SOURCE: "San Pietro and the 'Art' of War," in Southwest Review, Vol. 24, No. 3, Spring, 1989, pp. 230-256.

[In the following essay, Bertelsen discusses the literary and cinematic influences of Pyle's "The Death of Captain Waskow, " and parallels similarities between Pyle's piece and John Huston's war film San Pietro.]

"In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas." So begins Ernie Pyle's most famous World War II dispatch, "The Death of Captain Waskow"—a piece that describes the reactions of troops from the 36th "Texas" Division to the death of a young officer during the Italian campaign of 1943-44.

Pyle, the renowned American war journalist, had joined the 36th near the end of the battle for San Pietro Infine. It had been a cruel battle. Committed to suicidal frontal attacks on well-entrenched Germans in the town and surrounding hills, the troops of the 36th responded with good spirit and determination, but were slaughtered by the score in the terraced olive groves and high rock ridges that marked the southern entrance to the Liri Valley.

Documentary footage in the National Archives shows Pyle interviewing troops near San Pietro on 16 December 1943. It was probably that night he encountered Captain Waskow's dead body. Several days later, back in Caserta, depressed and possibly hung over, he wrote the dispatch that would gain him national fame and secure his place as the greatest American journalist of the war.

The battle for San Pietro Infine was a relatively small operation tucked between the bloody landings at Salerno and the muddy stalemate at Monte Cassino. Yet, typical of the bizarre transactions of war, it inspired two of the great documentary works of art to emerge from World War II. Pyle's article—which appeared in newspapers across the U.S.A. on 10 January 1944—was the first. The second was a film called San Pietro by John Huston and photographers from the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Huston had already directed the now classic version of The Maltese Falcon, and would later direct such films as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, and The Red Badge of Courage, but in the winter of 1943 he was a captain assigned to document, in his own words, "the triumphal entry of the American forces into Rome." It didn't work out that way. Instead, Huston and his crew produced one of the most harrowing visions of modern infantry warfare ever filmed: a documentary that conveys the raw repetitive grind of battle and the grim vulnerability of the men who fought it with a respect and bitterness unprecedented in the history of film.

World War II was more than any previous war an event for the camera and news dispatch. It was the war that began during the documentary movement of the 1930s and early 1940s and that drew heavily upon its techniques and resources. In "The Death of Captain Waskow" and San Pietro the results of this legacy are evident. Both works present themselves as factual records of real events, yet are deeply and allusively informed by literary and cinematic tradition. Both comment on the stoic dignity of man, yet deplore the heartbreaking conditions that evoke it.

And both focus not on the grand invasions and the daring raids, the D-Days and Ploestis, but on a single minor battle fought for an obscure Italian town by troops from a former Texas National Guard unit.

I

The 36th Division's road to San Pietro had not been easy. Trained in Texas, Massachusetts, and North Africa, but untried in battle, it struggled through the Salerno landings, where it produced in PFC Charles ("Commando") Kelly the first Medal of Honor winner in the European theatre. It also produced, after a time, one of the better novels of World War II, Harry Brown's slender, understated A Walk in the Sun; a book that in turn inspired the World War II combat movie of the same name.

The 36th's casualty figures at Salerno were terrible. After a month in action, 1800 of its men were dead, wounded, or missing. In his diary account of the aftermath of Salerno, the 36th's commander, General Fred Walker, registered a kind of shocked fascination with the dynamics of body collection and burial: "Bodies brought to the grave were laid, side by side, along the trench … they were in various stages of decomposition and lay in eerie, grotesque postures.… After all proper records were made, the body was wrapped in a bedsack or other material and laid in the trench." Walker's morbid focus on the mechanics of body disposal may serve to symbolize a qualitative and quantitative shift in American perception that occurred almost as soon as the 36th Division hit the beaches of Italy—a transformation that would come to obsess John Huston and Ernie Pyle. Something horrible was happening to American troops on the peninsula; for the first time in the war they were becoming massively expendable in a dirty, costly, extremely frustrating infantry campaign.

During October and early November 1943 the lost men of the Texas Division were replaced by other uniformed human beings, and on 15 November the 36th was again sent into the line. It rained continuously during this operation. "The men are soaked to the skin," Walker wrote, "and their uniforms are covered with mud up to their waists. They are cold and have no opportunity to dry their clothing or have hot meals.… all front line battalions have to be supplied by men who carry what is needed by hand up the side of the mountain through the mud and rain." Ernie Pyle, about this time, noted that "men were exhausted, and their feet were broken out, and infirmities such as arthritis, hernia or heart weakness would leap to the fore on those man-killing climbs."

