To write like this

The writer I love to read is Ernie Pyle. Here are the first two sentences of his post from Northern Tunisia, April 27, 1943:

We moved one afternoon to a new position just a few miles behind the invisible line of armor that separates us from the Germans in Northern Tunisia. Nothing happened that first night that was spectacular, yet somehow the whole night became obsessed with a spookiness that leaves it standing like a landmark in my memory.

There are 54 sentences yet to come, and every one of them will be an expansion of these first two. Every word will take us deeper into the newness of the position, the absence of anything spectacular and, especially, the spookiness.

We pick him up again for the final third of the post...

Another plane throbbed in the sky, and we lay listening with an awful anticipation. One of the dogs suddenly broke into a frenzied barking and went tearing through our little camp as though chasing a demon. 

My mind seemed to lose all sense of proportion, and I was jumpy and mad at myself.

Concussion ghosts, traveling in waves, touched our tent walls and made them quiver. Ghosts were shaking the ground ever so lightly. Ghosts were stirring the dogs to hysteria. Ghosts were wandering in the sky peering for us in our cringing hideout. Ghosts were everywhere, and their hordes were multiplying as every hour added its production of new battlefield dead. 

You lie and think of the graveyards and the dirty men and the shocking blast of the big guns, and you can't sleep.

"What time is it?" comes out of the darkness from the next cot. I snap on the flashlight.

"Half past four, and for God's sake go to sleep!"

Finally just before dawn you do sleep, in spite of everything.

An Ernie Pyle post is a monument to Aristotle's unities of time, place and action. In this one, however, he self-consciously breaks the unity of time to carry over into the next morning, confessing this misdemeanor by placing a single centered asterisk between the bulk of the post and these last five sentences:

Next morning we spoke around among ourselves and found one by one that all of us had tossed away all night. It was an unexplainable thing. For all of us had been through dangers greater than this. On another night the roll of the guns would have lulled us to sleep. 

It's just that on some nights the air becomes sick and there is an unspoken contagion of spiritual dread, and you are little boys again, lost in the dark.

If I were teaching a class on writing, I would draw 10 lessons from this single piece. And I would dance a minuet in honor of the five "ghost" sentences.