By Ben Yagoda

At 5:30 a.m. on February 24, 1941, a twenty-one-year-old Dartmouth graduate named Walter Bernstein reported to Draft Board 179 in his native borough of Brooklyn. He and his fellow future soldiers were greeted by a member of the draft board: “a small, round, baldheaded man,” Bernstein wrote later, “who came in smiling and rubbing his hands, and immediately knocked on a table for silence.”

After calling out a roster, the man led the inductees outside.

“They walked down the dark street toward the subway. The street lamps shone yellowly on the sad, dirty remains of the last snowfall. ‘I should have brought my rubbers,’ someone said. At the subway the baldheaded man stopped and took a pack of government transit tickets from his pocket. He gave these to the lead man, together with a printed list of instructions as to where he should go. Then he beamed at all the men and said in a loud voice, ‘Good luck, fellows.’ He waved cheerily as the men trooped down the subway stairs. ‘You little baldheaded son of a bitch,’ one of the men said, but the little man did not seem to hear.”

Those words appeared in Bernstein’s 1945 book, Keep Your Head Down. They provide a flavor of what makes the book so extraordinary. In clear-eyed, crisp, unsentimental, highly cinematic, and resolutely unjingoistic prose, Bernstein offered a sense of what it was like to experience World War II, from induction to discharge. The correspondents who got the most acclaim at the time, and who are read in the survey courses today, tended to be the Bigfeet: Liebling with the big voice, Hemingway with the big irony, Hersey with the big story, Ernie Pyle with the big heart. Bernstein was a miniaturist by nature, and as such was and is easy to look past. His work bears a resemblance to Pyle’s, but the differences are telling. Pyle had been a newspaperman for two decades when he started covering the war, and in his pieces you feel that he had taken on the official role of Chronicler of the American GI: he was polished, occasionally sentimental, always sympathetic, and inevitably a bit at arm’s length from the men he was writing about. Bernstein was an enlisted man; the view from the ground was the view he saw. It is a view that today’s embedded reporters, despite a wealth of gadgetry that brings Iraq into our living rooms, are unable to deliver. Bernstein’s grunt’s-eye perspective, combined with his literary talent and his innate skepticism, produced meticulously observed set pieces that evoked the near-constant fear, uncertainty, and hunger felt by men involved in achieving profoundly unspectacular objectives — the fog of war, as the currently popular formulation goes. As he wrote in one of the chapters, ironically titled “I Love Mountain Warfare” (about playing cat-and-mouse with the Germans in the Italian mountains):

The night was like all other nights. We stumbled down one mountain and crawled up another. We crossed a stream with the water up to our knees. No one talked; no one sang. We didn’t know where we were going or what we would find when we got there. Some of the officers might have known, but they probably weren’t very sure. We didn’t know where the enemy was. We didn’t even know where we were. We just walked. There was nothing at all nice about the walk. It was dirty, tiring, dangerous and without immediate compensation, and it was exactly what this war was like to most of the men in it. No matter how they felt about the war, this was how it was fought. And there were no Purple Hearts for either trench foot or jaundice.

Bernstein was something of a literary prodigy. By the time he reported to the draft board he’d already published short stories and sketches in The New Yorker and was working as a Broadway rewrite man. (His dream since childhood was to be a dramatist, which sheds light on all the dialogue and stage directions and economical characterization in his journalism.) After being sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for basic training, he periodically mailed off to the magazine accounts of his experiences. The pieces that were published showed a nice ear and eye for the banter and bravado and busywork camouflaging the pervasive jitters of the pre-Pearl Harbor period. In “Action in Georgia,” parts of which read like a treatment for Abbott and Costello’s movie Buck Privates, Bernstein describes the men, including Stein, “a twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn clothing salesman,” ribbing their sergeant in double-talk:

Stein had his rifle over his knee and was gesturing toward the inner parts. “The kravaswitch is broken,” he was saying.

“You mean the bolt?” the sergeant asked.

“He means the kravasnatch,” another man said. “The part next to the warple.”

The sergeant picked up the rifle and inspected it carefully.

“It’s broken,” Stein said firmly. “The lieutenant said I should show it to you.”

“Looks OK to me,” the sergeant said. He stared doubtfully at the rifle and then at the men, but no one laughed. “Beats me,” he said finally. He handed the rifle back to Stein, and then everyone laughed.

“What a connivo,” one of the men said, hitting Stein on the back.

The sergeant didn’t look too pleased but he smiled. “I thought it was some of your Jew talk,” he said to Stein.

While at Fort Benning, Bernstein was assigned to write the book for a musical comedy meant to entertain the troops. This was so successful that he was transferred to New York to work on a similar but much larger-scale effort, Irving Berlin’s Broadway revue “This Is the Army.” Bernstein duly put together his behind-the-scenes observations in an article meant for The New Yorker. Then came trouble. A colonel got hold of the manuscript, decided that it ridiculed the Army, and decreed that if it saw print, Bernstein would be punished, perhaps by court martial.

Bernstein reported this turn of events to Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s editor. As Bernstein (who is, as the saying goes, very much alive) recounted in his 1996 memoir, Inside Out, Ross

was delighted. As a private in World War One he had edited the army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and relished any fight with the brass . . . . While I waited in his office, Ross got on the phone to General George Marshall, the army chief of staff in Washington. Marshall had been an aide to General John J. Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force in the First War, and Ross had known him then. What I could hear of the conversation was jovially profane. When he hung up, Ross turned to me with a big, gap-toothed smile and announced it was all taken care of.

