Wash Day

Victory in Europe did something to two untidy G.I.s that morale officers or spit-&-polish generals could never do. Last week Cartoonist Bill Mauldin's famed Willie and Joe washed their dirty faces. (Joe, on being scoured up, proved to look startlingly like button-nosed Mauldin himself.)

The future of Joe and Willie presumably depends on their creator's future. The Mediterranean Stars & Stripes, which runs Mauldin's cartoons days before they reach the 129 U.S. newspapers which reprint them, changed the standing head from "Up Front" to "Sweating It Out." If Mauldin gets his way, the caption will shortly be changed again, first to "Going Home," then to "Back Home." With a wife & child, five battle-stars and a Purple Heart, Cartoonist Mauldin has 127 points--far more than the 85 he needs to get his Army discharge. In Rome last week, after five years of Army and two years of war, he made it plain that he was tired of being a soldier.

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