A Modern Day Pilgrimage to Italy
1. THE FLIGHT
2. ITALY - FIRST IMPRESSIONS - 1975 VINTAGE
3. ROME’S TURBULENT TRAFFIC
4. THE SIGHTS OF ROME
5. NAPLES
6. ‘TWAS ON THE ISLE OF CAPRI
7. THE CAMEO FACTORY
8. CASSINO AND THE WAR CEMETERY
9. IN TRIBUTE
10.THE POLISH CEMETERY AND THE MONASTERY
11. THE ABBEY
12. THE SILVIA PARK HOTEL
13. ON TO THE ADRIATIC
14. THE MORO RIVER CEMETERY
15. THE KATIA HOTEL
16. A WALK THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE RICCIO
17. RIMINI
18. MONTECCHIO WAR CEMETERY
19. GRADARA WAR CEMETERY
20. AN AFTERNOON IN SAN MARINO
21. CORIANO RIDGE CEMETERY
22. RAVENNA AND THE PO PLAINS
23. VILLANOVA CEMETERY
24. THE BATTLE OF THE FOSSO MUNIO
25. ON TO FLORENCE
26. THE PILGRIMAGE DRAWS TO A CLOSE
A MODERN DAY PILGRIMAGE TO ITALY
THE FLIGHTMost people, I tend to believe, hold an unreasonable fear of one thing or another. To make it short. They have a phobia. I know what mine is without hesitation. It’s a morbid fear of high places, and that naturally includes flying. I swore long ago that nothing, or nobody would ever compel me to travel by plane. Not on your sweet life I would! Not even if I won an all-expenses paid trip to the Hawaiian Islands would I get up in the air. No sir! I’d rather take the slowest cattle-boat to China. Anything but flying. But then up comes this Pilgrimage to Italy and suddenly I change my mind. However I don’t think it’s necessary for me to go into a long-winded explanation on why I finally broke the unspoken vow not to fly. All I can say here is that when this Pilgrimage deal came up, my mind was made up in a flash. Come hell or high water I was going to go and if it meant flying, why then that’s the way it’d have to be, fear be damned! After all, when a guy spends the best three and a half years of his young manhood in the army, and after what he has seen in battle I think he has a right to want to see where his footsteps had taken him. At least it was reason enough for me to overcome the morbid fear of travel by plane. I hope as you read this narrative you will understand what I mean.
And so the big day arrived. But in the weeks before the big day, however, I spent more than a few sleepless nights tossing and turning and pounding my pillow. I became an insomniac. In the last two days before departure my nerves took a turn for the worse. Excitement, uncertainty, and apprehension all ganged up on me with the result I was soon reduced to nothing but a bundle of raw nerve endings. The pessimistic side of my nature conjured up all sorts of dire things that could happen. For the whole of that last morning before departure I suffered from that non-fatal malady known as "butterflies in the stomach". Now, just a few short hours before I was to be on my way to Windsor Airport the butterflies were up and flying in a frenzy. I was a mental wreck. I was like a panther padding from one end of his circus cage to the other. Back and forth, back and forth. I couldn’t sit still, and darn near wore a path from the living-room, through the kitchen to the family-room where I tried to get interested in an old Tarzan movie on TV but it was "no go". The urge to move. The next stop was the kitchen where I tried my word skill at a crossword puzzle abandoned earlier by my half-consumed cup of coffee. Then came the need to visit the ‘john’ where I spent another few unfulfilled minutes. ‘Round and ‘round I nervously paced, varying only slightly the path I took, just to break the monotony of it all. No matter what I did, no matter how I tried I just couldn’t quiet my jangled nerves. There were moments when I actually thought about backing out but quickly realized this wouldn't be the smart thing to do. If I did, I'd lose the 800 bucks I invested in the trip. It was too late to back out now. My deliverance in safety to Italy was entirely in the Divine hands of the Almighty God. Isn't it amazing how suddenly religious a man can become? At the airport there were the usual final embraces, the sad kisses of parting, the last waves of "Good bye!" to the wife, my mother, my son Johnny, and two small daughters, Carolyn and Julie. Somehow, but I don’t know how, I fought back the tears and kept the twitching at the corners of my mouth to a minimum, then strode bravely away to the Viscount parked just a short distance away. I never did enjoy partings, and most certainly I didn't enjoy this one. With the way I was carrying-on you'd think I was on my way to a war again or something.
As I climbed the steep stairs to board the plane I found myself, in a sense, reluctant to go on, somewhat like a man walking the last mile to the gallows. If it hadn’t have been for all those rude people behind me pushing and jostling I think I might still have had a chance to get out of my predicament. But then, before I knew it I was practically carried inside and with very little or no effort on my part at all. What else was there for me to do now but to go quietly and bravely to my seat and endure the unendurable. Composure, in a small way, returned after I found my seat. Even some colour came back to my cheeks, so my good friend and travelling companion, Cam Burrows informed me. I thought I had it ‘made’. But then, as soon as those big engines began winding up my nerves began to dance all over again. Even though the plane was only taxiing along the runway my fingers gripped the armrests like C-clamps, turning my knuckles a pasty white. And when we arrived at the take-off point and the engines revved up to high speed I stopped breathing, literally stopped breathing. "This is it, this is where it all ends", the thought went through my mind over and over as the plane gathered speed for take-off. It wasn’t until we were well up in the clouds when normal breathing resumed. One would have to think it’d be impossible to stop breathing for five minutes, but it happened. Or at least I think it happened. An attractive flight attendant came by and asked how I felt. I looked up at her pretty and smiling face and gave her a sick grin. I knew it was a sick grin because I was sick - sick with fear, blurting out a squeak that could very well have sounded to her like "Okay, I guess?" I caught the sympathetic look in her eye and felt a little sheepish, but much better.The worst was over. Or so I hoped.