About the time this redeployment was taking place, John Huston arrived in Caserta. It was early December and the Texas Division's 143rd Infantry Regiment, to which Huston would eventually be attached, was preparing to attack San Pietro and the surrounding hills. Both Pyle and Huston had an eye for landscape, and the landscapes at the entrance to the Liri Valley were spectacular and horrific. "The country is shockingly beautiful," Pyle wrote, "and just as shockingly hard to capture from the enemy. The hills rise to high ridges of almost solid rock. You can't go around them through the flat, peaceful valleys, because the Germans look down upon you and would let you have it." Huston, characteristically, took an even more ironic view of war's effect on the pastoral. The opening shots of San Pietro—a black and white film—show scene after scene of farmland ravaged by war: shattered trees, shell craters, scorched earth. Accompanied by a solemn organ, Huston recites a tourbook description: "In winter the highest peaks of the Liri range ascend into the snows, but the valley floor with its olive groves and ancient vines, its crops of wheat and corn, is green the year around [dramatic pause]. That is, in normal times [shattered trees]. Last year was a bad year for grapes and olives [ravaged fields] and the fall planting was late—many fields lay fallow [shell craters and stagnant water].

"Huston's grim paradox set the tone for the rest of the film; a film that, above all else, is about the vanity of human constructions in a world gone mad with destruction—plow shares beaten into swords and olive branches pounded by artillery. The ancient village of San Pietro, which "for 700 years has stood at the threshold of Liri Valley, welcoming the traveler," is simply one more pathetic victim. In an extremely sardonic passage, Huston's camera surveys the town's devastated buildings and monuments, while his voice drones on, flat and knowing: "the stones of its walls were quarried out of the hills [piles of rubble] … population fourteen hundred and twelve at the last census [deserted houses] … patron saint, Peter [close-up of blasted icon] … point of interest, St. Peter's, 1438 [destroyed church] … note interesting treatment of chancel [interior shot panning over shattered dome and roof]." In these establishing shots, Huston's solemn narration and the funereal organ conspire to say what remains unsaid: this is to be a film about a world of death.

The German defenses facing the 36th provided the killing power. Huston describes them in some detail, but perhaps an even better sense of their impregnability is conveyed by Robert Wagner in his history of the 36th in Italy, The Texas Army: "German defenses, organized in depth, extended from the orchard covered terraces east of S. Pietro and across the mile-wide valley west to M. Lungo.… These emplacements, nearly impervious to constant Allied artillery fire and to attacks by fighter bombers, were deep pits covered by three layers of logs and further protected by earth and rocks. Each had a single opening, just large enough for a man to crawl through. The TPatchers [36th division troops] had first to penetrate a field of 'S' mines, then barbed wire, and still more 'S' mines. If these outer defenses were pierced, the enemy could still rain down artillery, mortar, and heavy machine gun fire without danger to his own troops, hidden in their shelters." Huston adds one extra detail: when stepped on, the 'S' mines bounced to groin level, then exploded.

The fluctuating mixture of sympathy and subversion notable in the film's establishing shots also colors the treatment of the soldiers who will fight the battle. Despite the dark ironies of the landscape, early in the film Huston constructs a generalized, heroic image of the infantry. Footage of soldiers fixing bayonets and moving out is backed by martial music as Huston recites a paean to the infantry's role in taking and holding ground: "that was for the infantry to do, employing those weapons that confine and destroy life in narrow trenches, caves, and fighting holes. It was up to the man with the rifle, the man under fire from all weapons, the man whose way all our weapons—land, air, and sea—serve only to prepare. It was up to the foot soldier." But as the moment of actual attack approaches, the soldiers of the 143rd regiment are strongly individualized. They are shown separately, full face, close up—smiling, talking, worrying, their eyes full of deference and humor and fear—in a way that makes disturbingly clear their humanity and the non-military aspect of their being. "Of the original force to establish the beachhead at Salerno," Huston says of these men, "the 143rd had since been all but a fortnight in action, under extremely bitter weather conditions. At Salerno, at the Volturno crossing, it had taken mortal punishment. The task ahead promised no less bloodshed, yet it was undertaken in good spirits and high confidence."

The job faced by the T-Patchers was simple, direct, and brutal. After an attack by allied Italian forces on Mt. Lungo failed—Huston shows Italian bodies being carried downhill and loaded on a truck—the 2nd and 3rd battalions of the 143rd infantry were committed to a direct frontal assault across the olive groves to the northeast of San Pietro. At the same time, the 1st battalion of the 143rd was to climb and seize Mt. Sammucro (Hill 1205), which towered above the olive groves.

"In good spirits and high confidence," reported Huston, the 143rd prepared to attack on 8 December 1943. To prepare the viewer, Huston records an intense night artillery bombardment that fades into an early morning scene of widely spaced troops advancing cautiously through sodden olive groves. "It had rained most of the night and was raining at H-hour when the 2nd and 3rd battalions crossed the line of departure" runs the simple narration, but the sequences that follow are some of the most striking of the battle.

