SOURCE: "Brave Man," in Seeing Things, Whittlesey House, 1946, pp. 46-53.

[In the following essay, which was first published in 1945, Brown provides a personal remembrance of Pyle, commenting on Pyle's motivation in writing about "the common frontline soldier."]

"Hi-ya, Ernie?" That's what they used to cry when they saw him. In their throats this was more than a salutation. It was also a question; a question which came from their hearts, and brightened their eyes. They really cared. They wanted him to be feeling "fine."

No other military figure held a higher place in their affections than did this unmilitary little man. They knew that in Ernie they had a friend. I say "Ernie" because the fact that he was known as Ernie was part of his character. A stranger would no more have thought of referring to him as "Mr. Pyle" than he would have dreamed of calling Bismark "Otto," or Will Rogers "William." Although I knew Ernie slightly, I felt I knew him well. So did everyone who read him. He was that kind of man. I wish I had know him intimately.

I saw him several times in Europe. First, in Naples, when he had just returned from Cassino and I was headed that way. Next, in London, when the spring was there and all of us were waiting impatiently for the Invasion. Later, on the Augusta, where, when he came aboard to file his copy, excitement swept through that cruiser like a monsoon. Finally, in Normandy. The last time I saw him was when, early one morning, several of us went in with him to that littered beach known as "Omaha" about which he was to write one of his finest stories.

When I met Ernie in Naples, his flat may have had furniture in it, but that furniture did not show. All I remember in the way of furnishings are people; young G.I.'s, airmen, and Army nurses. No canteen was ever more crowded than these small rooms. There was a difference, however; a sense of veneration, a centering of interest, such as no canteen knows. Ernie was that center.

These young people hovered about him like priests around an altar. He sat there like some benign god who refused to admit that he was being worshiped. More than hanging upon his words, these youngsters chinned themselves upon them. It took only a minute or two to realize how much Ernie meant to them, and how much they meant to him. He treated them with the solicitude most people reserve for Brass Hats. He showed them the same courtesy and respect which they showed him. He was more than a host. More than a wise uncle. More than an oracle, too. He was their friend and confidant; a person who palpably shared their interests and seemed to share their age. In his case age created no barrier. It did not lessen their affection for him; it merely increased their respect.

The strain of what he had undergone told heavily upon Ernie in Naples. He was so frail and thin that on the way home Bill McDermott, who had been as impressed by him as I was, likened him to Gandhi with his clothes on. Ernie was disturbingly pale. He was fighting not only against the enemy and for the G.I. with his typewriter; he was also fighting against anaemia. There was something of the blueness of his bright blue eyes even in the ivory whiteness of his skin.

When I saw Ernie again, it was, as I say, in London during those final suspensive months which preceded DDay. He looked made over. His color was no longer white. He told me he had been pinkened by red meat and rest.

We were having drinks late one afternoon in the crowded bar of the Dorchester. Two young airmen from a nearby Bomber Command came in and sat next to us at the corner table. Men in uniform were always recognizing Ernie.

Ernie happened to be looking straight ahead of him when one of the young pilots spotted him. "Isn't that Ernie Pyle?" he whispered across tables to me. When I signaled a "yes" with my head, he nudged his companion. The two of them were as excited as if they had just completed a successful mission over Berchtesgaden.

I told Ernie what had happened, and he asked them both over. Long after I had left, he remained with them. His friendship did not stop with that chance meeting. He visited them at their Command, as any reader of Brave Men remembers. He wanted to talk to any man in uniform, especially if he wasn't too highly placed. What is more surprising, every man in uniform wanted to talk to him.

The last time I saw Ernie was when we climbed down the Augusta's net into a small boat, and headed for the beaches. With us was the Navy's Charles E. Thomas, Pho. M. 1/c. As is the way of photographers, Thomas was not traveling light. He was freighted down with a large movie camera, while I was carrying his no less sizable still camera. When we waded ashore, Ernie was next to me. Half way in, he said, "Come on, give it to me now. It's my turn." I hesitated because he looked so frail and the camera was so heavy. I soon realized, however, that Ernie meant what he said. Not to have given him the camera would have been to hurt his feelings. His carrying it was a point of pride; a principle of behavior also. When he took it, there was a moment when I thought that both he and the camera were lost for good. But, though he sagged uncertainly for an instant, he managed to get both it and himself safely ashore.

His insistence upon sharing the burden was typical of him. It made me understand all the more fully why, as we trudged down those improvised roads, dusty and traffic-jammed, one tired G.I. after another would smile upon seeing him, saying either, "Jeez, there's Ernie Pyle," or the inevitable, "Hi-ya, Ernie. Glad to see ya."

Ernie was more than a little bundle of nerves and perceptions, of high courage and deep sympathy. He was the G.I.'s walking delegate to history. If he shared their feelings, it was because he shared their dangers. In the past there may have been a girl known as the daughter of the regiment. But Ernie was a fellow who had been adopted by the whole Army to serve as its spokesman; by the Navy, too, at least when it could tear him away from a foxhole. No one in this war has been able to do as much as he did to transform the blood and sweat of battle into printer's ink. Or brought the war with such intimacy into more distant homes.

