Description
Full color 9 1/2″ x 13 1/4″ ad that is for the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company. This ad has a drawing of a soldier working very diligently within a pillbox typing away as he writes another story about what is happening. The ad headline claims that “He wrote the story of two hundred yards”. “When Ernie Pyle went overseas to write about the war, many people had never heard his name. But a few years later, when he died of a sniper’s bullet on Le Shima, several million people felt like crying. This is how it happened that a skinny, middle-aged man with a portable typewriter became the brother of all of us. Ernie wasn’t like other war reporters. He ignored the generals, the grand strategy, the big picture, the pins on the map. To the ordinary guy, Ernie once said, war is hardly ever bigger than a hundred yards on each side of him. So Ernie lived in that two-hundred-yard world, eating its tasteless food, talking its language, sleeping its uneasy sleep. He never tried to be a hero. Much of the time he was scared, just like the men who had to be there. Like them, he was often hungry, always tired, and usually worried about something back home. He never tried to tell himself, or us, that war was fascinating. He found it lonely and dirty and boring and terrible. But he stayed up front because somebody had to write about the men who had to be there – the real story of the two hundred yards. If you had a son or husband in that two hundred yards, Ernie’s piece was the first thing you read in the paper. Other writers told you what was happening to the pins on the map. Ernie told you what was happening inside the heart and belly and wet shoes of your own soldier. He wrote you the letter your man would have written if he’d had the time. And often in Ernie’s stuff there’d be a phrase that would light up the whole war for you, like this:’You feel small in the presence of the dead men, and ashamed at being alive…’. When Ernie came home for a little rest, he found himself rich and famous. Movie stars kissed him, and generals asked for his autograph. It didn’t feel natural to Ernie. He went back to the unknown men he felt at home with, back to the two hundred yards. And there the bullet got him. So Ernie’s gone now, and we miss him. But his books will be there, fresh as ever, any time you need to be reminded that the great American story is the story of the ordinary guy”.
Source: June 1, 1953 Life magazine.
