Now we are in a lull and many of us are having a short rest period.  I tried the city and couldn’t stand it.  Two days drove me back to the country, where everything seemed cleaner and more decent.  I am in my tent, sitting on a newly acquired cot, writing on a German folding table we picked up the day of the big surrender.  The days here are so peaceful and perfect they almost give us a sense of infidelity to those we left behind beneath the Tunisian crosses, those whose final awareness was a bedlam of fire and noise and uproar.

Here the Mediterranean surf caresses the sandy beach not a hundred yards away, and it is a lullaby for sleeping.  The water is incredibly blue, just as we always heard it was.  The sky is a cloudless blue infinity, and the only sounds are the birds singing in the scrub bushes that grow out of the sand and lean away from the sea.  Little land terrapins waddle around, and I snared one by the hind leg with a piece of string and tied it in Photographer Chuck Corte's tent while he was out, just for a joke.  Then I found myself peeking in every few minutes to see how the captive was getting along, and he was straining so hard to get away that I got to feeling sorry for the poor little cuss.  I turned him loose and ruined my joke.

An occasional black beetle strolls innocently across the sandy floor.  For two hours I’ve been watching one of them struggling with a cigarette butt on the ground, trying to move it.  Yesterday a sand snake crawled by just outside my tent door, and tor the first time in my life I looked upon a snake not with a creeping phobia but with a sudden and surprising feeling of compassion.  Somehow I pitied him, because he was a snake instead of a man.  And I don’t know why I felt that way, for I feel pity for all men too, because they are men.

It may be that the war has changed me, along with the rest.  It is hard for anyone to analyze himself.  I know that I find more and more that I wish to be alone, and yet contradictorily I believe I have a new patience with humanity that I’ve never had before. When you’ve lived with the unnatural mass cruelty that mankind is capable of inflicting upon itself, you find yourself dispossessed of the faculty for blaming one poor man for the triviality of his faults.  I don’t see how any survivor of war can ever be cruel to anything, ever again.

Yes, I want the war to be over, just as keenly as any soldier in North Africa wants it.  This little interlude of passive contentment here on the Mediterranean shore is a mean temptation.  It is a beckoning into somnolence.  This is the kind of day I think I want my life to be composed of, endlessly.  But pretty soon we shall strike our tents and traipse again after the clanking tanks, sleep again to the incessant lullaby of the big rolling guns.  It has to be that way, and wishing doesn’t change it.

It may be I have unconsciously made war seem more awful than it really is.  It would be wrong to say that war is all grim; if it were, the human spirit could not survive two and three and four years of it.  There is a good deal of gaiety in wartime.  Some of us, even over here, are having the time of our lives.  Humor and exuberance still exist.  As some soldier once said, the army is good for one ridiculous laugh per minute.  Our soldiers are still just as roughly good-humored as they always were, and they laugh easily, although there isn’t as much to laugh about as there used to be.  And I don’t attempt to deny that war is vastly exhilarating.  The whole tempo of life steps up, both at home and on the front. There is an intoxication about battle, and ordinary men can sometimes soar clear out of themselves on the wine of danger-emotion.  And yet it is false.  When we leave here to go on into the next battleground, I know that I for one shall go with the greatest reluctance.

On the day of final peace, the last stroke of what we call the “Big Picture” will be drawn. I haven’t written anything about the “Big Picture,” because I don’t know anything about it.  I only know what we see from our worm’s-eye view, and our segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don’t want to die; of long darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks and Arabs holding up eggs and the rustle of high-flown shells; of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations and cactus patches and blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tents and shirt collars greasy-black from months of wearing; and of laughter too, and anger and wine and lovely flowers and constant cussing.  All these it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves.

That is our war, and we will carry it with us as we go on from one battleground to another until it is all over, leaving some of us behind on every beach, in every field.  We are just beginning with the ones who lie back of us here in Tunisia.  I don’t know whether it was their good fortune or their misfortune to get out of it so early in the game.  I guess it doesn’t make any difference, once a man has gone.  Medals and speeches and victories are nothing to them any more.  They died and others lived and nobody knows why it is so.  They died and thereby the rest of us can go on and on.  When we leave here for the next shore, there is nothing we can do for the ones beneath the wooden crosses, except perhaps to pause and murmur, “Thanks, pal.”