When, in Brave Men, he wrote, "I'm a rabid one-man movement bent on tracking down and stamping out everybody in the world who doesn't fully appreciate the common frontline soldier," Ernie was only stating a credo which explained his unique strength as a war writer. Although the common cause was his, he had a cause of his own. He did not want the forgotten men who were making history to remain forgotten.

In physical appearance and mental attitude, Ernie had no connection with either the Richard Harding Davis type of war correspondent or the tough swaggerers so dear to Hollywood. With his balding forehead and his fluffy gray hair, he looked more like a character actor than a lead.

Heroics were as foreign to him as tenderness was natural. He did not glorify battle; he admired the men who could endure it. He hated war as heartily as do most of the sailors and soldiers who fought beside him. His hatred of it colors many of his best passages. Yet he never wrote about it as an observer; always as a participant. He was a new kind of war correspondent—democracy's perfect symbol in a democratic war.

What was exceptional about him was his seeming averageness; his ability to enclose every man's war within the parentheses of his own personality. Scores of correspondents have had his courage, but none has had his heart. Ernie remained the small-town boy in a big-time war. He was one Little Man writing about all the others in this Little Man's war. Writing for them, too. Again and again he proved himself their equal in bigness and in gallantry.

He was different from them mainly because he was articulate. This is why the typewriter was his weapon, and one that, in the midst of battle, he could use superlatively.

A few of Ernie's readers (a few, because they are the ones who sneered at his simplicities) have tried to suggest that Ernie's columns were on a par with the letters the G.I.'s might have written home, had they been allowed to send them. These scoffers, I believe, have flattered the G.I.'s, and done Ernie a serious injustice. They might as well have been saying what Charles Lamb said when, after discussing Shakespeare with Wordsworth one night, he stuttered gleefully, "W-W-William says he could have written H-H-Hamlet if only he had had the m-m-mind to."

There are millions of G.I.'s, thousands of whom write extremely well, and some of whom, in this letter or in that, have done the best writing to have come out of the war. There are countless professional correspondents, too. But there was, and will be, only one Ernie Pyle. He may have been no Pater. Which was all to the good. Yet he had a neat, clean, driving style of his own, and a beagle's eye for details.

He could stipple a paragraph with these details. He advanced them in short sentences, rich in color. He made these details do their full emotional duty. He stabbed with them, too. The only deceptive feature of his style was the ease with which he could persuade the reader that he could have written like Ernie. Part of Ernie's skill was his adroitness in hiding it.

Ernie may have been as careful to write down the names and home-town addresses of all the sailors and soldiers he met as if he were covering a meeting of the Rotary Club. He was, however, able to endow the telephone book with a heart. He did not do this as a cheap reader-getting stunt. It was part of his kindness, and a proof of his understanding. It was one of the many ways in which he bridged the wide chasm separating those overseas from those here.

He knew what these names and addresses meant to the men at the front no less than to their families and friends back home. Soldiers and sailors always remained to Ernie citizens in uniform, anxious to get home. To him they were local boys making good in their living, their dying, and their enduring. He was anxious to get them home again, if it was only in print. Ernie did this as no other person writing about this war has been able to do.

His books, Here Is Your War and Brave Men, may be hard, if not impossible, to read continuously. They suffer, as all newspaper reprints do, when encountered within the covers of a book. This does not lessen their value, or mean that their individual entries are not excellent. It is only one measure of their high virtues as journalism. When it comes to a day by day record of the struggles for Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy, Ernie's books will always remain the G.I.'s Bible.

He could tell a story as movingly as his remarkable account of the passage by muleback on a moonlit night of Captain Waskow's body down an Italian mountain. He could describe a scene as unforgettably as he did when he recorded what he saw as he strolled along the Normandy beaches. He could capture the feeling of a convoy, the agony of a hospital tent, or the emotions of men moving into battle, no less graphically than in a dispatch from the Pacific he recorded the pantomime of the signalmen on a carrier. As a writer, Ernie was no less good than as a man.

The only columns by Ernie which distressed me were those he wrote before he headed for the Pacific. I have in mind those embarrassing "fillers" about the burdens of being famous. They seemed to me in the worst of bad taste. Instead of adding to his legend, I thought, and feared, they might subtract from it. They made me worry about Ernie. They worried me until I realized they were the final indications of his ingenuousness and his honesty. He was famous, and his fame bothered him. He wrote about it without affectation, exactly as he had written about all the other unpleasant things he had survived.

Ernie had run more risks and seen more fighting than most. Even before Normandy, he told me he thought his number might be up. He did not want to go to the Pacific. "I am going," wrote he, "simply because there's a war on and I am part of it. And I have known all the time I was going back. I am going simply because I have got to go—and I hate it."

Immediately after the report of Ernie's death on Ie had reached this country, President Truman issued a statement at the White House. It was the second of this kind he had issued since Franklin Roosevelt's passing. "The nation," began Mr. Truman, "is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle." The notable word in that statement, the word which stands out almost as if printed in capitals, is the "again." Surely no fancy adjective ever paid so high a compliment as that simple adverb which linked the sadness felt because of a correspondent's passing with the grief we had all known because of President Roosevelt's dying.