Forty-five minutes later we were over Lake Ontario banking for a landing approach. At about this time I glanced out the window and saw the blue expanse of water not far below. Disturbing visions of our craft plunging into the foam-flecked depths flashed before my eyes.Then I pictured somebody in a pleasure boat fishing my body out of the lake with a grappling hook. What a horribly depressing imagination! And then as we came in low over the 401 towards touchdown every muscle in my body went into rigour mortis. A few more seconds and then,"Whew! We made it!" It was about all I could say. Full relaxation didn’t return until the plane came to a stop at the terminal. Cam Burrows, my old buddy, had to nudge me a couple of jabs to snap me out of the trance I seemed to have slipped into. In all honesty though, I wasn't anywhere near as frightened as I've been making out thus far in this narrative. I've only been stretching the truth a little to get you readers in a good frame of mind to keep reading. Yet I have to admit that if it wasn't for Cam's trusty right arm to steady me as I stood at the urinal in the men's room I would more than likely have fallen in and suffered the indignity and embarrassment of having my brand new Legion grey trousers soiled.
We soon met up with all the others who made up Flight 2 of the Ed Davis tour group. Flight 1 had departed a day earlier. Once we got over greeting old Regimental comrades and the introductions to new friends we were soon involved in the complexities of applying bus identification stickers to our luggage and picking up our boarding passes. Then we pinned tiny Canadian Flag pins on our blazer lapels. The pins were provided by Ed Davis. They were supposed to let whoever might be interested know that we were Canadians. Once all these things were taken care of we hurried on over to the Duty-Free store to load up on our allotment of the drink that cheers. Since I wasn't much of a party man when it comes to "tieing one on" I picked up only one 40 ouncer of Canadian Club which I didn't plan to drink. I bought it because I wanted to present it to some nice person I might meet along the way. No, I hadn’t planned on giving it to some accommodating signorina for certain favours. Nothing like that at all. Such things never entered my mind. What I had in mind was, that somewhere along the line I might get to meet some friendly family who would welcome me into their home in appreciation for what the Canadians meant to them during the war, and I would present the bottle to them as my token of appreciation.
After this, it was with high spirits we trooped to the waiting-room where faint-hearted fellows like myself could suffer a few more agonizing minutes before boarding. I didn’t know how the others around me were taking it but I was busy chewing away at my fingernails with a vigour unbecoming to an old warhorse like myself, and was making fair headway when they opened the doors for boarding. It was in the nick of time too because I was getting down to the first knuckle on my right index finger. All kidding aside, it bowled me over to see how huge the Boeing 747 was. I was astounded. "Holy jeez, this thing'll never get off the ground!" I exclaimed as I walked down the aisle looking for my seat. It was halfway down what seemed to be the length of a football field, second seat off the aisle on the inside. Once I got myself comfortable I watched the steady stream of people getting on, our own tour group along with about a hundred Italians or so going on a visit to their motherland. After seeing how many people were getting on, I doubted even more so that the plane would ever make it off the ground. Out of the side of my mouth I commented to Cam, "Well, Cam, if we go down in the drink we’ll at least go down with a hell of a lot of good company." All I got back in the way of reassurance was, "Yep, you got that right." This something less than cheerful reply did nothing towards easing the tension building up inside me, tension I thought I had finally gained control over. All I could do at this stage of the game was to try and look cool, calm, and collected. What else could I do?
The flight to Montreal’s Dorval Airport to pick up more passengers was, thankfully, as uneventful as the flight to Toronto. By this time I was beginning to feel like I'd been flying all my life. In fact I was surprised that I’d finally managed to relax. Cam noticed and told me so. I no longer had that strained and faraway look on my face. It was nice to hear. It was about time I started enjoying the trip instead of being the eternal pessimist and a nervous wreck. I lay back in relaxation to await the Bacchanalian orgy someone had told me would get rip-roaring going once we departed Montreal and were on our way again. But it didn't even come close to what I expected. A few of our group did get into the sauce a little on the heavy side but they gave no problem except for their singing. It must have driven our opera-loving Italian passengers to distraction having to listen to their something much less than acceptable out-of-tune voices.The movie shown that night as we winged our way out over the dark North Atlantic was not only nonsensical in story plot, it was also the noisiest one I had ever tried to sit through. It wasn't a war movie but there was enough shooting going on in it that sure as hell made it sound like one. I hadn't seen and heard so much gunfire since the Gothic Line in Italy. After a half hour of suffering the racket I yanked the $3.00 plastic earphones off and just laid back to try and get some sleep.
One of my old platoon Sergeants, the handsome Stratford fireman, Bob Turnbull, "bless his good old NCOs hide!" got into harmonizing with his buddy, Johnny Coles, accompanied by Cam Burrows on his magic mouth-organ They sang their merry way through a whole gamut of songs, a wide repertoire that took them through all the old familiar tunes they’d sung so often with great gusto in the pubs back in England, songs like "Roll Me Over In The Clover", "Knees Up Mother Brown", "Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty". And then they got in a nostalgic mood and slipped into "The Old Rugged Cross", "I’ll Be Seeing You", and "You Are My Sunshine", songs that we loved so much in those long-ago unforgettable days. If their renditions didn’t exactly stir one’s emotions, at least their singing helped pass the long night in which sleep for many didn't come easy anyway. Actually the night itself was uncommonly short because we were racing at about five hundred miles an hour to meet the sun.
As the night wore on, every now and then a bleary-eyed passenger would slip out of his or her seat to peek out a window in hopes of seeing some lights on land far below. And when the coming of the new day brightened the sky with an azure known only in the mind's eye of a poet or a painter, people crowded 'round almost every window like excited schoolchildren. It was obvious they were transcontinental travellers for the first time like myself. From the moment we were over land right up to the time when the plane was in the landing approach one had a hard time finding a small segment of window to peek through. This reminded me of another time long ago when I was one of about five thousand khaki-clad Canadians approaching the British Isles aboard the troopship Andes. When the green hills of Ireland came into view in late afternoon after we’d been nine danger-filled days at sea, it seemed like three quarters of the ship’s passengers rushed to the starboard rail to feast their eyes on the welcome sight. I swear, that just a few hundred more and we'd have capsized. A spot at the rail soon got to be a pretty coveted piece of real estate, which the owner of same was most reluctant to give up even if it meant going without supper. Some actually, so I'd been told, did forego their meal that night. Most certainly they didn’t give up much, the meals were that lousy. It was an electric moment, to be sure. Likewise was it an electric moment when daylight revealed the greens and browns of the patchwork fields of France to the sleep-weary Pilgrims passing high above in the morning sky.