The initial shots are taken from the flank. A blustery wind shakes the olive branches, and the troops wear raincoats as they move forward hunched against the weather. A sense of wetness, coldness, fear, and inevitability pervades these shots. There are no heroic speeches or gestures. The troops look like tired workers on their way to hard labor. They have been ordered to assault an impossible objective in miserable weather, and Huston brilliantly conveys their resignation and foreboding as they move to the attack.

In the fourth shot of this sequence, the camera is positioned low behind two soldiers advancing up an incline into heavy smoke. The scene is framed by the trunk of a tree in the right foreground. The soundtrack rumbles with distant mortar explosions and artillery. It is a long take.

The soldier on the far left disappears into the smoke. The soldier on the near right zig-zags slowly up the hill. As the white smoke billows and blows down toward him, his moving figure becomes shadowy and ghost-like, then gradually disappears. A sudden burst of machine gun fire punctuates the soundtrack; the camera pans quickly forty-five degrees to the right and records in a blur what seems to be the death of a third soldier no more than twenty feet from the lens. He falls forward twisting to the left—his feet bounce in the air—and he lies there, on his back, his upper torso hidden behind another tree. His raincoat continues rather pathetically to cover his legs.

Huston has cut the film so that this extraordinary sequence seems to set off the attack. The soundtrack crackels with automatic fire and explosions, and five shots in quick succession show troops running or, more accurately, plodding forward: an officer waving men forward, several riflemen hunched against fire, a machinegun team—the gunner carrying his weapon over his shoulder, his loader with a box of ammunition, and another man without a rifle—all doggedly moving forward through the smoke, past the sometimes unfocused lens of the camera. The drab realism of these scenes—the stolid, mundane materiality of the troops, the awkwardly positioned camera, blurred images, the shock of random death—all serve to convey without narration the sense of monotonous hardship and arbitrary destruction that characterizes infantry warfare.

As the 2nd Battalion's attack bogs down, Huston shifts to a series of extremely close artillery and mortar explosions photographed from beside pinned-down troops. Several soldiers scramble headlong back into declivities, the camera shakes and wobbles from the concussion, sparks and flaming particles from the explosions cascade over their positions. Huston's visual language makes it clear that the attack has failed, and that, given the obstacles faced by the troops, it should have failed. His voice waxes elegiac as he lingers over the pictures of battlefield dead ("men gave their lives in attempts to reach pillboxes and throw hand grenades through the narrow gun openings"). Sorrowful music swells over the bodies. Then a slight pause, a quick fade, and Huston sums up the results of this tactical lesson—"The 3rd battalion was committed."

It is a memorable transition, shaking the audience from comfortable clichés into the brutal repetition of actual warfare. There are none of the rallying speeches, the "college tries," the "doing our duty," the "necessary sacrifices" so familiar from World War II combat films. The 3rd battalion is simply "committed." Again the sodden troops advance through the olive orchards, again they are riddled by defensive fire, again the artillery descends, the camera shudders, the attack fails. The advance, Huston tells us, "never got more than 600 yards past the line of departure."

With the breakdown of the second attack, the first major movement of San Pietro is complete, but Huston will not allow the viewer to retreat unmolested. Again the music becomes doleful, but this time it foregrounds not conventional, sanitized pictures of "battlefield dead," but highly disturbing closeups of bodies being put into white bed sacks (the convenience of zippered body bags being as yet unknown). The dead soldiers' grime contrasts strongly with the whiteness of the sacks. Although we see the gloved hands of the burial detail, Huston keeps the focus unrelentingly on the dead men themselves. The soldiers' faces are only momentarily visible, but their "deadness" and the unwieldly heaviness of the bodies generate a visual combination of horror, solemnity, and matter-of-factness that reinforces me tonal paradoxes of Huston's narration. In the final shot of this sequence, an uncovered soldier lies stiffly on the ground and in a grim conflation of housekeeping and religious tradition a pair of anonymous gloves quickly folds his calloused hands across his body.

There is a remarkable story behind these images. In his autobiography, Huston wrote mat he "had interviewed—on camera—a number of men who were to take part in the battle. Some of the things they said were quite eloquent: they were fighting for what the future might hold for them, their country and the world."

Later you saw these same men dead. Before placing the bodies in coffins for burial, the procedure was to lay them in a row in their bedrolls, make positive identification—where possible—then cover them. At that point it was necessary to lift the body up, and I had my cameras so placed that the faces of the dead came right to the lens. In the uncut version I had their living voices speaking over their dead faces about their hopes for the future.

Considering the emotional effect it would have on the families of these men, and also how American audiences of the time might react to it, we later decided not to include this material.

