Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Allied HQ, Algiers, Algeria – (by wireless)
The Army mess where I used to eat during infrequent visits to Algiers was staffed at one time by soldier-waiters. Then later we had French girls, and now upon my return our waiters are Italian prisoners. And they are in fact the best we’ve had.
They’re terribly attentive, and grin all the time, apparently because they’re so happy with their jobs. They don’t speak English, and very few of us speak Italian, so a very neat system of dining-table communications has been devised.
Each place has a little typed menu with each dish numbered. With it is a tiny slip of paper with numbers running up to 15. So you simply take a pencil and circle the number of whatever you want and hand the slip to the waiter.
Pretty soon he comes back with exactly what you ordered no matter how illogical your appetite may have been. They simply never make a mistake that way. I think we ought to try it at home.
Pvt. George McCoy used to do a daily buttonhole broadcast for WEAF on the steps of the Astor Hotel in New York. The program was called The Real McCoy. Now he’s on the staff of the Stars and Stripes doing the same thing – buttonholing soldiers on the streets and having them talk into the microphone.
Ernie is buttonholed
He calls the present program The Sidewalks of North Africa. Just before I went home last fall, George buttonholed me and got me up to his studio and made some kind of record for broadcasting to the soldiers.
I don’t know what I said because it was the second time in my life I’d ever done such a thing, and I was so scared I can’t remember.
I ran into Pvt. McCoy again yesterday and he was all aflutter. Seems he’d read in a clipping from the States how I’d turned down an offer of $1,500 for one broadcast. So he’s been running around all over Algiers telling people what a wonderful person I am because I turned down $1,500 at home but did one for nothing over here.
It’s nice of George, but the truth is I’m just plain silly.
Transient correspondents at Algiers stay in six rooms set aside for us at the Aletti Hotel. A newcomer just goes from one of the rooms to another until he finds either an empty bed or some floor space for his bedroll, and moves in. The first I stayed with John Daly of CBS. The second I slept on a balcony in the new sleeping bag That Girl bought me as a farewell gift. And now I’m in a room with Red Mueller of NBC, who is about to start home for the first time in 20 months.
Tireder and tireder
My battle friend, Chris Cunningham of the United Press, is still here after nearly two years at war. Here too are Hal Boyle and Boots Norgaard of AP, Don Coe of UP and Graham Hovey of INS, all old pals of last winter in Tunisia and all of them getting tireder and tireder of war.
Chris and Hal have been put to writing war columns similar to this one for their press associations. Hal, who always has a funny remark, says:
I’m writing for the people who look over the shoulders of the people reading Ernie Pyle’s column.
On the second day back in Algiers, I went up to Allied headquarters to give Gen. Eisenhower a copy of my book. In the outer lobby, you had to show credentials to a soldier behind the desk. After the soldier had made out my entry pass, he said:
I’m almost from your hometown.
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“Montezuma, Indiana,” he said.
The soldier was Luther C. Manwaring. He is a quiet and gentlemanly young man of 25, who hasn’t been home in nearly two years. I was through Montezuma about a month ago, so I was able to tell Pvt. Manwaring that our respective hometowns were still there and thriving and hardly mussed him or me at all.