The Pittsburgh Press (February 16, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
When I joined “X” Company, it was in one of those lulls that sometimes come in war. The company was still “in the lines,” as you say, but not actually fighting.
They had taken a town a few days before, and since then had been waiting for the next attack. We moved forward twice while I was with them, always in night marches, and on the last move the company went into battle again.
These intervals give the soldiers time to restore their gear and recuperate their spirits. Usually, they come weeks apart.
In areas recently passed over by battles, the towns have been largely evacuated – in fact, practically all of them are mere heaps of rubble from bombing and shelling – and no stores are open. There is little chance of buying wine.
But this regiment had gone sniffing into cellars in a depopulated town and turned up with all kinds of exotic liquors which they dug out of the rubble.
The result was that you could make a tour on foot of a dozen company and battalion command posts around the perimeter of the town and in nearly every one discover a shelf full of the finest stuff imaginable.
A drinker’s delight
It was ironic to walk into a half-demolished building and find a command post set up in the remaining rooms, with soldiers sitting in front of a crackling fireplace, and at 10 o’clock in the morning
Our company command post consisted of one table, one chair and one telephone, in a second-story room of a stone farmhouse. In most of these two-story farmhouses, the stairway goes up the outside. You hang blankets at the door for blackout, and burn candles.
Five platoons of the company were bivouacked in olive orchards in a circle around the farmhouse, the farthest foxhole being not more than 200 yards away.
I’ve always been struck by the works some men will put into a home as temporary as a foxhole. I’ve been with men in this company who would arrive at a new bivouac at midnight, dig a hole just big enough to sleep in the rest of the night, then work all the next day in a deep, elaborate, roofed-over foxhole, even though they knew they had to leave the same evening and never see that hole again.
Bullet-pocked trees
In the olive groves throughout this bitter Cassino area, there are pitiful testimonials to closeup warfare. In our grove, I don’t believe there was a single one of the thousands of old trees that hadn’t at least one bullet scar in it. Knocked-off branches littered the ground. Some trees were cut clear down by shells. The stone walls had shell gaps every so often, and every standing thing was bullet-pocked.
You couldn’t walk 50 feet without hitting a shell or bomb crater. Every house and shed had at least a corner knocked off.
Some soldiers were sleeping in the haymow of a stone barn. They had to get up into it via a stepladder they had pieced together, because the steps had been blown away. Between the house and the barn ran a footpath on a sort of ledge. Our men had been caught there that first night by a tank in the valley below firing at them point-blank. One soldier had been killed instantly, and as we walked along the path a few days later his steel helmet was still lying there, bloody and riddled with holes. Another soldier had a leg blown off, but lived.
The men were telling me of a replacement – a green soldier – who joined the company the day after, when this soldier’s leg was still lying in the path. The new soldier stopped and stared at it and kept on staring.
The other boys watched him from a distance. They say that when anyone came along the path the new man would move off to one side so as not to be seen. But as soon as they would pass, he would come back and star, sort of hypnotized. He never said anything about it afterwards, and nobody said anything to him. Somebody buried the leg the next day.