Thus, seemingly, was lost a sequence mat must have been unprecedented in its power and horror—"their living voices speaking over their dead faces." The description recalls the final scenes of later, fictional World War II movies in which the dead comrades appear as ghosts or closeup portraits just before the credits roll—except, in Huston's version, the dead faces and live voices are those of actual combat men. Whether or not such scenes ever actually existed, Huston's retrospective invocation of the motif suggests me kind of emotional effect he was striving for in the film and provides his interpretation of the symbolic and physical relationship binding living and dead on me battlefield—a theme central to Pyle's "The Death of Captain Waskow." In the final version of San Pietro, however, this gruesome juxtaposition does not survive. What remains are silent, strongly evocative closeups of the 143rd before the attack, and pictures of their dead bodies being put into sacks after it.

II

At 5:00 P.M. on 7 December—thirteen hours and twenty minutes before the 2nd and 3rd Battalions attacked across the olive groves—the 1st Battalion had begun climbing Mt. Sammucro. By 6:00 the following morning, fighting in fog and darkness, they had seized Hill 1205 from the Germans in what Huston calls "a brilliant success." Then began a series of intense German counterattacks under incessant artillery bombardment that during the next week would decimate both the 1st Battalion and the German attackers. Huston's film represents these fights with the same closeup accuracy and intensity that characterized the scenes on the valley floor. The setting is different—jagged rocks and scrub brush instead of olive groves—but for sheer intimacy of detail, for realistic renditions of how infantrymen under fire move across rocky slopes, for what might be called the violent choreography of ground warfare, these sequences rival those of the 2nd and 3rd battalions' initial attack.

Leading B Company during this action was Captain Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas. He survived the initial assault on Mt. Sammucro and by 14 December his company (or what was left of it) was in reserve, carrying supplies and ammunition. Captain Joel Westbrook, the assistant S-3 for the 1st Battalion, wrote that Waskow "was ordered to attack a German OP mat had come in behind us and was directing very accurate fire on our rear. Henry just had one platoon left. So naturally he took it. Tidwell, his orderly, told me how it happened. Very simple. A mortar shell, just like any other, laid open his abdomen. He didn't have to live very long." Later, the orderly, PFC Riley M. Tidwell, brought Waskow's body down the mountain lashed to the back of a mule. At the bottom of the trail was Ernie Pyle. With grim ambiguity he wrote several days later, "never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas."

In the years before World War II, Pyle had been a traveling writer of local-color columns—a kind of Charles Kuralt in print. In the war dispatches this experience is evident not only in his well-known tendency to identify a soldier's hometown (and sometimes street address), but in his sharp insight into regional and class-based speech and behavior patterns. In "The Death of Captain Waskow"—despite its poignance—Pyle cannot help sardonically punning on wild West phrases and turning Texas icons into Italian realities. In the phrase "never have I crossed the trail" Pyle seems to be playing grimly with Texas iconography and dialect. Likewise, the traditional Western body-lashed-to-the-back-of-a-mule motif becomes a brutal actuality in Italy: "their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked." But it is in the speech and gestures of the soldiers who gather round Waskow's body—and in the mood of the landscape that holds them—that Pyle finds the aesthetic heart of his most memorable dispatch.

World War II produced a lot of dead bodies—but bodies that were not yet fully dead for the people who survived. Voices do speak over dead faces, but they are the voices of others. Such voices—the voices of B Company, 1st Battalion, 143rd Regiment, 36th Division, recorded after the fall of San Pietro—are the central subject of Ernie Pyle's "The Death of Captain Waskow."

"I was at the foot of the trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow's body down," Pyle wrote. "The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.… Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed to the backs of mules." The "valley below" contained San Pietro and the terraced olive orchards. The dead men coming down the mountain all evening and the soldiers who made shadows as they walked were men of the 143rd enacting a surrealistic vision of the soldier's Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…"

In this eerie nightscape, cold dead men are taken off the mules by scared living men and laid "in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road." Captain Waskow's body, along with four others, is placed "in the shadow beside the low stone wall" until finally "there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road."

The unburdened mules move "off to their olive orchards," leaving the burden to the living men. They gradually move close to Captain Waskow's body. "Not so much to look," wrote Pyle, "as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear." This is what he heard:

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

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain's face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I'm sorry, old man."

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

"I sure am sorry, sir."

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

The incremental repetition, the alternations of speech and silence, the tonal variations between "men" and officers, the symbolic coalescence of natural imagery and biblical allusion, all offer grist to the mill of literary criticism. But for the common reader and viewer—the people back home for whom Pyle wrote and Huston photographed—this passage was wrenching because its dialogue at once overthrew and reinforced the strongest kind of popular ethical and cultural identifications. First, and most obviously, Pyle does something that even today is rare in syndicated newspaper columns: he uses one of the strongest forms of profanity in the language, a form extremely rare in literature of the 1940s and one that would not be allowed in films for another twenty years, and then intensifies it by adding "to hell." And then, miraculously, he makes the audience accept it, indeed embrace it, as a kind of prayer—"anyway." As far as I can discover, none of his readers complained about the profanity (although the Arkansas Democrat deleted it). This is an extraordinary fact: a transformation or momentary suspension or inversion of cultural norms in the readers that duplicates, as it records, the transforming effect of war on combat men.

