The first pioneering days of anything are always the best days.

Everything is new and animating, and acquaintanceships are easy and everyone is knit closely together.  In the latter part of the Tunisian war things were just as good for us correspondents—we had better facilities and the fighting army continued to be grand to us—and yet toward the end it became so big that I felt like a spectator instead of a participant.  Which is, of course, all that a correspondent is or ever should be.  But the old intimacy was gone.

And then finally the Tunisian campaign was over, spectacularly collapsed after the bitterest fighting we had known in our theater.  It was only in those last days that I came to know what war really is.  I don’t know how any of the men who went through the thick of that hill-by-hill butchery could ever be the same again.  The end of the Tunisian war brought an exhilaration, then a letdown, and later a restlessness from anticlimax that I can see multiplied a thousand times when the last surrender comes.  That transition back to normal days will be as difficult for many as was the change into war, and some will never be able to accomplish it.