds.
A couple of months ago, when I was wasting away with anemia, Goldilocks kept sneaking me eggs and steak from the hospital. We had a lot of fun joking with the nurses about my meager hemoglobin and my one corpuscle, and it was Goldilocks who undoubtedly saved my life with her surreptitious calories.
A goodbye kiss for Goldilocks
At the airport, Rief lugged in my bedroll and bags for me and I got all set for the plane. Then we started to say goodbye. We four were standing beside a command car. A group of officers and soldiers stood nearby, idly watching us, while they waited for their planes. Our little goodbye sequence must have given them a chuckle or two.
First, I shook hands with Harry. And then, since pretty nurses don’t come into one’s life every day, I managed to inflict upon Goldilocks a goodbye kiss that must have shaken Rome. And then I turned to shake hands with Reif.
But Reif, instead, grabbed me by both shoulders and in true continental fashion implanted a large Italian smack, first on my right cheek and then on my left. Our audience was astonished, and so was I. And though slightly embarrassed, I must admit I was also sort of pleased. There are swell people in any nation, and I know that in our crazy little group there was a genuine fondness for many of our Italian friends.
Thus buoyed and puffed up by this international osculation, I floated onto the plane and we were off. On the way out, we flew right past the magnificence of Vesuvius, but I was feeling badly about leaving and didn’t even want to look out, or look back, so I didn’t.
Dusk over the Atlas Mountains
We flew most of the day and far into the night. Crossing the Mediterranean, I knotted myself up on top of a pile of mailsacks and slept half the trip away.
And then, in a different plane, over western Algeria and Morocco, I got myself a blanket, stretched out on the floor and slept for hours. The sun was just setting when I woke up.
I’ve written many times that war isn’t romantic to the people in it. Seldom have I ever felt any drama about the war or about myself in two years overseas. But here in that plane, all of a sudden, things did see romantic.
A heavy darkness had come inside the cabin. Passengers were indistinct shapes, kneeling at the windows to absorb the spell of the hour. The remnants of the sun streaked the cloud-banked horizon ahead, making it vividly red and savagely beautiful.
We were high, and the motors throbbed in a timeless rhythm. Below us were the green peaks of the Atlas Mountains, lovely in the softening shroud of the dusk. Villages with red roofs nestled on the peak tops. Down there lived sheep men – obscure mountain men who had never heard of a Nebelwerfer or a bazooka. Men at home at the end of the day in the poor, narrow, beautiful security of their own walls.
And there high in the sky above, and yet part of it all, were plain Americans incongruously away from home. For a moment, it seemed terribly dramatic that we should be there at all amid that darkening beauty so far away and so foreign and so old.
It was one of those moments impossible to transmit to another mind. A moment of overpowering beauty, of the surge of a marching world, of the relentlessness of our own fate. It made you want to cry.