Pyle's more conventional appeal to the popular cultural norms and models is his sincere adaptation of speech patterns associated with various "types" in Hollywood movies. The profane soldiers seem "toned up" versions of the tough-guy-with-a-deeply-sympathetic-heart most often played by John Wayne (though Robert Taylor in Bataan—the most popular combat movie of 1943—also comes to mind). The officer with the stiff-upper-lip and quite upper-class "I'm sorry, old man" seems an Errol Flynn type, deeply distressed yet under control. But most poignant is the last voice—"the Kid's"—and its shy, sincere, and still respectful "I sure am sorry, sir." The speech pattern is unmistakably Robert Walker's—an actor who played just such a character in Bataan and reprised it in many movies, including Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. The scene then closes with a quasi-religious, and totally silent, meditation by a soldier who holds the captain's hand and arranges his tattered clothes; at once a battlefield Pieta and an image that finds an abbreviated but disturbingly real parallel in Huston's film.

"The Death of Captain Waskow" eventually achieved cinematic form in The Story of GI Joe (1945), probably the best combat movie to emerge from World War II. Created primarily from Pyle's dispatches and employing Pyle as a technical adviser, it starred Robert Mitchum as "Capt. Bill Walker" who dies on a mountain in Italy and is lamented by his troops in a precise rendition (minus the profanity) of the scene over Waskow's body. So strong was the "Walker-Waskow" identification (although Joel Westbrook tells me that Waskow was much more a disciplinarian than "Walker") that in 1945 Mitchum went on a promotional tour with Riley Tidwell, the soldier who had brought Waskow's body down from Mt. Sammucro.

But Pyle's column is interesting not only for its manipulation of the popular expectations and norms of its audience. It is also significant because it re-enacts, in what seems to be me to be a quite unconscious, uncannily accurate, and absolutely material way, the conventions of a very powerful literary tradition: the pastoral elegy lamenting the death of a young "shepherd." In using the term "unconscious" I do not intend to imply that Pyle didn't know what a pastoral elegy was or that he had never read one, but simply to suggest that in reporting on the death of Waskow, in a dispatch written from the combat zone under a deadline, he would have scarcely had the time or inclination consciously to pattern his work after this form. What seems more likely, and indeed more interesting, is that the parallels are due to an intertextuality occurring not so much because Pyle had internalized the conventions of the genre but because the elements that make up the genre—men caring for other men and for allegorical "flocks" in a rural setting; the premature death of a beloved young shepherd; the natural environment as a symbolic mourner; a series of human (or divine) mourners speaking to or about the dead man); the questioning of divine providence; the "decking" or beautifying of the body or hearse; the consolation and mourners' movement back into life—all are to be found, with brutal repetition, in the world of men and death that is the battlefield.

Captain Waskow is unmistakably the "good shepherd," the officer loved and respected by his men:

He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

"After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me.

"He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He'd go to bat for us every time."

"I've never knowed him to do anything unfair," another one said.

The night they bring his body down, nature puts on mourning; the moonlight throws deep shadows; the atmosphere is hushed and eerie. After the body is laid next to the low stone wall, the grieving soldiers form a kind of procession: each says his piece with the clipped anger or reticence or sorrow of a combat man. Then one man silently arranges Waskow's uniform in a last act of respect, and walks away.

This elegiac structure is infused by the 23rd Psalm, informing the valley of shadows and death that was the Liri. The 23rd Psalm is a pastoral poem, one that takes as its subject the potential death of a human shepherd and his prayer to his Shepherd, the Lord, for protection. The two texts—the one a well known psalm and the other an elegiac sequence recreating itself out of the raw material of men in combat—coalesce in a short description that, as a letter to the editor of Time put it, "I don't think any American could read … dry-eyed."

But in war, as in the pastoral elegy, mourning must be abbreviated, consolation implicit, and the transition to life immediate. In Milton's Lycidas, the mourner "rose and twitch'd his mantle blue / Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new"; in Pyle's dispatch, "we lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep." In the closing lines of San Pietro, Huston's biblical cadences likewise advocate consolation and the resumption of life: "the people prayed to their patron saint to intercede with God on behalf of those who came to deliver them and passed on to the north with the passing battle." But Huston's closing also reminds us that while the villagers may resume life, the soldiers only resume combat. St. Peter would have to "intercede" for many.

