A salute to the infantry—the God-damned infantry, as they like to call themselves.  I loved the infantry because they were the underdogs.  They were the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys.  They had no comforts, and they even learned to live without the necessities.  And in the end they were the guys without whom the Battle of Africa could not have been won.

I wish you could have seen just one of the unforgettable sights I saw.  I was sitting among the clumps of sword grass on a steep and rocky hillside that we had just taken, looking over a vast rolling country to the rear.  A narrow path wound like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope, and over another hill.  All along the length of that ribbon there was a thin line of men.  For four days and nights they had fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all.  Their nights had been violent with attack, fright, butchery, their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.

The men were walking.  They were fifty feet apart for dispersal.  Their walk was slow, for they were dead weary, as a person could tell even when looking at them from behind.  Every line and sag of their bodies spoke their inhuman exhaustion.  On their shoulders and backs they carried heavy steel tripods, macchine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition.  Their feet seemed to sink into the ground from the overload they were bearing.

They didn’t slouch.  It was the terrible deliberation of each step that spelled out their appalling tiredness.  Their faces were black and unshaved.  They were young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion made them look middle-aged.  In their eyes as they passed was no hatred, no excitement, no despair, no tonic of their victory—there was just the simple expression of being there as if thy had been there doing that forever, and nothing else.

The line moved on, seemingly endless.  All afternoon men kept coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon.  It was one long tired line of antlike men.  There was an agony in your heart and you felt almost ashemed to look at them.

They were just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but maybe you wouldn’t remember them.  Their world can never be known to you, but if you could have seen them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people were working back home they never kept pace with those infantrymen in Tunisia.

After four days in battle, my division sat on its newly won hill and took two day’s rest, while companion units on each side of it leapfrogged ahead.

The men dug in on the back slope of the hill before any rest began.  Everybody dug in.  It was an inviolate rule of the commanding officers and nobody wanted to disobey it.  Every time there was a pause, even if a man thought he was dying of weariness, he dug himself a hole before he sat down.

The startling thing about those rest periods was how quickly the human body could recuperate from critical exhaustion, how rapidly the human mind snapped back to the normal state of laughing, grousing, yarn-spinning, and yearning for home.

Outposts were placed, phone wires were strung on the ground, some patrol work went on as usual.  Then the men lay down and slept till the blistering heat of the sunn woke them up.

After that they sat around in bunches recounting things.  They didn’t do much of anything.  The day just easily killed itself.  [ . . .]

[. . . . . .]

Soldiers cut each other’s hair.  It didn’t matter how anyone looked, for they weren’t going anywhere fancy anyhow.  Some of them stripped nearly naked and lay on their blankets for a sunbath.  Their bodies were tanned as if they had been wintering at Miami Beach.  They wore the inner part of their helmets, for the noonday sun was dangerous.

Their knees were skinned from crawling over rocks.  They found little unimportant injuries that they didn’t know they had.  Some took off their shoes and socks and looked over their feet, which were violently purple with athlete’s foot ointment.

I sat around with them, and they got to telling stories, both funny and serious, about their battle.  “We always get it the toughest,” they said.  “This is our third big battle now since coming to Africa.  The Jerry is really afraid of us now.  He knows what outfit we are, and he doesn’t like us.”

Thus they talked and boasted and laughed and spoke of fear.  Evening came down and the chill set in once more.  Hot chow arrived just after dusk.  And then the word was passed around.  Orders came by telephone.  There was no excitement, no grouching, no eagerness either.  They had expected it.  Quietly men rolled their packs, strapped them on, lifted their rifles and fell into line.