We landed at the huge Leonardo da Vinci airfield at Fiumicino about twenty miles north of Rome. What a reassuring and delightful feeling it was to know that the wheels had touched terra firma, and a few minutes later, to hear the dying whine of the engines. I was so excited I could hardly wait to get off the plane and get our tour of the battlefields and our visits to the Commonwealth War Cemeteries underway. My exhilaration was boundless.
ITALY - FIRST IMPRESSIONS - 1975 VINTAGE The first thing we couldn’t help but be somewhat shocked about as we walked through the great marble and terrazzo terminal to Customs and thence to pick up our luggage was the ominous presence of armed Italian paratroopers everywhere we looked. A chill went through me, knowing we were now walking on potentially dangerous ground. No one had to remind us of the dangers. All these armed young men in mottled uniform and berets told us this in a way much more forceful than words, each one of them carrying a wicked-looking sub-machine gun. Not a smile crossed their faces as we went by. Obviously they weren't trusting anybody and were ready to react. They ‘d been installed here ever since the terrible Palestinian terrorist attack had occurred in the terminal two or three years previously. Remembering this, I began to study with a most suspicious eye every swarthy, shifty-eyed male walking by. With the trained eye of an infantryman I also scanned the terminal for a safe place to take cover should the shooting break out.
Passing through Customs was no problem and we were waved on past the stern-eyed boys in blue with no delay. Just a cursory glance at our passports and that was 'it'. But then we spent close to an hour in some confusion waiting for our luggage to appear on the turntable. As it turned out, this was unnecessary since porters had already taken care of them, having separated the luggage into proper bus-loads as indicated by the stickers pasted thereon. All we had to do was find our assigned bus and climb aboard.
As we exited the terminal we walked out into the glorious Italian sunshine. My, oh my! What a lovely day! What a delightful and marked change it was from the cool and depressingly overcast weather we had left behind in Canada! Once we were settled down in the bus a young lady came aboard and introduced herself as our guide for the tour. Sharon Winkler, an ash blonde lady with a most pleasant personality, possessing, as we soon found out, a fine-honed wit and a remarkable gift for description. It was amazing how much she knew about ancient, mediaeval, and Renaissance history. She was something special, this girl. Long before the tour had concluded, however, we learned also that the good-looking guides who had been assigned to the other six buses were thought of as highly by the groups they were in charge of as we did of Sharon.
The head guide, Gloria Bartolini, was an exceptionally pretty, intelligent and vivacious girl. She wasn't a native Italian, but a Canadian like the rest of us, hailing from good old Essex County, and the tomato capital of Canada, Leamington. And it didn't take me long to learn that here was another young lady who knew her job right down to the 'T'. The seven guides were pleasant at all times, even when there were occasions they had every right to be disenchanted with the rude behaviour of some people. Fortunately, the rude remarks and incidents were few and far between. But what I especially liked about the guides was that they appeared to be having as much fun showing us around and enlightening us as to ancient history as we did listening to them. We couldn't have wanted for better ones.
And while we’re on the accolades, we can’t forget the great team of bus drivers for the superb, (and I can't say enough about it) absolutely superb way in which they handled their vehicles. They were, as the saying goes, "something else again", but we’ll get into that later on in the narrative. And I might mention here also; although they knew only a half dozen words in English, they were still able to communicate with us some-how, and before we were a quarter of the way into the tour we accepted them as part of the gang. From what I could see, they got a big kick out of their job, and when it was time to have fun partying in the evenings they were right there with us having as great a time as we were having.
As the bus rolled swiftly along the highway from Fiumicino to Rome I find myself being carried across the years to that other time when I was last here under much different circumstances. The fields, the vineyards, the olive groves, the stuccoed farmhouses, the people we pass along the way bring the memories flooding back. As I look out the window of our speeding bus I see the old familiar casas (farmhouses), once shabby and battered, now bright with newness, casas such as we had come to know so intimately on so many occasions when we sought shelter in them from the dreary and chill rains of late Fall and Winter. Of course we always looked to them also for protection from enemy artillery and mortars. A roof overhead and thick walls, at least in my opinion, were so much safer than an 'open-to-the-sky' slit trench, no matter what the officers tried to tell us.
The stately beauty of Italian umbrella pines and cypress caught our eyes, the quality of their beauty beyond my ability to describe them. Tall, symmetrically slender pines lined the roadsides like long rows of plumed guards-men awaiting a Royal visitor. Farther off in the middle distance on the grass-covered hillocks their graceful forms in concert with umbrella pines lent a charm such as only a poet could hope to put down on paper. Enchanting! In every way enchanting! I grope for words to express my thoughts, my deepest inner feelings but I come up short. Every acre of this ancient land, so steeped in history, is a paradise for painters. We pass by a Casa Cantoniera, its beige stucco and its roof of red clay tile and its intricate scrollwork brings to mind another day and another casa some-where tucked away in the Daunia hills of Southern Italy. Memories - Memories - Memories. In a tree-lined laneway alongside a culti-vated field I see a team of great white oxen pulling a large and ponderous two-wheeled farm cart. Seated in great majesty on his throne-like seat was a most unregal, slouch-hatted farmer. Yes, how the memories come rushing back, of carts and oxen, of shouting and impatient reinsmen urging their slow-responding beasts along the dusty tracks and gravelled roads. I thought little or nothing of them at the time, but today I think of them with feelings of nostalgia, wishing I could go back in time and relive some of those moments, not all of them, mind you, just some. We never seem to appreciate things as much the first time around.
ROME'S TURBULENT TRAFFIC No sooner had we entered the outskirts of Rome when it became quite evident to all of us that we were coming onto something that would be almost beyond our comprehension. We would learn, before we had gone only a few blocks, that the traffic situation in this great and historic city was unlike anything any of us had ever seen before, anywhere, any place, any time. Not even Times Square in New York or the expressways of Los Angeles or the corner of Yonge and Bloor at rush hour could come remotely close to matching the hair-raising qualities of Rome’s tumultuous traffic. It has to be seen to be believed. And then,of course, one would have to survive it in order to tell someone all about it.