The fight for San Pietro continued for several days after Henry Waskow's death. Huston's film portrays the entire battle (or series of battles): the futile tank assault and renewed infantry attacks of 15-16 December ("I had never seen so many dead," Huston wrote, "all around were the dead. I remember remarking to someone that we had seen more dead that day than living"), the crucial seizure of Mt. Lungo, the fall of San Pietro, and the return of the civilian population. As Huston assembled the film, each of these actions is punctuated by images of the dead: a dead soldier's hair blows in the wind as he seems to look from his foxhole at the troops advancing into San Pietro; long lines of Italian gravediggers labor to complete a large field of fresh graves; a dead woman is slowly dug from a booby-trapped house as her relatives weep (in a particularly graphic sequence, her husband reaches out to touch her face and comes away with blood on his hand). After he returned to New York, Huston called the mountains and valleys of central Italy "a dead man's world": a combat environment whose grinding rapacity and difficult landscape combined to produce a literal "population" of undisposed dead bodies. It is an image that haunts Huston's San Pietro—as it had haunted Pyle's dispatch on the death of Captain Waskow.

Back in the U.S.A., Pyle's dispatch was an enormous success, appearing in newspapers across the country, taking up the entire front page of the Washington News (the issue sold out), reprinted in Time Magazine, and evantually contributing to his Pulitzer prize later that year.

But the brass didn't like San Pietro. After its first screening, several high-ranking officers complained about the film, and a spokesman for the War Department labelled it "anti-war." Huston replied dramatically that if he ever made a film that was pro-war, "I hoped someone would take me out and shoot me." The film was temporarily suppressed by the War Department, then rescued by General George C. Marshall—and some judicious cutting. The approved thirty-minute version was released to the general public in early 1945.

San Pietro is thus the "official" version of Huston's original film. This may help to explain the rather too upbeat ending of smiling children and new agricultural cultivation "as the battle passed over and beyond San Pietro westward"—to fresh woods and pastures new. Of course there would be smiling children (whom Huston records beautifully) and new cultivation, but there would also be fighting and dying at the Rapido River and on the miserable slopes below Monte Cassino. Huston reminds the viewer, over a series of shots of the 143rd resting after the battle, that many of the soldiers "you see alive here have since joined the ranks of their brothers in arms who fell at San Pietro." But the strong visual reassertion of the non-ironic pastoral, with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir soaring in the background, seems somehow false and out of place. It is a conventional theatrical touch—and there are others in the film.

The careful viewer will notice a remarkable number of left-handed soldiers, and even a bolt action rifle with the bolt on the left side. These shots have been reversed following the Hollywood prescription that the good guys must always attack in the same direction so as not to confuse the audience. (The wounded and the dead are always removed in the opposite direction.) General Mark Clark's high-flown preface, full of heroic phrasing but spoken out of the side of his mouth, rings at once false (in its intent) and true (in what it reveals about the distance between heroic words and reality). And the background music, although sometimes effective, too often sounds trite and theatrical.

Yet the boys who fought the war and died at San Pietro were often trite and theatrical—products of their culture, of patriotic truisms and Hollywood sentiment, of Mom and Dad and apple pie. Here is what Captain Henry T. Waskow wrote to his family:

If you read this, I will have died in defense of my country and all that it stands for—the most honorable and distinguished death a man can die. It was not because I was willing to die for my country, however—I wanted to live for it—just as any other person wants to do. It is foolish and foolhardy to want to die for one's country, but to live for it is something else.

To live for one's country is to my mind to live a life of service; to—in a small way—to help a fellow man occasionally along the way, and generally to be useful and to serve. It also means to me to rise up in all our wrath and with overwhelming power to crush any oppressor of human rights.…

Try to live a life of service—to help someone wherever you are or whatever you may be—take it from me, you can get happiness out of that, more than anything in life.

In this sincere mixture of patriotic sentiment, high-flown morality, proverbial wisdom, and common sense reasoning resides one part of one man killed on one mountain during one battle in Italy in 1943. We hear that hope for "what the future might hold for them, their country and the world" that Huston remembered from T-Patchers he interviewed and then deleted when confronted by their dead faces. We find the goodness of intent and the pastoral care that Pyle memorializes in his prose. We do not find the sordidness, the cruelty, the pettiness, the selfishness that are also part of combat—nor do we find them in Huston's and Pyle's representations. But perhaps Huston and Pyle, in their mixing of the grim and the poignant, in their balancing comradeship and consolation and horror and waste, were closer to the truth of World War II than we in the post-Viet Nam era are willing to admit. The product of a central Texas town, and, as the clichà might continue, a thousand American towns, Henry T. Waskow's is the voice that inspired the voices of "The Death of Captain Waskow"; the voice missing from San Pietro: the living voice speaking over the dead face.

III

Of all human activities, combat is perhaps the easiest to fictionalize and the hardest to represent accurately. It is the subject of the first great epic of Western culture, yet today is an experience so extreme and so foreign to everyday life that even the best representations seem somehow impotent. One can sit in a modern movie theatre with a large screen and THX sound and experience tension, noise, flash, and chaos—but never feel heat, blast, and fatigue. One can read excellent descriptions of men under fire, but never feel that absolute chill that comes from the realization that someone is trying to kill you.

