The Death of Captain Waskow

Ernie Pyle was one of the greatest war correspondence of WWII. His reports were beautifully written and captured a war and its soldiers of a different time. On this Veterans Day, 2013, as these old soldiers are dying away, we are reminded of those who gave their lives in the service of their country.

The Death of Captain Waskow

By Ernie Pyle

AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY -- In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them.  But never have I crossed the trail of a man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Tex.

Captain Waskow was a company commander in the 36th division.  He had been in this company since long before he left the States.  He was very young, only in his middle 20s, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

“After my own father, he comes next,” a sergeant told me.

“He always looked after us,” a soldier said.  “He’d go to bat for us every time.”

“I’ve never known him to do anything unkind.,” another one said.

I was at the foot of the mule train the night they brought Captain Waskow down.  The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley.  Soldiers made shadows as they walked.

Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules.  They came lying belly down across the wooden packsaddle, the heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

The Italian mule skinners were afraid to walk beside the dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night..  Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift the bodies, when they got to the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself and ask others to help.

The first one came early in the morning.  They slid him down from the mule, and stood him on his feet for a moment.  In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there leaning on the other.  Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the stone wall alongside the road.

I don’t know who the first one was.  You feel small in the presence of dead men and ashamed of being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions.

We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back to the cowshed and sat on watercans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.

Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about him.  We talked for an hour or more ; the dead man lay all alone, outside in the shadow of the wall.

Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside.  We went out into the road.  Four mules stood there in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain.  The soldiers who led them down stood there waiting.

"This one is Captain Waskow,” one of them said quickly.

Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid in the shadow beside the stone wall  Other men took the other bodies off.  Finally, there were five lying end to end in a long row.  You don’t cover up dead men in combat zones.  They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

The uncertain mules moved off to their olive orchards.  The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave.  They stood around, and gradually I could sense them moving, one by one, close to Captain Waskow’s body.  Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him and to themselves.  I stood close by and could hear.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud:

“God damn it!”. That's all he said, and then he walked away.

Another one came, and he said, “God damn it to hell anyway!”  He looked down for a few last moments and then turned and left.

Another man came.  I think it was an officer.  It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for everybody was grimy and dirty.  The man looked down into the dead captain’s face and the spoke directly to him, as though he were alive.

“I’m sorry, old man."

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer and bent over, and he to spoke to his dead captain, 

not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

“I’m sorry, sir.

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the captain’s hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face.  And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

Finally he put his hand down.  He reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight all alone.

God bless our Veterans, both living and dead. God Bless America.

Samuel Arnold

LTJG USNR