Parking? No problem! They park double. They park triple. They park on sidewalks, on cathedral steps. You’ll probably even find cars parked smack dab right in front of cinema ticket booths. The drivers of Rome park wherever a few feet of open space presents itself, even if it means shoe-horning their little buggies into the space. Parking lots are so jam-packed you can’t help but wonder how on earth anyone manages to get their car out. I pondered this problem for three city blocks and gave it up as unsolvable.
Fire hydrants are not something drivers in this city give much thought to. As a matter of fact hydrants don’t seem to mean a damn thing to them. It's as though they weren’t there at all. I know this to be true because everyone on my side of the bus stared with open mouths when they saw a hydrant with four Fiats (about the only makes you see over here) parked in a tight circle around it and there wasn’t a one of them with a ticket under the windshield wiper-blade. One can’t help but wonder what the heck the police in this city do to earn their pay.
Our driver, in a miraculous display of handling the wheel, threaded his way through Rome’s traffic jungle, and at each intersection ran into a crisis of sorts. Who had the right of way? From what we could see, they all did. It got so you had to close your eyes and say a quick prayer or three "Hail Marys!" We were transfixed in our seats, faces frozen in the attitude of abject fear. As for our bus driver, it was like there was nothing to it, nothing at all to get worked up over. He simply tromped on the gas and more or less bulled his way through the teeming and honking mass of cars, an almost impenetrable wall of exhaust emitting machinery. How we emerged out of the maelstrom without even a scratch will ever remain a mystery. All I know is that you could hear our collective breath whistling through tight-clenched jaws when we came out on the other side safe and sound. A miracle in every sense of the word. How did he pull it off? Search me.
If I had the inclination and the time, I'm pretty sure I could write a fair-sized volume describing in fine detail the hilarious, the outrageous, the down-and-out incredible traffic of Rome. Whether it would sell in the bookstores or not I wouldn't know. It would, however, be a study in some-thing, but what that something is I couldn’t even begin to say, only that it is definitely something. Driving skills of the average Italian motorist? Possibly. Courtesy of the road? No way! Recklessness? You could bet your bottom dollar on that! Could it even have been a tendency towards highway suicide? Who knows? It would, however, appear that way after what we had just seen. Yes, we could go on and on in this vein and we’d barely scratch the surface regarding the adventures and the comedy of errors, intentional and unintentional that are part and parcel and a minute by minute occurrence on the wild and woolly streets of Rome.
‘U’ turns are considered quite normal over here and rarely gets a nod or sidewise glance from the passing throng of jaywalkers and sidewalk gawkers. A ‘W’ turn is a quite recent innovation and will draw some casual interest from pedestrians, only because they’re probably fleeing for their lives. However, as our gal Sharon so informs us, only a few drivers seem to have developed a knack for this desperate manoeuvre and once in awhile give it a ‘try’. One wrong move in this intricate handling of the wheel usually results in a wide swath of strollers being swept away. Like Sharon puts it, "There isn’t a turn you can think of that drivers in this cosmopolitan city haven’t already experimented with, or executed with some varying degrees of skill."
The drivers are, without a doubt, a most dangerous force to be reckoned with. But the pedestrian isn’t all that innocent either. They usually aid and abet the hairy situations by completely ignoring the rush of traffic whizzing by all around them. I couldn’t get over it! They just don’t seem to give one hoot in bloody hell about the traffic, and they show it with an utter disdain that Canadians like ourselves can do little but marvel at. By the time our bus arrived at the Valadier Hotel on the Via del Fontanella we'd been reduced to a state of gibbering idiots.
The only time we took our eyes off the road and the speeding traffic while on our hectic way to the hotel was to read the proliferation of scrawls covering the walls of buildings. Scarcely a building escaped the crude handiwork of Rome’s graffiti artists. Strangely enough, though, none of the ugly messages were of the porno type as adorn the walls of hotel and gas-station washrooms back home. In Italy, the big thing seems to be messages, mainly in the form of a death threats aimed either at the right or left wing of the country’s political scene. Anyway, I know one thing for sure, and that is that the guy who owns the franchise selling those little cans of spray paint must be doing a land-office business in this country. He's landed a gold mine, no less!
THE SIGHTS OF ROME The Valadier Hotel, home for the night for our group from ‘B’ bus was an unpretentious hotel of the type you would expect the clientele to be Bohemian artists, expatriate North American writers, and a sprinkling of other odd-ball types. It was clean and comfortable enough even without the normal refinements of posturepedic mattresses and room telephones. The bathrooms were, however, somewhat behind the times and gave rise to doubts in more ways than one. The plumbing was nowhere near the standards we're accustomed to, especially the toilets(but more on that later). The rooms also lacked air conditioning and TVs, room service, and of course there wasn't a Gideon Bible to be found. Though a few in our group grumbled about the accommodations I personally found the hotel comfortable enough for the short time we’d be staying there. Some people will grumble no matter how well-appointed a hotel might be.
The hotel is tucked away on a short, narrow street, the via del Fontanella connecting two major thoroughfares, the vias del Corso and Babuino. It’s quite easy if you don’t read street signs, to walk right by thinking it was just another alleyway. As a matter of interest, the via del Babuino literally means, “The Way of the Baboons”. At the point where the two roads meet is the Piazza del Popolo at the far end of which is a massive three-arch gateway leading to the ancient and historical via Flaminia. And now I feel I have to apologize for having used the adjective ‘historical" when describing the sights of Rome. I’ve committed a classic example of ‘redundancy’. The whole of Rome is replete with history and any description thereof requires no such adjective. In the centre of the Piazza del Popolo, which, translated means the Place of the People, stands a 13th century Egyptian obelisk towering some 100 feet above the pavement. It had been brought back to Rome by Emperor Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome. Outside his military accomplishments, Augustus’ claim to fame was his extensive rebuilding of Rome, after which he boasted that he found Rome in brick and left it in marble. Now, 2000 years later his marble buildings have turned a grayish-black with age incurred by the foul breath of millions of cars that have circled the Piazza in all the years since cars displaced the horse and chariot. The Piazza is one constant whirr of traffic that doesn’t begin to diminish until the wee small hours of the morning.
