Ernie Pyle Library Visit

Post-Script: Included in the Ernie Pyle Library is a small display case with memorabilia, including his typewriter, with an Albuquerque Tribune front page announcing his death.

Typecast via Corona 4, images via Fujifilm X10.

Ernie Pyle in the war

The view from the sidewalk

Front window

Ernie Pyle GI Joe set, including his typewriter

Pyle at his typewriter

Ernie Pyle's typewriter

"I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.

It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead.

Here are toothbrushes and razors and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. Here are broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition...

I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier's name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don't know why I picked it up, or why I put it back."

Ernie Pyle
France, 1944
"Here Is Your War"

A quiet place to sit

Memorial

Engraved on the monument:

"The Death of Capt. Henry T. Waskow"

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

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

From Brave Men, by Ernie Pyle