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> "You become eminently practical in wartime. A chaplain who recently went through the pockets of ten Americans killed in battle said the dominant thing he found was toilet paper. Careless soldiers who were caught without such preparedness have to use 20-franc notes. . . ."
> "[Infantrymen] are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without . . . A narrow path comes like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope and over another hill. All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.
"The men are walking. They are 50 feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary. . . . It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middleaged. In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory—there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever. . . ."
42 to 122. Pyle's columns are distributed by the United Feature Syndicate, Inc. Pyle's salary is approximately $25,000 a year, including a percentage of the varying amounts newspapers pay for his columns. He does not pay his own expenses. (He lives frugally, especially since he has been in Africa; recently his expenses have run about $15 a week.) When he left for North Africa in November he had 42 papers on his string, with a combined circulation of 3,347,765. This week he had 122 papers, with a combined circulation of 8,848,862.
Sand and Cigarets. More satisfying, probably, to Ernie Pyle is the wide acclaim that has come to him. He gets thousands of fan letters from big and little people. The Charlotte, N.C. Civitan Club sent him a letter of appreciation and a bag of sand, after he had said facetiously in a column from sandy North Africa: "If somebody will just send me a little sackful of sand for Easter, everything will be wonderful." From admirers (members of the Indiana Legislature, the National Press Club in Washington, and just plain people) Pyle has received over $6,000 worth of cigarets for him and distribution among the troops.
One of the most substantial approvals of Pyle came from the Youngstown Vindicator, which used his column this spring when Columnist Westbrook Pegler was on vacation. When Pegler returned, the Vindicator kept Pyle.
Writing and Restlessness. Ernie Pyle's first newspaper job was on the La Porte, Ind. Herald, whence he went in 1923 to the Washington Daily News (Scripps-Howard) as a reporter, later became a deskman. By 1932, after a brief fling at Manhattan news rooms, he had become the Washington Daily News's managing editor. Unhappy, in 1935 he asked for a roving assignment.