Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols
Owen, Kent
Books in Review - "Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols" stances and, as such, liked or disliked them according to whatever set of prejudices suited him best. This approach to life may not be what Jesus had in mind, but there is something to be said...
...all the same there was a war on, and Pyle had no reluctance about identifying the enemy...
...He had been at loose ends in both his work and marriage, tired of writing rather aimlessly about random, often trivial topics...
...David Nicholsy a young writer from Fort Wayne, merits our thanks for making Ernie Pyle's finest writing again available in such an intelligent edition...
...If ethical tests need be applied to his reports, there is nothing that must be discounted because it hints of propaganda or "disinformation...
...His was hardly a come-as-you-are tolerance, as his disparagements of Algerian and Tunisian Arabs, Vichy French collaborators, assorted Sicilians and Italians, and the Japanese (he called them Japs, thought them wily and deadly and probably inscrutable) as well as the more Nazified Germans make quite clear...
...Compare Pyle's writing with that of the New Yorker'a A. J. Liebling, and the contrast is plain: Liebling's is a war for connoisseurs, one to be experienced sensuously, understood cerebrally, appreciated in its finer points, even, in a certain sense, to be enjoyed...
...That may be the message many will glean from the cuttings, taking cues from Eleanor Roosevelt as epigrapher and Studs Terkel as prefacer...
...Pyle addressed his readers directly...
...His prose gains its power through the interplay of longer lines and passages because, as a sort of prose poetry, it depends on the lengthened cadences of spoken words, as if it were composed to be read aloud to gatherings of those anxious to hear news of their men at the front...
...In any case, it was the attitude Pyle brought to his work...
...In contrast, Edward R. Murrow's CBS radio communiques are both more informative and more engrossing...
...What do readers of the present need to learn from Ernie Pyle...
...No doubt his work will be put forward as conclusive evidence that any war, however just, is evil, that unilateral disarmament is necessary, that appeasement is the better part of valor...
...What Pyle does is describe the texture of the soldiers' daily existence, inside and out, so that his readers, the folks back home in comfort and safety, can feel something of what the troops are going through...
...His attitudes about having to observe the twentieth century's second great war and interpret what he saw, felt, and thought for "the folks back home" were too complex to be reduced to the simple absolute of pacifism...
...This approach to life may not be what Jesus had in mind, but there is something to be said for it when it comes to working out social arrangements...
...There he had to live and move with the troops, sharing their discomfort, boredom, and danger, learning what happens to men when the props of civilization are removed...
...His biographical essay presents Pyle candidly and sensitively, giving a touching account of Jerry Siebolds, the writer's tragically self-destructive wife...
...After his return to America in March 1941, Pyle entered the army's war in North Africa in November 1942 to cover the Tunisian campaign with the infantry and the tankers...
...Nichols and Random House have made an important contribution to American literature, because Ernie's War is for the ages...
...It is part of the value of Ernie's War to be able to follow the course of Pyle's own development...
...Why should Random House decide to reissue his choicer reportage forty years later...
...Oddly enough, little of what Pyle wrote lends itself to being quoted phrase by phrase...
...To have the dispatches arranged in chronological order—earlier books provided only thematic or topical selections—enables one to discover the actuality of war through the mind of one man: this foxhole, this tank, this dive-bomber, that mountain, these men, person by person, working and fighting together in dull, filthy, exhausting, perilous work...
...Suddenly caught up in tremendous events, he tried to stay detached, filing removed accounts of air raids, London under siege, bomb shelter routines, the disrupted lives of ordinary men and women...
...This has evidently proved a problem for latterday war correspondents...
...Pyle was sent to London in December 1940 to cover the blitz...
...you" was meant to be taken personally, and it was...
...Taken as isolated images or separate phrases, the lines seldom seem remarkable...
...Hence his "humanism" will be faulted as inexcusably racist...
...Before long, his reports show a different point of view: Like it or not, he is now an insider, part of the company, day and night, of those who must struggle and fight to stay aUve...
...Joe, or how he was pestered and fawned on as a celebrity when he came home on leave For appalled as he was by the enormity of war, Pyle was not a pacifist, and it is intellectually dishonest of ideologues to claim he was...
...It may have been...
...In truth, Mr...
...I doubt that Pyle, much as he hated war, would have approved this line of argument—any better than he liked how Time portrayed him in a cover story, how Hollywood depicted him in The Story of G.I...
...And, moreover, in prevailing at last over the Axis might through international cooperation on a monumental scale...
...Indeed, he is often startlingly frank about casualties, retreats, runs of bad luck, and utter exhaustion—his own as well as the soldiers...
...mostly, it is done with the studied objectivity of the professional outsider...
...Pyle's war is no less carefully or skillfully reported, but the emphasis is different: The interaction of men, materiel, weather, landscape is charged with a welter of emotions...
...As memories of the war recede into the nether reaches of public consciousness, Pyle has become a wispy, c^imly lighted figure...
...But the cumulative force evokes what an action or a place feels like, and the meaning of his words is as much the result of that well-tempered sound as it is in the plain sense of men's names...
...While such considerations may seem nicely aesthetic, Pyle's use of the language produced moral results: It expressed the significance of the war in so trustworthy a way that the nation's resolve grew stronger and steadier...
...Is it time again to remind ourselves war is terrible and must never be repeated...
...Yet Pyle never lost sight of the individual soldier, especially the infantryman, struggling not so much to kill the enemy as to stay alive, regain his freedom, and go home...
...he is made to feel their hardships and hazards as his very own...
...Though not religious in a conventional sense, he was awed by the persistence of the human spirit in withstanding adversity, in incidental things like keeping warm and dry...
...The moment, whether in battle or in camp, is alive with energies either set to go off, or spent and numb...
...There are lyrical touches, reflective passages, praise for the unflappable Brits, sympathy for the old people who must have war at the end of their lives...
...His plainspoken American English is idiomatic and conversational, the language of a man whose words can be trusted...
...His early dispatches reveal a self-conscious, first-time-out war correspondent eager to report the big show...
...he was more than ready to make a big change...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