And then there is the rhetoric of war writing—the set of literary and historical conventions that shape an author's conception of an "attack" or a "retreat" even before writing or filming begins. John Keegan, in The Face of Battle, and Paul Fussell, in a series of essays on World War II literature and photography, have tellingly explored such conventions as they affect the writing of military history and belles lettres. They have done what seems to me something very much worth doing: they have tried to discover in the representations of battle those cultural norms and ideological motivations that separate the mediation from the fact. In the historian Keegan's case, the primary motivation has been to get closer to the fact; in the critic Fussell's case, the motivation has been to attempt to understand the purpose and dynamics of the mediation.

Both, I think, have contributed markedly to our ability to understand what goes on when war is represented in various media. But to say that we can at least distinguish the conventions at work in a representation, although we can never get back to the fact, is itself misleading. For as the Pyle article shows, sometimes life—or at least, Pyle's version of life—unconsciously enacts the structures of art. And often, as in the case of troops in Viet Nam "John Wayning It," life consciously imitates fictional representation. Most commonly, however, representational precedents allow (or force) us to see and frame events in life that we have merely looked at before. I recently stumbled upon a germane example of this phenomenon in the February 7, 1944 issue of Time Magazine—the issue that carried the letter (quoted above) praising Pyle's column. Seventeen pages farther on—in the "World Battlefront" section—was a report about the 36th's infamous attack across the Rapido River. Illustrating it was a photograph that showed four soldiers looking sadly at a "dead comrade in Italy." The photograph could have been an illustration for "The Death of Captain Waskow"—and I'm sure that in part it was. The AP photographer had obviously read the column and begun to look for such a shot; the editor at Time had read the column and decided to print the photograph. The fact that the picture accompanies a report on the 36th Division only adds to its strong evocative and "artistic" value—yet it is a picture of real combat soldiers looking at a real dead body in a way that certainly was repeated day after day in the combat zone.

In a sense, John Huston was doing precisely the same thing at this time as the AP photographer. With a model of the battle of San Pietro framed in his mind, he was shooting the footage that eventually became the film, San Pietro. For despite the extraordinary realism of the film, its battle action seems to have been almost entirely reënacted. According to Eric Ambler, he and Huston did not even arrive at the town of San Pietro until the final day of the battle, probably 16 December 1943. They saw plenty of dead and were mortared by the retreating Germans, but got little in the way of useable footage. They did, according to Ambler, take some closeups of Texas troops—he calls them "Rangers"—"waiting to leapfrog through after some troops ahead of them had started the attack," and it may have been this film that Huston was remembering when he talked about interviewing soldiers before the battle. The bulk of action in the film, however, was restaged between late December and late February using troops from the 36th Division (and possibly other units).

The hours of unedited footage in the National Archives provide a good sense of how Huston went about the filming. Several scenes—including a number that survive in the final cut—appear on two or more reels and indicate that once a scene was set up, several cameramen would record the action simultaneously from different angles. For example, a scene showing a medic approaching three "wounded" soldiers among the boulders on Mt. Sammucro appears on both reel ADC 750 (the shot that appears in the final cut) and ADC 582 (from a vantage point farther to the right). Likewise the scene of the machine gun crew plodding to the attack appears on two reels; the out-of-focus footage (which appears in the final cut) on ADC 750, and focussed footage on ADC 588. Perhaps the best record of the actual filming occurs on reel ADC 581 during a scene in which a farm building is "cleared" by soldiers who toss smoke grenades into it and then enter the smoking building as if looking for enemy troops. (This scene does not appear in the final cut.) During one sequence, in which a camera continued to roll after the "action" had stopped, we see a soldier in a knit cap come into the frame and attempt to kick a smoking grenade away from the door while the troops stand around watching. Behind the building a second cameraman is visible, and as the soldier who kicked the grenade moves away from the building a third cameraman comes into view on the right. The shots taken from the other two camera angles appear on reels ADC 583 and ADC 587.

Captain Joel Westbrook—who in Henry Waskow lost not only a fellow officer but a very close friend—was assigned after the battle to help facilitate Huston's filming. He recalls that he and Huston would go over maps together, with Westbrook describing parts of the battle and Huston asking if they could be recreated. Huston would then be assigned troops, and move to the designated area. Westbrook recalls making sure that troops throwing hand grenades were given relatively safe concussion grenades rather than the fragmentation type; indeed, in several of the outtakes we can see small explosive charges being tossed in front of troops to simulate enemy shelling. (In the final version of the film, only the subsequent explosion and troop reaction appear.) Westbrook does not, however, remember the exact dates when the filming occurred. He believes that it was sometime in late December or early January, before the T-Patchers returned to the line for the ill-fated attack across the Rapido River on 20-22 January 1944. The dates assigned to the various reels in the National Archives card catalogue are only vaguely accurate, but several slates appear in the footage itself. One indicates that the scenes of women washing clothes in San Pietro were taken on 3 January 1944. Two different slates show that on 31 December Huston was filming in the American cemetery at Capriati. A final slate indicates that Huston was filming destroyed tanks and Italian civilians (both scenes in the final version) in or near San Pietro on 22 January 1944. By this time, many of the 36th Division troops who had restaged the attack scenes were dead or dying on the Rapido,

