Once there was a war

He would have smelled the sharp cordite in the air and the hot reek of blood if the going has been rough. The burning odor of dust will be in his nose and the stench of men and animals killed yesterday and the day before. Then a whole building is blown up and an earthy, sour smell comes from its walls. He will smell his own sweat and the accumulated sweat of an army. When his throat is dry he will drink the warm water from his canteen, which tastes of disinfectant.

While the correspondent is writing for you of advances and retreats, his skin will be raw from the woolen clothes he has not taken off for three days, and his feet will be hot and dirty and swollen from not having taken off his shoes for days. He will itch from last night’s mosquito bites and from today’s sand-fly bites. Perhaps he will have a little sand-fly fever, so that his head pulses and a red rim comes into his vision. His head may ache from the heat and his eyes burn with the dust. The knee that was sprained when he leaped ashore will grow stiff and painful, but it is no wound and cannot be treated.

“The 5th Army advanced two kilometers,” he will write, while the lines of trucks churn the road to deep dust and truck drivers hunch over their wheels. And off to the right the burial squads are scooping slits in the sandy earth. Their charges lie huddled on the ground and before they are laid in the sand, the second of the two dog tags is detached so that you know that that man with that Army serial number is dead and out of it.

These are the things he sees while he writes of tactics and strategy and names generals and in print decorates heroes. He takes a heavily waxed box from his pocket. That is his dinner. Inside there are two little packets of hard cake which have the flavor of dog biscuits. There is a tin can of cheese and a roll of vitamin-charged candy, an envelope of lemon powder to make the canteen water taste less bad, and a tiny package of our cigarettes.

That is dinner, and it will keep him moving for several more hours and keep his stomach working and his heart pumping. And if the line has advanced beyond him while he eats, dirty, bug-like children will sidle up to him, cringing and sniffling, their noses ringed with flies, and these children will whine for one of the hard biscuits and some of the vitamin candy. They will cry for candy: “Caramela—caramela—caramela—okay, okay, shank you, good-by.” And if he gives the candy to one, the ground will spew up more dirty, bug-like children, and they will scream shrilly, “Caramela—caramela.” The correspondent will get the communiqué and will write your morning dispatch on his creaking, dust-filled portable: “General Clark’s 5th Army advanced two kilometers against heavy artillery fire yesterday.”

SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR THEATRE, October 8, 1943—The invasion and taking of the beachhead at Salerno had been very rough. The German was waiting for us. His .88s were on the surrounding hills and his machine guns in the sand dunes. His mines were in the surf and he sat there and waited for us. There was no other way. He had to be pushed out. And, for a time, it looked as though we might be pushed out. But gradually, what with the naval ships firing and the determined holding out of recently green troops and the coming of our reserves from the sea, the picture has changed. Now the invasion fleet lies in comparative safety off the shore and the beach is secure.

The sea has been smooth during the whole thing. Any storm would have made it more difficult, but the sea has been kind to us. It is as slick as silk and littered for many miles with little twinkling C-ration cans floating in the sea and glittering under the sun. The water is oily, too, and there are bits of wreckage floating everywhere and all the garbage of this huge fleet, the crates and cans and bottles and debris that men have the ability to scatter about.

Near shore the cruisers and battleships continue to fire, but now their guns are elevated and they fire over the mountains at targets unseen from the sea.

The command ship lies protected in the middle of the invasion fleet. She is a floating radio station. From her all the orders have gone out and to her all the news has come in. And the staffs are brutally tired. This has not been the usual thing. The command ship has been bombed at constantly. Her crew has been alerted every half-hour in the twenty-four. The bugle is blown and then the boatswain’s pipe over the loudspeaker and then the crackling horn that means battle stations. Then tired staff officers have taken off their helmets and their lifebelts and made for the deck for their assigned stations, while the anti-aircraft roared over their heads and the bombs came down and burst the water into the air.