To & from Ernie

To his new-won Pulitzer prize (TIME, May 8) Ernie Taylor Pyle last week added new kudos:

P: Sigma Delta Chi's Raymond Clapper Memorial Award for distinguished war correspondence.

P: Designation by the Sons of Indiana as "Hoosier of 1944."

P: The House Military Affairs Committee's approval of his suggested bill to give soldiers 50% extra pay for combat service.

These were sufficient reasons to clinch slight, earnest Ernie Pyle's claim to the title of No. 1 war correspondent. But last week, as nearly every week, he provided another. Arriving in London from the Anzio beachhead, he gave his 11,500,000 readers a notable example of his warm, richly simple style:

"We were high [over Morocco's Atlas Mountains], . . . Down there lived sheep men--obscure mountain men who had never heard of a nebelwerfer or a bazooka. Men at home at the end of the day in the poor, narrow, beautiful security of their own walls.

"And there, high in the sky . . . and yet part of it all, were plain Americans incongruously away from home. ... It seemed terribly dramatic that we should be there at all amid that darkening beauty so far away and so foreign and so old. It was ... a moment of overpowering beauty, of the surge of a marching world, of the relentlessness of our own fate. It made you want to cry."

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