[In the following essay, Angoff reviews Brave Men, distinguishing Pyle from the "political philosophers" whose less emotional understanding of war distances them from its true tragedy.]

Among the hopeful things about contemporary American journalism are the wide popularity of Ernie Pyle and the recognition of his excellence, at long last, by the "serious" arbiters of literary taste. Some of these arbiters still speak of him with a bit of condescension, claiming that his pieces are merely "reporting of a special kind," very good, of course, but rather deficient in the understanding of "underlying forces." There is, indeed, much truth in this claim. Ernie Pyle does not understand "underlying forces," as the more intellectual journalists think they do.

He is a more modest man. His reporting is really "of a special kind." He does not indulge in ideological acrobatics or hand out hunches as inside information. He only tries to tell us how millions of young Americans grapple with loneliness and despair and fear and intense heat and bitter cold and boredom and pain and death every minute of the day and night in every conceivable climate and environment on this planet. He does not write about these things "philosophically," as if he were above them; he writes about them personally, intimately, and he is not ashamed or afraid to express his feelings.

Brave Men is a collection of his Scripps-Howard columns from July 1943, when the Allies landed on Sicily, to the liberation of Paris thirteen months later. It is an even better book than his Here Is Your War, because it is even less "objective" and more "sentimental." Ernie Pyle can never forget that a dead soldier or sailor is not just a "casualty," but a colossal tragedy, a disgrace to creation, an enduring catastrophe to his family and friends. And he can never forget that every living soldier or sailor is not merely a serial number, a possible expendable, but someone who was sent off to war with heartbreak and dreadful foreboding. And in writing about soldiers and sailors from these standpoints he often displays more "understanding of underlying forces" than the political philosophers do.

Ernie Pyle was on a warship in the armada approaching the Sicilian shores:

The night before we sailed the crew listened as usual to the German propaganda radio program which featured Midge, the American girl turned Nazi, who was trying to scare them, disillusion them and depress them. As usual they laughed with amusement and scorn at her childishly treasonable talk.

In a vague and indirect way, I suppose, the privilege of listening to your enemy trying to undermine you—the very night before you go out to face him—expresses what we are fighting for.

Pyle's favorite fighting men are the common front-line soldiers, "the fabulous infantry." His most moving pages are devoted to them. Some of them make such stylists as Hemingway seem very poor stuff indeed. There is the magnificent section on the death of the beloved Captain Henry T. Waskow, of Belton, Texas, who "had a sincerity and a gentleness that made people want to be guided by him." A few specimen lines:

Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden packsaddles, their heads hanging down on one side, bobbing up and down as the mules walked.

The Italian mule skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies when they got to the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself and ask others to help.

I don't know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and you don't ask silly questions.…

The unburdened mules moved off to their olive grove. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually I could sense them moving, one by one, close to Captain Waskow's body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it!"

That's all he said, and then he walked away.

Another one came, and he said, "God damn it to hell anyway!" He looked down for a few last moments and then turned and left.…

Then a soldier came and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper, but awfully tenderly, and he said, "I'm sorry, sir."

II

Pyle knows the soldiers as probably no other one man knows them. He seems to sense their every dream, yearning, dread. He knows what makes them laugh and suddenly grow somber. He knows what commands their respectful silence and what draws a gag out of them. He can describe them fully in a few words. "The men of Oklahoma are drawling and soft-spoken. They are not smart-alecks. Something of the purity of the soil seems to be in them. Even their cussing is simpler and more profound than the torrential obscenities of Eastern city men." Sgt. Buck Eversole's grammar "was the unschooled grammar of the plains and the soil. He used profanity, but never violently. Even in the familiarity of his own group his voice was always low. It was impossible to conceive of his doing anything dishonest. He was such a confirmed soldier … that he always said 'sir' to any stranger.… Buck Eversole had no hatred for Germans, although he had killed many of them. He killed because he was trying to keep alive himself. The years rolled over him and the war became his only world, and battle his only profession. He armored himself with a philosophy of accepting whatever might happen." Pfc. James Framis McClory "was crazy about apes" and was so loyal to his commanding officer that when "Captain Kennedy's mother was very ill, McClory took the last money he had and telegraphed home to his own parish to have a Mass said for the Captain's mother."

These men and the millions of other American soldiers and sailors, united by "the powerful fraternalism in this ghostly brotherhood of war," are less afraid "of the physical part of dying. That isn't the way it is. The emotion is rather one of almost desperate reluctance to give up the future." And what is the future for these men? It includes

things such as seeing the "old lady" again, of going to college … of holding on your knee just once your own kid whom you've never seen, of again being champion salesman of your territory, of driving a coal truck around the streets of Kansas City once more and, yes, even of just sitting in the sun once more in the south side of a house in New Mexico.

This sort of honest reporting has been absent from American journalism since our reporters decided that it was more important to write personal histories and philosophize on world affairs than to write simple, heart-felt accounts of how ordinary men and women manage to maintain their self-respect in this life. One hopes that Ernie Pyle's Brave Men will show these journalists the error of their ways.