The Pittsburgh Press (April 8, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Tunisia –
The war correspondents over here seldom write about themselves, as it may be interesting if I try to tell you how we live.
There are more than 75 American and British correspondents and photographers in North Africa. Since Allied Headquarters is in a big city to the rear, that’s where most of the correspondents stay. The number actually in Tunisia at any one time fluctuates between half a dozen and two dozen. Each of the three big press associations has a five-man staff – usually three men back at headquarters and two at the front. They rotate every few weeks.
The correspondents in the city live a life that is pretty close to normal. They live in hotels or apartments, eat at restaurants or officers’ messes, work regular hours, get laundry done, dress in regulation uniforms, keep themselves clean, and get their news from communiqués and by talking to staff officers at headquarters.
Heebie-jeebies in the city
Since their lives are closely akin to the lives of newspapermen at home, we’ll deal here only with the correspondents as they live at the front.
Some of us have spent as much as two months in Tunisia without ever returning to the city. When we do, it is a great thrill to come back to civilization – for the first day.
But then a reaction sets in. Almost invariably we get the heebie-jeebies and find ourselves nervous and impatient with all the confusion and regimentation of city life, and wish ourselves at the front again.
The outstanding thing about life at the front is its magnificent simplicity. It is a life consisting only of the essentials – food, sleep, transportation, and what little warmth and safety you can manage to wangle out of it by personal ingenuity. Ordinarily, when life is stripped to the bare necessities, it is an empty and boring life. But not at the front. Time for me has never passed so rapidly. You’re never aware of the day of the week, and a whole month is gone before you know it.
Up here, the usual responsibilities and obligations are gone. You don’t have appointments to keep. Nobody cares how you look. Red tape is at a minimum. You have no desk, no designated hours. You don’t wash hands before you eat, nor afterwards either. It would be a heaven for small boys with dirty faces.
And it was a healthy life. During the winter months I was constantly miserable from the cold, yet paradoxically I never felt better in my life. The cold wind burned my face to a deep tan, and my whole system became toughened. I ate twice as much as usual. I hadn’t been hungry for nigh onto forty years, but in Tunisia I ate like a horse and was so constantly hungry it got to be a joke.
You do everything for yourself
It was a life that gave a new sense of accomplishment. In normal life, all the little things were done for us. I made my money by writing, and then used that money to hire people to wash my clothes, shine my shoes, make my bed, clean the bathtub, fill my gas tank, serve my meals, carry my bags, build my fires.
But not in Africa. We did everything ourselves. We were suddenly conscious again that we could do things. The fact that another guy could write a better story than I could was counterbalanced by the fact that I could roll a better bedroll than he could.
Last, and probably most important of all, was the feeling of vitality, of being in the heart of everything, of being a part of it – no mere onlooker, but a member of the team. I got into the race, and I resented dropping out even long enough to do what I was there to do – which was write. I would rather have just kept going all day, every day.
I’ve written that war is not romantic when a person is in the midst of it. Nothing happened to change my feeling about that. But I will have to admit there was an exhilaration in it; an inner excitement that built up into a buoyant tenseness seldom achieved in peacetime.
Just part of Army family
Up here, the Army accepts us correspondents as a part of the family. We knew and were friends with hundreds of individual soldiers. And we knew, and. were known by, every American general in Tunisia. There was no hedging at the front. I’ve never known an instance where correspondents were not told, with complete frankness, what was going on.
In the beginning, no restrictions were put on us; we could go anywhere we pleased at any time. But things gradually changed, as the established machinery of war caught up with us. Then there was a rule that correspondents couldn’t go into the frontlines unless accompanied by an officer. Maybe that was a good rule. I don’t know. But there were about two dozen of us who felt ourselves in an odd position, as if we were being conducted through our own house.