You can’t help, as you stroll along the crowded sidewalks of the via del Corso, but be instantly aware of the vitality and the general cheerfulness of the people as they go about their shopping or whatever other purpose that brings them out from their homes. The atmosphere on the Corso or on any other street lined with stores retailing everything from perfume, jewellery, clothing, and groceries and anything else one can think of, seems so much more lively and carefree, an almost festival-like air as compared to what goes on in our malls back home. Canadian shoppers by and large, carry a deadpan look about them. You might even call it a grim-set look, as though the fact that they are about to spend money is an unpleasant undertaking, something they wished they weren't doing.This might not be the kind of opinion that the others in our Pilgrimage hold, but that’s the way it looked to me. I hope I’m wrong.
Modern day Roman citizens, on the other hand, make shopping a major event, almost a cause for celebration. When you come to think of it that a good many of the people walking in and out of stores are tourists from all corners of the world, not Roman citizens, but people like ourselves, then you have to arrive at the conclusion that the positive shopping habits and attitudes has to have rubbed off some onto the visitors. Isn’t there a saying that goes, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do?”
As you pass by open doorways, especially those of the older shops, you can’t help but detect the peculiar smells that waft out from them. There’s a musty scent of antiquity, mildew, and only God knows what else. One gets used to these strange smells, however, after awhile. Farther along the Corso you come to an even more crowded section of the street where navigation all of a sudden becomes a bit of a problem. You more or less allow yourself to drift along with the crowd. There is simply no other way to go about it. I remember one Canadian writer’s hilarious description of Rome’s pedestrian traffic, a feature article that appeared in the Maple Leaf, our popular army newspaper back in ‘44. This craftsman with words wrote; The Italians don’t walk. They eddy and swirl like a vinoed-up snake with St.Vitus Dance. How true! How true! He couldn’t have written it any better. My own observations were thus: They dawdle along like they've got nothing else to do, then for no apparent reason they'll stop, veer off towards the curb, pause there for a contemplative second with one foot in the gutter, then just as suddenly make a bee-line for a store entrance. You find yourself anticipating what their next move will be, and to your dismay find you’ve invariably guessed wrong. An afternoon's stroll downtown sure can be a nerve-wracking experience.
And then, of course, there are the sidewalk conversations you can be sure to encounter at some point along the way. These are no ordinary meetings of friends or casual acquaintances. More so, they are like the ‘gathering of the clans’. You approach this new threat with great caution and some considerable trepidation. Why? It's because of those arms! You’ve got to watch those arms! You’ve got to be on your guard all the time. If you don’t, you could end up with someone’s bony knuckles in your teeth or a sharp elbow in your eye. Romans seemed to be incapable of carrying on a conversation without a wild waving of arms and hands like a seaman waving flags in Morse code. I know this well. I know it because on one occasion I let my guard down for only the briefest of instants as I was passing a little too close to a spirited group of sidewalk philos-ophers and came damn near to suffering grave consequences. Had it not been for my blinding footwork as I dodged those flailing arms I might not have been able to enjoy the balance of the tour.
Rome, as everybody who has ever visited it knows, is a cultural dream come true. It’s a city where you can spend a month and still have a lot yet to see. You can also spend a small fortune, that's for sure. One of the more outstandingly popular sites to visit in Rome is the Colosseum, as popular today as it must have been for those who dwelt here in the years before the birth of Christ. Today, the Colosseum is, in every sense of the word only a shell of what it once had been. In the time of ancient Rome when the Caesars held sway and the city was a cesspool of sin and debauchery, Roman citizens thrilled to spectacles such as would sicken even the most blood-thirsty of modern Rome's citizens. The sadistically-inclined of those days, men, women and even children paid their way to scream their heads off at the gory sight of heavy-muscled gladiators hacking away at each other with their short, double-edged swords. Even more popular was the four-star event in which groups of helpless Christians were sacrificed to ravenously hungry leopards and lions. Depravity in all its evil forms was as common then as it is in this day and age.
We visited the famous Trevi Fountain at night when it was bathed under the glare of floodlights. Though an exceedingly magnificent piece of art, it’s beauty was defamed by the noisy and scruffy crowd of teenagers draping their near naked bodies all over it. We’d come to see one of the most beautiful and talked-about fountains in the world, not to look at a bunch of dirty and mangy hippy characters carrying on like buffoons in some fourth rate ‘B’ movie. Some of them looked more like what crawls out from under rocks rather than the human beings they were supposed to be. It was hardly worthwhile to take pictures of the fountain.
The most famous stairway in the world, the Spanish Steps, also suffered under the onslaught of these unkempt, musk-ox haired transients. They carpeted the steps with blankets of cheap (although they didn’t sell cheap) jewellery, leather goods, paintings or prints thereof, and caricature art. It would have been nice to snap a picture or two of the Steps but with the kind of flotsam sprawled on them from top to bottom I doubted whether such a 'snap' would have been something to show family and friends back home. On this one day in particular, the Spanish Steps didn't come anywhere near to being as captivating as I had expected it to be, the kind of beauty I had seen in so many travel pamphlets and in books on photographic works.
One would have to be a voracious reader or student of Roman history to recognize and appreciate all the sites, buildings and monuments relevant to the subject. Those of us who weren't, and I would suppose that would be just about everyone on the bus, had to depend on Sharon’s extensive knowledge of the streets of Rome to make us realize how enriching ancient history can really be. Injecting the odd fragment of humour into her revelations, Sharon went on to describe simply, but eloquently, of the momentous event that had taken place at one site and what had happened at another. In other words, she taught us more in our travels through the city about ancient Roman history than we had ever learned in a classroom.
The city of the Ages is replete with great works of art in stone and marble, and what we had thus far seen was only the thin skin of the rich world of art that is Rome. There was so very much more to be seen on the inside of the grand, colonnaded buildings, the museums, the art galleries, the gardens and the villas, in the ruins of the Forum, the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, the Baths of Caracalla, and others. To see all there was to see would take considerably more time than was available. Even so, what we had been exposed to in our short visit to Rome had ignited an interest in ancient history that we thought had died a way back in grade school.
