Pulitzer-winner's classic reissued

"Up Front"

by Bill Mauldin (W.W. Norton, 228 pages, $24.95)

What does Christmas mean to you, in this time of peace and prosperity?

In an early Bill Mauldin cartoon, five soldiers are crowded around a puny fire in the snow. One of them is holding a Very signal pistol pointed skyward, while another reads from Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and says: "Corp'l Ginnis an' his Very pistol will now contribute the Star o' Bethlehem."

That was the soldiers' Christmas to Mauldin, interpreter of World War II GIs to themselves -- an occasion for hardy sentimentality.

A later cartoon, published on Christmas Day, features his two famous dogfaces, Willie and Joe. They are in a dank cave, which also shelters two bedraggled, woeful children, huddled next to Joe, who has obviously been talking to them. Says Willie: "Wisht somebody would tell me there's a Santa Claus."

Mauldin's cartoons, published first in the 45th Division News and later in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, held up a mirror to the lives of soldiers in the European theater, who liked what they saw.

Eventually, through wider circulation, they also explained those lives to people on the home front, who were equally appreciative.

Mauldin won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning in 1945, the year that "Up Front" was first published. It has become an enduring World War II classic.

In an introduction to this new edition, historian Stephen Ambrose says of Mauldin, "More than anyone else, save only Ernie Pyle, he caught the trials and travails of the GI."

So he did, and like Pyle, our most famous and gifted war correspondent, he favored the infantry, because it has more trials and travails than anyone. Six days a week, often under arduous conditions, he drew the hard and perilous lives of the dogface, and won the admiration of nearly every enlisted man.

Not every officer, however. Ambrose explains that Gen. George S. Patton, commander of the Third Army, thoroughly despised Mauldin and his creations and would have silenced him if he could. Mauldin disliked Patton's insistence on battlefield spit and polish, and what he regarded as his treatment of GIs as peasants.

Mauldin admits that Willie and Joe are all but indistinguishable from each other. And why not? They are Everydogface: dirty, grizzled, unshaven, tired, put-upon, baggy-pantsed, hungry. And indispensable.

Mauldin's drawing style is something to admire in itself - swift, sure, using bold strokes in stark black and white with no gray tones. (Cartoonist and World War II veteran Charles Schulz said he liked the way Mauldin drew mud.)

Equally admirable are his wisdom and depth of understanding, in both the cartoons and accompanying text. Armed with this talent and understanding, he drew Willie and Joe fighting the enemy: the cold, the wet, the pomposities and privilege of rank - and, of course, the Germans. He catches war's eternal grubbiness and absurdity.

The cartoons not only hold up marvelously well, they are, despite the difficulties of one generation understanding another, timeless.

Each reader will have his or her favorite. Anyone who has occupied a low rung on the military ladder will appreciate the one in which two officers are gazing at spectacular mountain scenery, and one turns to the other and says: "Beautiful view. Is there one for the enlisted men?"

In another, Willie and Joe are ducking shot and shell, and Willie says: "I feel like a fugitive from th' law of averages."

"Up Front" was a great success in its first edition. Ambrose says it sold 3 million copies and was No. 1 on the New York Times best- seller list for "an astonishing 18 months." (Astonishing, indeed; a history of the list, on the other hand, shows that the book was at No. 1 for 19 weeks, and on the list as a whole for 41 weeks.)

When the war ended, Willie and Joe went home and, along with the other dogfaces, disappeared into the anonymity of civilian life. Mauldin told one interviewer that he planned to have them killed on the last day of the war, but the Stars and Stripes editor said he wouldn't print it.

Then again, as the periodic reissues of "Up Front" show, old soldiers never die - especially if they just fade away.

Copyright 2000 Cowles Publishing Company
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