The Pittsburgh Press (February 25, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
At long last our company was really underway on its night movement up into the line. It was just past midnight, and very black. The trail was never straight. It went up and down, across streams, and almost constantly around trees.
How the leaders ever followed it is beyond me. The trees on each side had been marked previously with white tape or toilet paper, but even so we did get lose a couple of times and had to backtrack.
The rain had stopped, but the mud was thick. You literally felt each step out with the toes of tour boots. Every half hour or so we’d stop and send runners back to see how the tail end of the column was doing. Word came back that they were doing fine, and that we could step up the pace if we wanted to.
Somewhere in the night, both ahead of us and strung out behind us in files, was the rest of our battalion. In fact, the whole regiment of more than 3,000 men was moving that night, but we knew nothing about the rest.
Throughout the night, the artillery of both sides kept up a steady pounding. When we started, our own guns were loud in our ears. Gradually we drew away from them, and finally the explosion of their shells on German soil was louder than the blast of the guns.
Rifle fire gets louder
The German shells traveled off at a tangent from us, and we were in no danger. The machine-gun and rifle fire grew louder as our slow procession came nearer the lines. Now and then a frontline flare would light up the sky, and we could see red bullets ricocheting.
The nagging of artillery eventually gets plain aggravating. It’s always worse on a cloudy night, for the sounds crash and reverberate against the low ceiling. One gun blast along can set off a continuous rebounding of sound against clouds and rocky slopes that will keep going for 10 seconds and more.
And on cloudy nights you can hear shells tearing above your head more loudly than on a clear night. In fact, that night the rustle was so magnified that when we stopped to rest and tried to talk, you couldn’t hear what the other fellow said if a shell was passing overhead. And they were passing almost constantly.
At last, we passed through a village and stopped on the far edge to rest while the column leader went into a house for further directions. We had caught up with the mules.
One of the muleskinners out in the darkness kept up a long monolog on the subject of the mules being completely done up. Nobody would answer him, and he would go on:
They’re plumb done in. They can’t go another foot. If we try to go on, they’ll fall down and die.
Huffy muleskinner
Finally, some soldier in the darkness told him to shut up. We all privately endorsed his suggestion. But the monologist got huffy and wanted to know who that was. The voice said it wasn’t anybody, just a new replacement soldier.
Then the muleskinner waxed sarcastic and louder. He had an objectionable manner, even in the dark.
He said:
Oh, oh! So we’ve got a baby right from the States telling me how to run mules! A tenderfoot, huh? Trying to talk to us veterans! A hero right from the States, huh?
Whereupon one of the real veterans in our company called out to the gabby skinner:
Aw, shut up! You probably haven’t been overseas two months yourself.
He must have hit the nail on the head, or else his voice carried command, for that’s the last we heard of the muleskinner.
It was almost midnight when the company reached its bivouac area and dug its foxholes into the mud. Always that’s the first thing to do. it becomes pure instinct. The drippy, misty dawn found our men dispersed and hidden in the bottom of shallow, muddy depressions of their own digging, eating cold hash from C-ration cans.
They attacked just after dawn. The Germans were only a short distance away. I stayed behind when the company went forward.
In the continuously circulating nature of my job, I may never again see the men in this outfit. But to me, they will always be “my” company.