Since 1975 was designated as the Holy Year in Roman Catholicism, the devout from all over the world arrived daily in droves, drawn like insects to a bright light. For these multitudes, the Vatican is their bright light. Included in our itinerary was a visit to the Vatican and an audience with the Pope. The audience was indeed a highlight, no matter whether you were a Roman Catholic or not, or whether you were the religious type or not. In my last visit to the Vatican 31 years ago, one month after Rome was liberated from the Germans I was lucky by draw to spend a day in Rome and be granted an audience with the Pope at that time, Eugene Pacelli whose official title was Pius XII. On that visit the audience was a comparatively small one. If memory serves me correctly, there couldn't have been any more than two hundred servicemen involved. Representatives were present from every Christian nation that had troops in Italy. But on this occasion in 1975, there was something like five thousand seated in a vast, new auditorium. An impressive showing of adoration by Roman Catholics from all over the world.
Six sturdy Swiss Guardsmen dressed in gaudy, striped comic opera pantalooned uniforms carried His Holiness in on an ornately carved sedan-chair, and as the Pope and his entourage moved slowly down the aisle to the stage he was greeted by the sudden flashing of literally hundreds of flash-bulbs going off like a night artillery barrage. The tumultuous cheering and clapping of the 5000 souls in the auditorium was testimony to the respect they showed for the man they believed was God’s number one man on earth. It was an inspiring spectacle.
The Pope gave a brief address to the vast audience, many of whom came from distant places all over the world. He extended his welcome to all the visiting tour-groups, and followed with his blessing which most of the audience came prepared for. They held up their favourite rosaries, their gold necklaces with tiny gold crosses, and other religious articles they felt need to have blessed, and were granted their wish.
Later on, outside the auditorium, while we waited to board our buses, one of the ‘quick-buck’ types in our illustrious group tried in vain to sell off a few of his supposedly blest cigars for a couple of bucks each. The nerve of the guy! But, after all, you couldn’t really blame him for trying to get in on the act when there were dozens of hucksters in the streets close by selling all sorts of cheap jewellery and religious baubles, and they too were supposed to have been blest. Seeing no ‘takers’, our friend withdrew his offer and decided instead to light one of his special cigars to enjoy it himself. True reverential bliss, no less.
The only other special feature of our stay in Rome was the official participation on April 25 in Italy’s National Liberation Day Ceremonies. A wreath-laying ritual was held at the Tomb of Italy’s Unknown Soldier, in which the Hon. Daniel MacDonald, Canada’s Minister of Veterans Affairs led a party of Canadian pilgrims up the many steps to lay Canada’s wreath at the base of the Tomb. This last resting place of Italy’s Unknown Soldier was set into the inordinately huge King Victor Emmanuel II monument which looks down onto the famous Piazza Venezia from the balcony of which Mussolini once harangued in bombastic fashion vast crowds of his misled followers. The monument is, in every sense of the word, a massive piece of masonry and sculpture. For some reason, and I don't know why, it has never been admired by Italians in general. Instead, it has been criticised, condemned and derided by many so-called notables in the city past and present describing it as a grotesque and vainglorious work, a monument not worthy of standing close by and dominating by its very size the treasured ruins of the Colosseum and the Forum. The detractors even went so far as to call it by the unflattering title of 'The Wedding Cake'.
The King Victor Emmanuel II monument was erected between 1885 and 1911 in commemoration of the unification of Italy. Built in white marble in its entirety, it stands in striking contrast to all else that surrounds it. In all, it is an imposing structure that overwhelms the visitor. It even steals attention away from the Colosseum at the opposite end of the via del Fori Imperiali. Since it’s beyond my ability to adequately describe it we’ll leave it up to each pilgrims memory to dwell upon this immense legacy of Italy’s unification. As for my own opinion; If the monument's critics and detractors had their way and it was dismantled, Rome and it's citizens and the tourists at large would be the big losers. Would another parking lot draw tourists to the site in the way the majesty of this arresting monument does? Not on your life! Which reminds me of a line I read once. “No monument has ever been put up for a critic.’”
On our second day in Rome we had a choice of either touring the ruins of Pompeii or paying a visit to the lyrical and legendary Isle of Capri, that island jewel so familiar to all of us in that lovely melody we sang in the late thirties. One group went to Pompeii, while a larger group chose to visit Capri. As I had already walked Pompeii's stone-cobbled streets not long after my Regiment landed in Naples harbour in the first week of November in 1943, it was only natural for me to choose to visit Capri this time around, the island of song, sun, and mythical sexy sirens.
Our drive south on the Autostrada del Sole took us through a succession of wide valleys and gentle-sloped hills laced with acres upon acres of vineyards. Beyond Valmontone we enter a region of thick-wooded slopes, and to our right loom the soaring heights of the Aurunci mountains where the French Exped-itionary Corps under the bold leadership of General Alphonse Juin had so spectacularly fought and defeated the German Divisions. And I’m sure that every Italian Campaign veteran focused his eyes on the scenery passing by as we sped along, looking for some familiar piece of ground or landmark that would bring back memories of those hectic days in late May of ‘44. With the bus clipping along at 80 plus (KPH), any glimpse of a memory evoking kind would be just that, a glimpse, providing little opportunity to focus our eyes on a specific location in the valley that might be of some significance. I did, however, manage to recognize the hilltop town of Arnara a mile or so off the highway to our left. Arnara was the last town my Regiment had taken in our thrust down the Liri and Sacco valleys. What I most remember about it was that we took it at daybreak without opposition. We had expected a tough fight for the town but the Germans had decided to hightail it to the north, and all we got was the backside view of their motorized detachments scooting off down the via Casilina towards Rome. It was a bloodless victory, but no one complained. By this time It was easy for us to appreciate such unstirring victories.
We passed by Ceprano just off the highway and it instantly brought to mind an incident that took place here shortly after our Regiment crossed the Liri on the only available assault boat. The other canvas craft had been carried away by the rushing waters. We crossed without a shot being fired at us, and except for the fact that. the strong current made the crossing a bit of a "touch and go" thing the Regiment got into Ceprano surprisingly easy. In the advance through the rubbled and debris-strewn streets we ran into spotty small-arms fire, but not enough to slow us down. On reaching a T junction just outside of town one platoon turned off the road and entered a grainfield to the left. A second platoon cleared the houses along the trunk of the T, while my platoon clambered up a steep embankment on the right to give covering fire for the platoon moving through the grainfield. Up to this point everything was going along much better than expected.
