Cartoonist Bill Mauldin, now probably best known to fans of the Peanuts comic strips, won his first Pulitzer Prize at 23, for Up Front, a narrative written around a collection of cartoons he had drawn while serving with the American Army in Europe.

At the end of his tour of duty, while waiting for a medal he didn't want, and didn't think he deserved, Mauldin attended a Memorial Day service in Italy, at which the main speaker was General Lucian Truscott, commander of the Firth Army since December of 1944.

He described the experience in The Brass Ring: A Sort of a Memoir, more than a quarter century later.

"Normally I am allergic to Veterans Days and Armistice Days and the like, but Truscott was somebody special. Besides, I was curious to hear that gravelly voice over a PA system. The Anzio-Nettuno cemetery was a collecting point and there were about twenty thousand American graves. Families hadn't started digging up the bodies and bringing them home. The speakers platform, covered with bunting, was arranged with its back to the endless rows of white-painted temporary wooden markers. Before the stand were spectator benches, with a number of camp chairs down front for the VIPs, including several members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

When Truscott spoke, he turned away from the visitors and addressed himself to the corpses he had commanded here. It was the most moving gesture I ever saw. It came from a hard-boiled old man who was incapable of planned dramatics. The general's remarks were brief and extemporaneous. He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart this is not altogether true. He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances. One of the Senators' cigars went out; he bent over to relight it, then thought better of it. Truscott said he would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn't see much glory in getting killed in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do."

[From Bill Mauldin, The Brass Ring: A Sort of a Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 272]