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Actually, the only notes he ever takes are of the names & addresses which stud his column (occasionally accompanied by such messages as "Corporal Charles Malatesta of Maiden, Mass, asks me to tell his wife that he loves her"). His usual practice is to attach himself to one small unit for several days (in last week's columns it was an ack-ack gun crew), and live just as they live, doing no writing at all. When he has learned enough, he goes back to the rear and spins out as many columns as the experience is good for. Sometimes he gets as much as three weeks ahead.
When he writes, he yearns to be alone; the normally easygoing Pyle can be extremely short with tentmates who distract him while he is composing. His homespun, sometimes corny, sometimes eloquent style comes natural to him, but it does not come easy. He writes slowly at best, often rewrites a column three or four times.
The Future of a Conscience. Last week, after a breather at a Normandy press camp in the rear, Ernie Pyle—who will be 44 on Aug. 3—was preparing to go up to the battle line again. He dreaded it more than ever. To a fellow correspondent he confided: "The thought of it gives me the willies. Instead of getting used to it, I become less used to it as the years go by. With me it seems to have had a cumulative effect. I am much more afraid of a plane overhead now than I was during the London blitz, or even during our early dive-bombing days in Africa. With those four narrow squeaks at Anzio [where a bomb blew in two walls of a room where he was sleeping] coming after a year and a half of sporadic squeaks, I have begun to feel I have about used up my chances."
But to "That Girl" who was waiting for him back in their small white house at Albuquerque, N. Mex. (they were divorced in 1942, remarried by proxy the next year), he wrote: "Of course I am very sick of the war and would like to leave it and yet I know I can't. I've been part of the misery and tragedy of it for so long that I've come to feel a responsibility to it or something. I don't know quite how to put it into words, but I feel if I left it it would be like a soldier deserting."
With the premonition of death that haunts him now, Ernie Pyle is not doing much personal postwar planning. But if he lives to resume his U.S. roving, as both he and his wife hope to do, he will be one man with a future clearly cut out for him. Everywhere he goes he will find old friends of the foxholes, and it will be his job to report to the nation how justly and successfully they are being received back into civilian life, how they feel about the America they have come back to, what they think of the way the people who stayed home are carrying on the fight for lasting peace and freedom which they began.
Thus, in his unique way, he is almost sure to be a sort of national conscience. He may be that even if he is killed in battle. For if Ernie Pyle should die tomorrow, as well he may, it would still be a long time before Americans forgot Ernie Pyle's war.
* Last week the War Department adopted a suggestion long urged by Columnist Pyle that it revive the practice of awarding a sleeve stripe for each six months of overseas service. Congress has passed the so-called "Ernie Pyle Bill" to raise G.I. pay $10 for combat service.