On top of the embankment we came upon several abandoned enemy slit-trenches and stood there looking down at them in somewhat of a daze. And then a silly bickering began. We began arguing as to who should occupy which trench. I couldn’t understand why all the argument, when every damn one of them were beauties. . .geometrically perfect and reassuringly deep. They were at least five feet deep, a lot deeper than any we’d ever sweated over. And while we were standing there in great debate, suddenly from across the low-lying grainfield, an MG 42 positioned close by a villa on a cypress-topped knoll ripped off a long burst, tearing up the grassy turf all around our feet. We scattered in a mad scramble of diving bodies.
The hole at which I launched myself was already occupied by what had to be two of the fastest men that had ever sought to save their skins. It surprised me no end because all along I had always figured that no one could touch me for speed when it came to running or diving for cover. From the first whistle of an incoming shell to the moment of impact no one had a faster reaction time than me. Or so I thought, up until this moment. Now, to my dismay, I had to face it that there were indeed people quicker than me. And, since I wasn’t able to stop myself in mid-flight, I naturally came down with some considerable impact onto the yielding back of the man on top, which force in turn drove that man hard into the man below. Swear! I'd never heard such foul language in all my days in the army and I sure heard plenty. Their suffering cries, condemnations and outright threats sounded even above the drumbeat of bullets kicking up the dusty soil all around the trench and ripping through the air inches above the trench. But the pain and discomfort they were being subjected to disturbed me not one bit. I was safe, at least momentarily so and that’s all that mattered. As far as I was concerned they could holler their lungs out and call me all the names they could think of and my feelings wouldn’t be hurt one iota. But then there was this one man still out there in the open crawling desperately from trench to trench trying to find cover all the while Spandau burst after Spandau burst chewed the ground around his body. How he got out of it alive I'll never know. It had to be another one of the many miracles that happen in war.
There were at least three guys in each trench, and no one made an effort to make room for one more. It seemed that the following quotation, “Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his fellow man,” did not apply to the situation. “Find yourself another hole!” Was more less the attitude they took. In sheer desperation, ignoring their lousy and heartless advice, the forlorn one piled into the trench of which I was top man. Like a pile-driver he landed. Now the moaning and groaning sounded loud and clear, to the extent that their condemnations sounded even above the bullets snapping and crackling in the air just above us. As for the fine art of cursing, the Cape Breton Highlanders could have learned a few choice expressions from the Ontario boys crowding the trench. They’d really have to go some to match the blue of the air.
For the moment, things didn't look all that promising for us. But then one of the other platoons managed to fight their way up the trunk of the ‘T’ in a flanking move forcing the Spandau crew to pick up their weapon and make a run for it. Although we no longer had to worry about the MG, the platoon in the grainfield had to contend with snipers who picked off two of our boys. The Jerries, however, weren't about to give Ceprano up that easy, and so they commenced to give us a lambasting from their mortars and artillery. Using the ‘T’ junction as their aiming point they literally poured in the H.E. The blast waves bouncing off the walls of the buildings nearby were so loud I was sure they were throwing 12 inch naval shells at us. And then suddenly all became quiet, much like some-one turning off a blaring radio. It was so quiet now, you could whisper from ten feet away and understand what each other was saying. The Jerries had buggered off, much to our relief. Ten minutes later we were up and moving forward again, with the advance proceeding unhindered until we hit Pofi the next town farther down the valley. After Pofi it was Arnara, and our contribution to the breakthrough had come to an end.
And so here we are back again 31 years later riding peacefully down through the Liri Valley and soon finding ourselves crossing the Melfa River where Major John Keefer Mahoney won his Victoria Cross. The river’s almost bone-dry now, but as I recall it, it wasn’t much of a water obstacle even then when we crossed it in late May of ‘44. Though the Melfa was some fifty or sixty yards wide with a fifty foot high bluff on the far side, the river itself was nothing much more than a two inch deep trickle of water about ten to fifteen feet wide. The VC winner, Mahoney was on the Pilgrimage in company of what was called the V.I.P. group. Though he was happy to return to the scene of his uncommon exploit he said he was disappointed in not being able to identify the salient points of the Melfa River bridgehead battle site where his actions had won for him the Victoria Cross.
NAPLES The first thing we couldn't help but notice as the bus entered Naples' outskirts was the fact that the traffic came pretty darn near to being as treacherous as that of Rome’s. We also couldn’t overlook the fact that there was a certain slovenliness about the city that we had not been exposed to in the Eternal City. It's very likely that Rome had its fair share of slum sections also, but since our tour of the city streets hadn't taken us through them, we weren't able to make any comparison between the two on this note.
From what I could see the moment we arrived in the suburbs, Naples didn't appear to have changed all that much since the war. Of course, the war damage had long since been cleared away, with new buildings replacing those destroyed or heavily damaged, and the streets were repaved. And all the many other necessary repairs and revamping that had to be done in the intervening years brought the city back to the state it had enjoyed before the war closed in on it. But yet, by and large I saw in Naples some things about it that hadn’t really changed from the one I had known in the spring of ‘45 as I passed through it on the way to the docks for embarkation to the U.K. The Canadian Corps had departed Italy at Leghorn in the first days of March 1945 for the relatively short journey across the upper Mediterranean to Marseilles and eventual join-up with the rest of the Canadian Army in northern Holland on April 3rd for the final battles of the war. I'd been left behind in 104th British General hospital in Rome when the move was made, and so never made it to the Regiment for the final push in Northwest Europe. They gradually closed down all hospitals, sub-units and other Canadian installations, with the able-bodied being sent on to rejoin their units in Northwest Europe, while the rest of us were shipped off to the U.K. It was April Fool's day when I boarded the Duchess of Richmond for the happy voyage back to Merrie Olde England.
Neapolitans are a people quite unto themselves, with customs, mannerisms, attitudes and appearances somewhat different than the citizens of Rome. They seemed a much harder-looking ‘lot’, with that sinister way about them that wasn't easy to define. I do know though, that after Naples had been taken in October of 1943 and right through to the end of the war in May of 1945 they had gained for themselves a notoriety for being the world’s most prolific thieves, joining the North African Bedouin tribesmen in this dubious honour.
