I do not mean to indicate that the
correspondent was harried and pushed into these rules of conduct. Most often he
carried his rule book in his head and even invented restrictions for himself in
the interest of the War Effort. When The Viking Press decided to print these
reports in book form, it was suggested that, now that all restrictions were
off, I should take out the “Somewhere in So-and-So” dateline and put in the
places where the events occurred. This is impossible. I was so secret that I
don’t remember where they happened.
The rules, some imposed and some self-imposed,
are amusing twenty years later. I shall try to remember a few of them. There
were no cowards in the American Army, and of all the brave men the private in
the infantry was the bravest and noblest. The reason for this in terms of the
War Effort is obvious. The infantry private had the dirtiest, weariest, least
rewarding job in the whole war. In addition to being dangerous and dirty, a
great many of the things he had to do were stupid. He must therefore be
reassured that these things he knew to be stupid were actually necessary and
wise, and that he was a hero for doing them. Of course no one even casually
inspected the fact that the infantry private had no choice. If he exercised a
choice, he was either executed immediately or sent to prison for life.
A second convention was that we had no cruel or
ambitious or ignorant commanders. If the disorganized insanity we were a part
of came a cropper, it was not only foreseen but a part of a grander strategy
out of which victory would emerge.
A third sternly held rule was that five million
perfectly normal, young, energetic, and concupiscent men and boys had for the
period of the War Effort put aside their habitual preoccupation with girls.
The fact that they carried pictures of nude girls, called pin-ups, did not
occur to anyone as a paradox. The convention was the law. When Army Supply
ordered X millions of rubber contraceptive and disease-preventing items, it had
to be explained that they were used to keep moisture out of machine-gun barrels—and
perhaps they did.
Since our Army and Navy, like all armies and
navies, were composed of the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the cruel,
the gentle, the brutal, the kindly, the strong, and the weak, this convention
of general nobility might seem to have been a little hard to maintain, but it
was not. We were all a part of the War Effort. We went along with it, and not
only that, we abetted it. Gradually it became a part of all of us that the
truth about anything was automatically secret and that to trifle with it was to
interfere with the War Effort. By this I don’t mean that the correspondents
were liars. They were not. In the pieces in this book everything set down
happened. It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.