Not only would the article run, but Bernstein was assigned to be a reporter for Yank, a new weekly magazine staffed entirely by enlisted men. Bernstein spent a few months in New York, where Yank had its offices, then sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on a Dutch freighter. He put in some time in Tehran, Cairo, and Tel Aviv (where he played touch football on the beach with Irwin Shaw), but there were few stories and no combat. So he hitched a ride on an attack bomber heading to Sicily.

Bernstein’s situation, once he got to the shooting war, was singular even by 1942 standards; today, it sounds like a fantasy. “I would get out on the road with my bedroll and typewriter and pistol and wander until I found a unit that promised a story,” he recalled in Inside Out. Odder still, he wrote whatever he chose. Like the current-day journalists in the Persian Gulf, he was embedded, with the important difference that he was himself a soldier and would participate in any mission his unit was involved in.

Bernstein filed short reports for Yank but saved the good stuff for The New Yorker. Here, again, he was working without a net: he came up with his ideas and composed his stories on his own, then sent them to William Shawn (Ross’s deputy and eventual successor), who usually accepted them. These pieces are the heart of Keep Your Head Down, out of which they pop with absolute freshness.

The best piece in the book — one of the best short works of wartime journalism ever — is “Search for a Battle.” Bernstein is now on the mainland of Italy, though in his literary treatment the landscape has an existential anonymity. He is supposed to be woken up at two o’clock one morning to join a battalion attacking “a long steep ridge that stood like a door at the head of the valley we occupied,” but in a typical foul-up, the message to rouse him gets lost. Setting off by himself to try to find the battalion, he hitches a ride across a field that’s supposed to be mined, presses on by foot, and encounters the wounded, the desperate, and two burned-out infantrymen — black-comic characters out of Waiting for Godot:

“We just got relieved,” the rifleman said. “Only nobody knows where we’re supposed to go.”

“I ain’t even sure we been relieved,” the mortar man said.

“I’m sure,” the rifleman said. “The lieutenant come by and said we were relieved. That’s good enough for me.”

“The lieutenant got killed,” the other man said.

“So what?” the rifleman said. “He relieved us before he got killed.”

Still separated from the battalion, Bernstein finds himself in a valley under shell attack and is unknowingly in the crosshairs of an enemy tank until some GIs summon him into their homemade shelter. He thanks them for saving his life; one of them replies, “Hell, he might have missed you.”

The last chapter of the book is a long account of Bernstein’s one authentic scoop. In Cairo, he befriended some Yugoslav partisans and arranged through them to go on a weeklong foot journey to the Yugoslav town of Drvar, where Bernstein had an exclusive interview with the partisan leader, Tito. After the story came out in Yank, The New York Times ran a front-page story about it.

Keep Your Head Down was well received; The New York Times Book Review remarked that “the stories of combat . . . . have the ring of genuine authenticity.” There was an Armed Services edition, and a Book Find Club reprint sold 40,000 copies. The book fell out of print soon after that, which in retrospect is not surprising. Postwar America was not especially in the mood for a rueful reminder of what it felt like to be cold and hungry and lost and trudging through the mud. That perspective, of course, is part of why the book doesn’t feel dated by a day. It also offers a very clean first draft of an important slice of history.

After being discharged by the Army, Bernstein became a staff reporter at The New Yorker, a loosely designed job for which he was not well suited. He spent his afternoons going to the movies, in part because, as he wrote in Inside Out, “the alternative was sitting in my office and staring at a blank piece of paper.” But there were other reasons. Even as a journalist he was a sort of scriptwriter, making certain, as he says now, that “every piece I wrote had some kind of set piece in it”; animating plays and players turned out to be his calling. The success of Keep Your Head Down earned him a movie contract. He spent six months in Hollywood, working on screenplays that included All the King’s Men and Kiss the Blood off My Hands, then returned to New York to find that live television dramas were all the rage and that they needed scripts!

Bernstein tells the story of what happened next in Inside Out, and also in his 1976 screenplay for The Front. He was a Communist — not a sympathizer or fellow traveler, but a card-carrying meeting-attender. Inevitably, he was blacklisted. Like the Woody Allen character in the movie, he survived by finding friendly civilians, or “fronts,” who would sign their names to his scripts. Bernstein was unblacklisted in 1960, when United Artists hired him to work on the screenplay for The Magnificent Seven. Since then he has been busy and productive, with such credits as Fail-Safe, Semi-Tough, Yanks, The House on Carroll Street, and the 1997 HBO film Miss Evers’ Boys, for which he won an Emmy.

As I write, there is a war going on, and among its many differences from World War II is the nature of the prose it has generated. Walter Bernstein was one of thousands of current and future writers drafted into service. He produced outstanding journalism; his counterparts refracted their experience into fiction (Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut), poetry (Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell), drama, film, and even humor. Those talented chroniclers saw to it that the war was in an important sense a shared national experience.

With some notable exceptions (like Anthony Swofford and Joel Turnipseed, authors respectively of Jarhead and Baghdad Express), the all-volunteer army doesn’t attract many literary types. We have the brave and sometimes eloquent embedded reporters, but they’re mainly producing stories about “the organization” — strategy and training, objectives and preparedness, mission and manpower. Even when they attempt to turn from macro to micro, they are inevitably, like Ernie Pyle, at arm’s length from the grunt on the ground — able to share his tent but not the feeling in his gut.

The result is an unfortunate irony. As we often hear, digital communication has made the world a smaller place. We can see the troops in Iraq in real time. Yet their experience remains profoundly remote and distant from us at home. A book like Keep Your Head Down reminds us of a time when a talented writer, utilizing a manual typewriter and airmail, could make his home-front readers feel what making war was like.

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