Citizen Soldiers

Ernest Hemingway, Jerk

In general, the American press corps covering ETO -- whether for the wire services, individual newspapers or magazines, radio, or the GIs' paper, Stars and Stripes -- did an outstanding job. The names of the top reporters, like the names Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Collins, resonate through the ages. The list included Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, Ernie Pyle and Andy Rooney, Eric Sevareid and A. J. Liebling, Martha Gellhorn and Anne O'Hare McCormick, John P. Marquand and Robert Sherrod, James Agee and William Shirer, among others. Best known of all was Ernest Hemingway, correspondent for Collier's magazine. If being a jerk is first of all being self-centered, Papa was one.

When Hemingway sat down to write, he was the only person in view. His dispatches to Collier's were about what he saw, did, felt. His biggest moment came when he and his driver, Pvt. Archie Pelkey, hooked up with a Resistance group headed for Paris. It was August 19. The sun rose and "it was a beautiful day that day" and Hemingway got to carry vital information to headquarters. "I had bicycled through this area for many years. It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them."

"Never can I describe to you the emotions I felt," he opened his report from Paris, before going on to three columns about how he felt.

There were many adventures with the Resistance group, and much drinking. As only he could, Hemingway loved these French fighters for their courage, elan, and simplicity. They wanted to have one more drink, one more kiss from the barmaid, and be off for Paris. So did Hemingway. But on the edge of the city they were ordered off the road by an American MP.

That evening it rained very hard but Pelkey and Papa were snug in a bistro, with a bottle of wine and some cheese and bread, looking down on Paris. They talked about their newfound French friends.

"They're a good outfit," Pelkey said. "Best outfit I ever been with. No discipline. Got to admit that. Drinking all the time. Got to admit that. But plenty fighting outfit. Nobody gives a damn if they get killed or not."

"Yeah," Papa replied. Then, he concluded his dispatch, "I couldn't say anything more, because I had a funny choke in my throat and I had to clean my glasses because there now, below us, gray and always beautiful, was spread the city I love best in all the world."

Ernie Pyle didn't see the war that way, which is why he is read a half century later, and Hemingway isn't. In a 1995 two-volume anthology of the best of World War II reporting, done by the Library of America, there are twenty-six dispatches from Pyle, one from Hemingway. Everyone knew that Hemingway was brave, foolish, and sentimental. What they wanted to know was what the GIs and the high command were doing. That was what Pyle and nearly all of the others gave them. [Link back and forth with Hemingway.]

Copyright © 1997 by Ambrose-Tubbs, Inc. Converted for the Web with the permission of Simon & Schuster.