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Death in a Ditch. Ernie himself was a little slow to recognize the nature of the new assignment. At first he tried to be a more or less conventional war correspondent, covering the news as others did. The change began one day in Africa when the press corps was invited to meet Admiral Darlan. Scripps-Howard cabled him to be sure to attend. He was hurrying across an airfield to the interview when a swarm of Stukas swooped down, began splattering bullets around him. He dived into a ditch just behind a G.I. When the strafing was over he tapped his companion on the shoulder and said, "Whew, that was close, eh?" There was no answer. The soldier was dead.
Pyle sat through the interview in a daze, went back to his tent and brooded for hours. Finally he cabled his New York office that he could not write the Darlan story. Instead he wrote about the stranger who had died in the ditch beside him. For days he talked of giving up and going home. But when the shock wore off, he knew for sure that his job was not with the generals and their strategems but with the little onetime drugstore cowboys, clerks and mechanics who had no one else to tell their stories.
The G.I.s were slow to reciprocate the Pyle devotion. In the field Ernie, ab normally sensitive to cold, wraps his skin ny frame in as many thicknesses of non descript clothes as he can lay hands on, makes himself look like a ready-made butt for jokes. At first the G.I.s plagued the funny-looking little man unmercifully, "scrounging" (i.e., swiping) his blankets and water, knocking off his helmet to reveal the wad of toilet paper always kept there, ridiculing his passion for orderliness and his perpetual puttering, pouncing on him in howling droves when he modestly retired behind a bush to relieve himself. Then the letters from home began to arrive, mentioning the Pyle column or enclosing clippings of it. Slowly it dawned on the G.I.s that they had acquired a champion, a man who really understood and cared what they—not as regiments or armies but as individual men—were like and were trying to do. Their affection grew as, time & again, they saw Pyle force himself to share their dangers and keep on sharing them, despite the increasing fears that sometimes made him scream in his sleep, despite the fact that he could go home any time he wanted.
And they also learned that, on the human side, he is somewhat less and more than the sort of super-chaplain he appears to be. Old Newspaperman Pyle cusses with the best of troopers, enjoys a good dirty joke, takes a drink when he feels like it.
He also loves to sneak up on fellow reporters in the dead of night, scare the day lights out of them with a belch which has been favorably compared with the bark of a French 75. There are probably still some G.I.s who would not give their last cigaret or blanket to Ernie Pyle. But nothing that any G.I. can scrounge from another is too good for him.
How He Works. Columnist Pyle, still genuinely humble yet not unaffected by his new fame, is particularly worried lest the forthcoming Pyle-based movie portray him dashing around with pad & pencil, eagerly asking questions and making notes.