Editorial: Symphony of words
For our money there’s nobody in the business who can write like Ernie Pyle. Sometimes Ernie outdoes himself. For instance, this description of a night in Okinawa, taken from his column which is printed on the first page of the Section today:
Not long after dark the rifle shots started. There would be a little flurry far ahead, maybe a dozen shots. Then silence for many minutes.
Then there would be another flurry, way to the left. Then silence. Then the blurt of a machine gun closer, and a few scattered single shots sort of framing it. Then a long silence. Spooky.
All night it went like that. Flares in the sky ahead, the crack of big guns behind us, then as passing shells, a few dark figures coming and going in the night, muted voices at the telephones, the rifle shots, the mosquitoes, the stars, the feel of the damp night air under the wide sky – back again at the kind of life I had known so long.
The old familiar pattern unchanged by distance or time from war on the other side of the world. A pattern so imbedded in my soul that, coming back into it again, it seemed to me as I lay there that I’d never known anything else in my life. And there are millions of us.