World War II Chronicle: May 18, 1943
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George Fielding Eliot column on page 10… Sports section begins on page 14.
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
NORTHERN TUNISIA, (By Wireless) — It isn’t good form for correspondents to put themselves too much into their war stories, for we at best are only onlookers. But right up in the lines interesting things happen which you can not tell without writing about yourself.
So for a day or two I am going to violate the usual ethics and regale you with some of my own mild experiences. I’ll tell you the machine-gun story first.
Usually on trips into the lines I have enough columns written to last until I get back to our permanent camp, but this time I didn’t. Of course I couldn’t have a typewriter with me, so I wrote with a pencil, sitting on the ground.
Now the midday sun is so bright and hot one can’t sit out in it and write. Where we were there was only one spot of shade in miles. That was a tiny patch, made by a big rock behind which our battalion staff lay directing the battle. So I picked out this spot of shade for my writing room.
It would have been all right at that, except my special spot of the rock was the front side and consequently afflicted with bullets. I would write for 10 or 15 minutes, then suddenly machine-gun slugs would come singing down from the hilltop and buzz past us overhead. They came from a dugout sniper on our own hill. Apparently my paper made a target for him. I would stay each time until three or four bullets went past, then go around to the other side of the rock and tell the battalion staff:
“That guy is shooting at me again.”
We’d all laugh, and after a while I would go back to try to recapture the muse. Four times in one day that fellow chased me out of my shady place. The fourth time finally three bullets went past so close they had fuzz on them, and the fourth went into the ground with a quish just 10 feet away. At that I went around the rock so fast I made a groove in the ground. From then on I stayed on the correct side. Our soldiers finally dug out and captured the sniper that last afternoon. So there is my narrow escape story, and I’ll stick with it.
I don’t know which was the greater mental hazard — my writing, the bullets, or snakes. This rocky hill country is a reptilian paradise. After the machine gunner had made me flee in shame, I sat down in a foxhole and tried to write. If I had just kept my eyes on the paper it would have been all right, but for some perverse reason I happened to look down on the ground. There, alongside my leg in the bottom of the hole was one of our dear little slimy friends. A movie of me leaving that foxhole would look like a shell leaving a rifle.
When I finally crept back to peer into the hole, my new roommate turned out to be one of those mistakes of nature with which this country abounds — something or other that is two-thirds snake and one-third lizard. It is a snake, except it has two legs, side by side, about half way down its body. Before we could exterminate this monstrosity, he wiggled back under a sunken rock which formed one end of my foxhole. And there he still is, so far as I know.
Corp. Richard Redman of Struthers, O., occupied a shallow foxhole adjoining, and hour or so after my episode. Corporal Redman was catching some daytime sleep in his trench when I happened to walk by. There, within a foot of his head, was a real snake. This time I let out my special snake-fright whoop, which can be heard miles. The battalion surgeon grabbed a shovel and killed the thing. He said it was an adder, very poisonous. Later they killed another at the same spot.
When Corporal Redman woke up I told him how I had practically saved his life. He was very grateful. Indeed it turned out that he also was cursed with snake horrors. If circumstances were a little different I think Corporal Redman and I would just leave these snakes to the Arabs, and come on home.
Corp. William Otter of Hazelton, Pa., had the next adjoining foxhole. So he joined in our snake discussion. He said he, too, had had a complex about snakes all his life, but since being in Tunisia he had seen so much horror of battle that a snake seemed minor stuff to him and his unreasonable fear had gone.
Maybe I feel a little like that myself. I thought I couldn’t possibly lie down in my foxhole that night, with that lizard still there and snakes all around. Yet, when the time came, there was nothing else to do. So I made myself crawl in, and I slept soundly all night.
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 18 May 1943. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1943-05-18/ed-1/