The Pittsburgh Press (July 19, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Everything seems odd in Normandy.
The hedgerows are thick and ancient. The stone walls are sometimes so mounded over with earth that you don’t know there’s a wall beneath. The trees in the apple orchards are mellow with moss so thick that it seems like a coat of green velvet.
The towns and cities are just as old and worn-looking. I have yet to see a building in Normandy that appeared to have been built within the last three generations.
The tone is not one of decadence, but just of great and contented age. Even Cherbourg was a surprise. All of its buildings were old and worn.
It was a contrast to other war cities we have passed through – Algiers and Palermo and even Naples – where much building and remodeling have been done in this country, and the new homes are shiny and modernistic, and the street fronts look almost American.
A street scene in Cherbourg looks so much like the Hollywood sets of old European cities that you get your perspective reversed and feel that Cherbourg has just been copied from a movie set.
It’s the same way with the Norman architecture. The houses aren’t so smooth and regular and nice as California homes of Norman design. When you look at them you feel, before catching yourself, that they have copied our California Norman homes and not done too good a job.
Everything is of stone. Even the barns and cowsheds are stone – and in exactly the same design and usually the same size as the houses. They are grouped closely together around a square, so that a farmer’s home makes a compact little settlement of buildings that resembles a country estate at a distance.
Have more butter than they can use
Normandy is dairy country. Right now, the people have more butter on their hands than they know what to do with. It is a stupid soldier indeed who can’t get himself all the butter he wants. But even though it is a glut on the market, the French still ask 60 cents a pound for it.
When the Germans were here, they bought all the Norman butter, and at fancy prices too. German soldiers would ship it home to their families.
And although their new order is strict and full of promises of an ordered world, the Germans themselves created and fostered the Paris black market, according to the local people. Much of the butter bought in Normandy by German officers went to Paris for resale at unheard-of prices.
To be honest about it, we can’t sense that Normandy suffered too much under the German occupation. That is no doubt less because of German beneficence than because of the nature of the country. For in any throttled country thew farm people always come out best.
Normandy is rich agriculturally. The people can sustain themselves. It is in the cities that occupation hurts worst. I suspect that when we get to Paris, we will hear an entirely different story from the people.
Good-looking children the rule
Normandy is certainly a land of children. It seems to me there are more children here even than in Italy. And I’ll have to break down and admit one thing – they are the most beautiful children I have ever seen.
It is an exception when you see a child who isn’t exceptionally good-looking. Apparently, they grow out of this, however, for on the whole the Norman adults look like people anywhere – both good and bad.
One thing about the Normans is in contrast with the temperament we have known so long in the Mediterranean. The people here are hard workers. Some of the American camps and city offices hire teenage French boys for kitchen and office work, and I’ve noticed that they go at their work eagerly and like the wind.
The story of the French underground, when the day comes for it to be written, will be one of the most fascinating things in all history.
On the Cherbourg Peninsula the underground was made up of cells, five people to a cell. Those five people knew each other, but none of them knew any other members of the underground anywhere.
It was fun to see the Frenchmen on the day the underground began coming out into the open. They identified themselves by special armbands that they had kept in hiding. One underground man would look at a neighbor wearing an armband and exclaim in amazement: “What! You too?”
In one village, we asked some people who were not in the movement if they had ever known who the underground members in their town were. They said they could pretty well guess, just from the character of the people, but never actually knew for sure.