Below is one of my favorite articles by Ernie Pyle. It is very appropriate for Veteran' Day.
The Death of Capt. Waskow
By Ernie Pyle
AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, Jan 10 (1944) (by Wireless) — 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, Tex.
Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had
been in this company since long before he left the states. He was very
young, only is 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 comes next,” a sergeant told me.
“He always looked after us,” a solder said. “He’d go to bat for us every time.”
* * *
I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt.
Waskow down. The moon was nearly full and you could see far up the
trail, and even part way across the valley. Soldiers made shadows as
they walked.
Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed
onto the backs of mules. They came belly down across the wooden
backsaddle, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their
stiffened legs sticking awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and
down as the mule 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.
The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from
the mule, and stood him on his feet for a moment. In the half light he
might have been merely a sick man standing there leaning on the other.
Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the stone wall
alongside the road.
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 . . .
We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all
went back into the cowshed and sat on watercans or lay on the straw,
waiting for the next batch of mules.
Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and
then nobody said anything more about him. We talked for an hour or more;
the dead man lay all alone, outside in the shadow of the wall.
Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some
more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there
in the moonlight in the road where the trail came down off the mountain.
The soldiers who led them stood there waiting.
“This one is Capt. Waskow,” one of them said quickly.
Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and
laid it in the shadow beside the stone wall. Other men took the other
bodies off. Finally, there were five lying end to end in a long row. You
don’t cover up dead men in combat zones. They just lie there in the
shadows until somebody else comes after them.
The uncertain mules moved off to their olive groves. The men in
the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually I
could sense them moving, one by one, close to Capt. 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!”
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.
Another man came. I think it was an officer. It was hard to tell
officers from men in the dim light, for everybody was grimy and dirty.
The man looked down into the dead captain’s face and then spoke directly
to him, as tho he were alive:
“I’m sorry, old man.”
Then a solder came and stood beside the officer and bent over,
and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully
tender, and he said:
“I sure am sorry, sir.”
Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took
the Captain’s 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.
Finally he put the hand down. He 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 rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the dead men
lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay
down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.
