Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. "This one is Captain Waskow," one of them said quietly. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting. Four mules stood there, in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside.
The dead man lay all alone outside in the shadow of the low stone wall. We talked soldier talk for an hour or more. Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself, and ask others to help. The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, 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. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.ĭead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below.
I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. "I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair," another one said. "He always looked after us," a soldier said. "After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me. 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. He had led his company since long before it left the States. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Photo of a Dean Cornwell painting depicting Ernie Pyle at a grave.ĪT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, Janu– In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them.
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