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In a jeep named "Jeanie" he covered the fronts, commuting between Cassino and the Anzio beachhead, making his left-handed sketches with India ink, which he got from the engineers, and three carefully guarded worn-out brushes.
He solved the problem of drawing paper by using the backs of portraits of Mussolini and the King of Italy, which he found hanging in virtually every Italian home. He marlp notes up front but did his drawings back in rear areas—not in foxholes, as has been reported. Says Mauldin, "Anybody who can draw in a foxhole has my hat off."
His slight figure, wide grin and puckish face—unlike Willie's, his beard was no heavier than peach fuzz—was better known to the Fifth Army than General Mark Clark's.
It was Ernie Pyle who got him round the last big corner. On the basis of Ernie's glowing comments, Mauldin's drawings were picked up and syndicated by United Feature Syndicate. Bill Mauldin thought his wildest dreams had come true.
By last week he had become both famous and wealthy. His drawings had already earned him $25,000, now bring him upwards of $200 a week. They are sold to 138 newspapers. Henry Holt & Co. paid him $5,000 advance on Up Front (it is a Book-of-the-Month Club choice) and Ladies' Home Journal paid him $10,000 for the rights to publish Ladies'-Home-Journalized. excerpts. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 1944's best cartoon. In Italy last week, at a ceremony crowded with brass hats, Bill Mauldin was presented with the Legion of Merit.
A Little Time. This week Bill Mauldin, with more than 127 discharge points to his credit, was home.
In Arizona was Mom. In New Mexico was his brother Sidney. In San Diego was Pop, married again, working in an aircraft plant. Pop had something to talk over with him. Pop had good-naturedly accused Bill of using him as a model for Willie (see cut). People, noting the resemblance, stopped him on the street. Bill had replied: "I'm not saying anything, Pop."
In Los Angeles was the girl he calls "the little woman." Ecstatic Jeanie Mauldin awaited him in a cheap little house in a drab neighborhood—the only place she could find in the housing shortage. She had lived on Bill's allotment, putting his earnings in the bank. With her was chubby Bruce Patrick, 21 months, the son Bill Mauldin had never seen.
And what about Willie and Joe? Cleaned up, shaved and tidied, they too have come home. They are not going to be problems, Bill Mauldin hopes. Said he:
"They are so damned sick & tired of having their noses rubbed in a stinking war that their only ambition will be to forget it. ... They don't need pity, because you don't pity brave men. . . . They simply need bosses who will give them a little time to adjust their minds and their hands, and women who are faithful to them, and friends and families who stay by them until they are the same guys who left years ago."
Bill Mauldin, too, hoped to settle down as a civilian, some day to be the same carefree guy he was a few years ago. But, like Willie and Joe, he never really would be quite the same.
* Bruce Bairnsfather's "Old Bill," best-known cartoon soldier of World War I ("Well, if yer knows of a better 'ole, go to it"), is the spiritual uncle of Mauldin's Willie.