[In the following essay, Sulzberger reviews Brave Men, suggesting that Pyle's main contribution to wartime journalism was "a more concrete recognition of GI Joe's services."]

A skinny little fellow with weather-beaten face, querulous expression and thinning gray hair is not only without doubt the best-known American war correspondent reporting to the United States public, he is also far and away the best known to the United States armed forces serving in the general European area. His name is Ernie Pyle.

The first category of popularity results from the enormously widespread circulation of Ernie Pyle's daily columns syndicated through the Scripps-Howard papers and of his first book compiled from these and called Here Is Your War. The second category is, however, still more important. Not only does Pyle know hundreds of GI's personally as friends. Thousands of others know him—and tens of thousands feel they do. He has a knack for getting around, and he makes the very best of his opportunities.

Finally, not only by recognizing that the doughfoot in the infantry (which only more ponderous military writers call the "Queen of Battles") is the key man in this as other wars, but by harping on this fact, and continually depicting his trials and tribulations as well as his heroism, Ernie has done a considerable service. He has not only made the infantryman realize that he is far from being the forgotten man; he has paved the way for further popularization by such other students of the GI as Sgt. Bill Mauldin, whose cartoons, originally drawn for the Forty-fifth Division News, are now widely known back home. Also, Ernie Pyle through his influence on readers has helped obtain more concrete recognition of GI Joe's services.

Ernie Pyle's new book, Brave Men, is like his last one; that is to say, it is excellent and will unquestionably be at least as widely read. Like the last one it reads like a rambling but acutely written series of letters to the folks back home—telling them what the armed forces have been doing in Europe, from the invasion of Sicily through the Italian campaign, the landing in France and finally the fall of Paris.

It's exactly the same as Here Is Your War in its general make-up. The only difference in the plot is that this time it's about what the American armed forces did in Europe instead of in Africa; General Marshall draws up the plot and Ernie writes about it. The main character is the same in both cases—GI Joe—and, incidentally, he is the same character Ernie used to write about on Main Street before he himself got to be quite such a well-known guy.

Time Magazine once described Ernie Pyle's war as "the war of homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and lug themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage." That not only goes for Ernie's myriad sergeants, corporals and privates but for Ernie himself. He is not nor does he try to be an analytical reporter describing trends politically or strategical concepts. Ernie's job is to tell what the GI smells, feels, hears, sees and thinks day after day in battle and during the dull routine waiting, often in mud or dust or heat or cold.

That is the meat of this book and Pyle accomplishes his task skillfully. Brave Men contains some fine individual anecdotes and accounts such as those included in what were perhaps the two finest single columns Pyle ever wrote: that describing the calm, heart-breaking courage of an English pilot dug out of the wreckage of his shot-down night fighter eight days after it crashed; and the terrible yet magnificent story of how they brought the body of Capt. Henry Waskow down from the battlefield one moonlit night on muleback and what the soldiers said as they stared at the dead hero's face. "God damn it," they said. And "God damn it to hell anyway." And one of them said just simply: "I'm sorry, old man."

Ernie Pyle knows the infantry and the artillery and the engineers and the air force and the ordnance outfits. He knows C rations and K rations and the particular value of a scrounged bottle of vino. He knows what mosquitos can be like when they come in clouds. He knows intimately the permeating smell of death.… He knows what squalor, discomfort, unease, fear and homesickness are—not merely because he can feel them all himself but because in his unassuming way he can get other fellows who feel these things to tell him about it. His particular and special gift is that he can put this down in cold type and have it sound just as it really is; neither too mawkishly sentimental nor uncomfortably restricted and embarrassed but simple, factual and human.

Added to all this, Ernie has a nice, easy way of making the reader feel he is simply turning the page of a letter from an old friend whose reactions to strange things he can almost guess. Says Ernie: "The American soldier has a fundamental complex about bodily cleanliness which is considered all nonsense by us philosophers of the Great Unwashed, which includes Arabs, Sicilians and me." Ernie says he feels "a little shame at the average soldier's bad grammar and lack of learning." He expresses a view-point which certainly was widely held, at least until France was well-entered, when he says "actually most of us felt friendlier toward the Sicilians than we had toward the French."

His reports on GI observations concerning some problems of international importance have value. Describing the reaction of an artillery gun crew to the rumor some Russian officers might be around on an inspection trip: "One of the cannoneers said: 'Boy, if they show up in a fighting mood I'm taking out of here. They're fighters.' Another one said: 'If Uncle Sam ever told me to fight the Russians I'd just put down my gun and go home. I never could fight people who have done what they have.'"

Or this revealing interlude, important in the light of a lot of hogwash which has not illumined the recent political campaign:

I was riding in a jeep with an officer and an enlisted man who was of Italian extraction. The officer was saying that there were plenty of girls in Naples—most of the soldiers there had girls.

"Not me," said the driver. "I won't have anything to do with them. The minute they find out I speak Italian they start giving me a sob story about how poor and starved they are and why don't the Americans feed them faster.

"I look at it this way—they've been poor for a long time and it wasn't us that made them poor. They started this fight and they've killed plenty of our soldiers, and now that they're whipped they expect us to take care of them. That kind of talk gives me a pain. I tell them to go to hell. I don't like 'em."

Ernie records for posterity some of the finest linguistic expressions which war's hardness can squeeze out of the ingenious American brain. "It was at that early morning moment when one soldier looked for a long time at another one and then said, 'Cripes, you look like a tree full of owls.'" His book not only describes the bravery of the men in the armed forces, but their endearing qualities: how they managed to get their laundry done by the Italian peasantry; how they acquired innumerable pets; how they adopted dozens of homeless children and dressed them in cutdown uniforms (Pyle doesn't mention this, but he himself is a member of the "Uncles' Club," helping a young major to care for an orphan youngster named Mario); the odd characters of the Army, such as Pfc. James McClory and his friend "Alfred the Ape" in the Cleveland zoo.

There is some first-rate writing. ("The smell of death washed past us in waves as we drove on. There is nothing worse in war than the foul odor of death. There is no last vestige of dignity in it.") Or, describing that unhappy moment in France when our own bombers pounded American troops (the time General McNair was killed): "We stood tensed in muscle and frozen in intellect, watching each flight approach and pass over, feeling trapped and completely helpless. And then all of an instant the universe became filled with a gigantic rattling as of huge ripe seeds in a mammoth dry gourd."

But this book cannot be picked apart and analyzed any more easily than can the history or experience of war itself. In a nutshell, Brave Men is the account of the American soldier during the campaigns of Sicily, Italy and France. It is an account written from the bottom of the hierarchical pyramid, not the top. It is sort of an inside-looking-out job; an emotional history of the war in terms of the man who does the hardest fighting under the worst conditions—the frontline combat soldier. And there is a deep point, one that cannot be over-emphasized, which is included in a brief last chapter that Ernie wrote in France just for this volume and not for his columns. The point is this (in Ernie's words):

The end of the war will be a gigantic relief, but it cannot be a matter of hilarity for most of us. Somehow it would seem sacrilegious to sing and dance when the great day comes—there are so many who can never sing and dance again.