What the unedited footage does not contain, interestingly, are four of the five brilliant closeups that define the humanity of the troops before the attack and any scenes of bodies being put into bed sacks. The sources of this footage remain uncertain. Almost all of the other scenes in the final version of the film appear somewhere in the unedited footage, even the stunning sequence of the soldier going down in the initial attack. In light of this evidence, Huston's statement that "for purposes of continuity a few of these scenes were shot before and after the actual battle" but all "within range of enemy small arms or artillery fire," which is appended to the end of San Pietro, is patently false. The picture was filmed primarily after the battle and, as Westbrook remarked, "maybe in range of very long-range artillery fire."

But the more important question has to do with the effect of this information on the viewer. Westbrook, for example, despite his intimate knowledge of the filming and the battle, nevertheless contends that San Pietro is an essentially accurate rendition of the fighting. James Agee, admittedly a Huston partisan, found the film "magnificent"—as have almost all film critics and military historians since. Because "actual" ground combat footage with any degree of coherence is extremely hard to obtain, a high percentage of World War II "combat" film purporting to show infantry warfare is either long-range or restaged action. The final test for representations of something as horrifically confusing as battle, then, would seem to be accuracy of effect rather than authenticity of material.

In Huston's film and Pyle's dispatch, this accuracy begins with a focus on living men becoming dead bodies in powerfully understated moments of transition. There is a striking poem by Richard Wilbur (who joined the 36th Division outside Cervaro) that describes a rope-twirling, knife-throwing soldier, "violent, neat, and practiced," killed by enemy fire. Reminiscent of the machine-gunned soldier in San Pietro, his body "turned / To clumsy dirt before it fell." The poet, amazed and stunned at the change, can only ask: "And what to say of him, God knows. / Such violence. And such repose" ("Tywater," 17-18). This is the massive perplexity at death so evident in renditions of what happened at San Pietro. Young men, so immediately alive, just dead. Joel Westbrook on his way up Hill 1205 encountered a group of dead paratroopers, "caught on their way up to reinforce the First. Splendid, husky young men. They seemed just barely dead. You thought, such healthy men you could shake them a little and they would come alive again." So too with Pyle's Henry Waskow, so too with the images of Huston's film; the grimy quick become the grimy dead, but remain inextricably and inexpressibly linked with the living. This is what less accurate representations of infantry warfare neglect; not death, but the dead and their eloquently unspeakable presence. Killing people, as a Viet Nam veteran and colleague succinctly pointed out to me, doesn't mean that they go away. The physical bodies stay right there, dead, and yet in imagination so alive, to be lugged around, to be worked with, to be talked about, until Graves Registration gets them out of sight. Huston and Pyle both knew this, and constructed memorable representations from their knowledge.

Yet one senses that even this vision is not enough; that no matter how accurate a literary or cinematic representation of battle might seem, the basic otherness of the environment and situation will always distance the noncombatant from the reality of even the most mundane and familiar occurrences in it. Somehow living for days in a muddy Italian foxhole just can't seem as truly miserable and debilitating as doing the same thing in a ditch in one's backyard. Bill Mauldin, a friend of Pyle's and one of the great recorders of American combat in Italy, recognized this problem and wrote some darkly humorous instructions for civilians who want to know what it's "really" like to be a combat infantryman:

Dig a hole in your backyard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and, so there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire.

Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you.

After ten or twelve miles (remember—you are still carrying the shotgun and suitcase) start sneaking through the wet brush. Imagine that somebody has booby-trapped your route with rattlesnakes which will bite you if you step on them. Give some friend a rifle and have him blast in your direction once in a while.

Snoop around until you find a bull. Try to figure out a way to sneak around him without letting him see you. When he does see you, run like hell all the way back to your hole in the back yard, drop the suitcase and shotgun, and get in.

If you repeat this performance every three days for several months you may begin to understand why an infantryman sometimes gets out of breath. But you still won't understand how he feels when things get tough.

We may never understand how he feels "when things get tough"—something, I think, Pyle and Huston both implicitly recognized in their representations of what happened at San Pietro. There is a lapidary paragraph by Louis Simpson, the poet and former infantryman, that stands as a small monument to the problem of representing what is beyond representation and giving voice to those who have experienced the unspeakable. It is thus inscribed:

To a foot-soldier, war is almost entirely physical. That is why some men, when they think about war, fall silent. Language seems a betrayal of physical life and a betrayal of those who have experienced it absolutely—the dead.