Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
Soldiers are made out of the strangest people.
I’ve recently made a new friend – just a plain old Hoosier – who is so quiet and humble you would hardly know he was around. Yet in our few weeks of invasion, he has killed four of the enemy, and he has learned war’s wise little ways of destroying life and preserving your own.
He hasn’t become the “killer” type that war makes of some soldiers; he has merely become adjusted to an obligatory new profession.
His name is George Thomas Clayton. Back home he is known as Tommy. In the Army he is sometimes called George, but usually just Clayton. He is from Evansville, where he lived with his sister. He is a frontline infantryman of rifle company in the 29th Division.
By the time this is printed he will be back in the lines. Right now he is out of combat for a brief rest. He spent a few days in an “Exhaustion Camp,” then was assigned briefly to the camp where I work from – a camp for correspondents. That’s how we got acquainted.
Clayton is a private first class. He operates a Browning automatic rifle. He has turned down two chances to become a buck sergeant and squad leader, simply because he would rather keep his powerful BAR than have stripes and less personal protection.
He landed in Normandy on D-Day, on the toughest of the beaches, and was in the line for 37 days without rest. He has had innumerable narrow escapes.
Twice, 88s hit within a couple of arms’ lengths of him. But both times the funnel of the concussion was away from him and he didn’t get a scratch though the explosions covered him and his rifle with dirt.
Then a third one hit about 10 feet away, and made him deaf in his right ear. He had always had trouble with that ear anyway – ear aches and things as a child. Even in the Army back in America he had to beg the doctors to waive the ear defect in order to come overseas. He is still a little hard of hearing in that ear from the shell burst, but it’s gradually coming back.
When Tommy finally left the lines, he was pretty well done up and his sergeant wanted to send him to a hospital, but he begged not to go for fear he wouldn’t get back to his old company, so they let him go to a rest camp instead.
And now after a couple of weeks with us (provided the correspondents don’t drive him frantic), he will return to the lines with his old outfit.
Clayton has worked at all kings of things back in that other world of civilian life. He has been a farm hand, a cook and a bartender. Just before he joined the Army, he was a gauge-honer in the Chrysler Ordnance Plant at Evansville.
When the war is over, he wants to go into business for himself for the first time in his life. He’ll probably set up a small restaurant in Evansville. He said his brother-in-law would back him.
Tommy was shipped overseas after only two months in the Army, and now has been out of America for 18 months. He is medium-sized, dark-haired, has a little mustache and the funniest-looking head of hair you ever saw this side of Buffalo Bill’s show.
While his division was killing time in the first few days before leaving England, he and three others decided to have their hair cut Indian fashion. They had their heads clipped down to the skin all except a two-inch ridge starting at the forehead and running clear to the back of the neck. It makes them look more comical than ferocious as they had intended. Two of the four have been wounded and evacuated to England.
I chatted off and on with Clayton for several days before he told me how old he was. I was amazed; so much so that I asked several other people to guess at his age and they all guessed about the same as I did – about 26.
Actually, he is 37, and that’s pretty well along in years to be a frontline infantryman. It’s harder on a man at that age.
As Clayton himself says, “When you pass that 30 mark you begin to slow up a little.”
It’s harder for you to take the hard ground and the rain and the sleeplessness and the unending wracking of it all. Yet at 37, he elected to go back.