Those, who by fortune, or as it would be more aptly put, by ill-fortune found themselves set down within Naples’ environs in that period of a year and eight months, soon learned of the perils therein. It was a cesspool of crime of every vile sort. Violence, which often meant murder of military personnel, was a nightly occurrence. A man had to be pretty brave to venture out onto the streets after dark. It was also one vast house of ill-repute, the like of which I doubt any of us who were there will ever see again. Not that we would want to. Prostitutes plied their trade openly, and these women of the streets would range all the way from girls just entering puberty to shameful old biddies in their 80s. Anyone seeking the questionable favours of these diseased and lice-infested harlots had to have a couple of screws loose or else had to have had a little more than a skinful of the Naples brand of rot-gut in them. “See Naples and die”, so the saying went. And come to think of it, it wasn’t that far from fact.
Organized gangs of youthful and even child thieves roamed the main avenues in a constant prowl for army vehicles, especially jeeps left unattended. Any soldier fool enough to be so lax as to park his vehicle and wander off, usually came back to find his vehicle on blocks and the wheels missing, or the cargo gone, or more than likely find to his intense sorrow and dismay the vehicle itself gone. It got so bad as the war dragged on, that all convoys passing through Naples had armed guards sitting on top the cargo of each truck to discourage these brazen thieves. Such was Naples during those hectic and pulsing days of war. Quite a few of our boys chose to spend their leaves there. I was not one of them. Worry about getting killed in battle was bad enough without tempting the fates in a dark alley or a sleazy back room in Naples.
“TWAS ON THE ISLE OF CAPRI” We crossed the Tyrrhenian Sea on one of those newfangled boats called hydrofoils. This craft speeds along just above the waves through the effect provided by special vanes projecting from the sides and passing under the hull. Not only did this unique method of scudding across the water give us a silken smooth ride without the nausea associated with sea travel, it was also a lot faster. With all that spray flying past you’d swear you were riding in a racing hydroplane. Surprisingly enough, even though we seemed to be zipping along at a good rate of speed it still took us at least a half hour to reach the island. From the dockside at Naples, Capri doesn’t appear to be more than a few miles away across the water. Distances at sea do have a way, however, of being deceiving.
Capri rose from out of an incredibly blue sea, and in a way had a remarkable resemblance to that of Gibraltar, breathtaking in its immensity and rugged beauty. This huge mountain of rock jutting out of the sea, looks down on a tiny harbour graced with the fanciful name of ‘Marina Grande’. A long concrete jetty angles out from the narrow shoreline and all along it the hydrofoils and the regular ferries that had brought tourists like ourselves to this lyrical island of romance are berthed along its entire length. As our boat glides slowly towards the jetty we pass a small motor launch packed to the gunwales with nuns in their new habits of grey cotton. It makes a wonderful study for camera-buffs, but only those of us who stayed on the open deck to brave the salty spray are lucky enough to capture the scene on film.
Straight off the boat and after a long walk on the jetty we climb aboard tiny open-air buses, carrying capacity about two dozen, all crammed in like anchovies without the benefit of oil. We had no inkling as the driver got rolling, just how exciting the next ten or fifteen minutes would be. If I had known at the time as I scrunched myself into a folding seat beside the driver what kind of ride we were in for I’d have taken off down the nearest alleyway faster than you could say “Molte presto”. But on looking back on that ride from the comfort and safety of my easy-chair in the family-room I have to admit that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it for the world. It was an experience, let me tell you, a real experience.
The young, bronze-skinned, handsome driver who held our lives in his well-manicured hands gunned the engine and shot away from the parking lot like a drag-racer. We careened past a couple of kids walking along the shoulder, but the close call didn’t seem to faze them one bit. I still can’t get over how the people on the island show almost no concern for the traffic zooming by no more than a hair’s breadth away. The dangers of the road, for some inexplicable reason, makes no impression on Italian pedestrians whether young, old, or in between.
The road, twisting in hairpin turns as it climbs to the crest of the central spine of the island, is an exceedingly narrow one just barely wide enough to allow approaching vehicles to pass. This wouldn’t have been half so scary if the twists and turns had been a little less abrupt and the driver a bit less suicide-bent. But, as it was, we found ourselves hanging on for dear life to our seats or anything our hands could grab hold of. Some had no recourse but to hold on to the equally faint-hearted person beside them. To look straight down the sheer face of the mountain to the treacherous foam-flecked sea beating against the rocks far below was to know the fear of heights at its most intense. The road ran never much less than two feet from the edge of oblivion.
The ride up the mountain would have been quite interesting and even enjoyable had the driver taken things a little easier, with the welfare and safety of his passengers uppermost in his mind. Any thoughtful driver would have done so. But this particular driver, as we soon learned, wasn't that kind. In fact I was sure the guy had every intention of making the ultimate exit from this world by taking us all with him in that long dive to the rocks far below. My suspicions were confirmed by the time we hit the third turn that he was doing his damnedest to outdo Evel Knievel the famous dare-devil stunt man. He hurtled along the road towards one of the hairpin curves with nary a sign of slowing down. I gritted my teeth, swallowed oceans of phlegm and died ten thousand times. Piercing screams rent the air! We were on a hell-bound express and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about stopping this runaway engine. Women screamed, and men who had always thought of themselves as he-men screamed in a falsetto they never knew they could reach. Not me. No, not me. Not a sound came from my voice box. It wasn't that I was the bravest on board, it just meant that I lost my voice somewhere back near the first turn.
The driver, I had to admit, had to have been blessed with a built-in radar to navigate those treacherous turns, or else God had given him some sort of occult power to see through rock. If it wasn’t either of these, then how could we explain his rocketing around the blind curves on a narrow mountain ledge the way he did? I kept repeating, “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!" At every second curve I’d take a peek down wondering how many feet we'd free-fall before hitting the rocks. After a ride like that I think from now on we'll all appreciate the fact that roller coasters and Ferris wheels will never again hold quite the same degree of fright for us as they once did. We'd seen the worst.
A suddenly devoutly religious and visibly shaken group of Canadian military pilgrims and assorted other types breathed deep sighs of relief as their ‘Toonerville Trolleys' rolled to a stop at the entrance to the Eden Paradiso Hotel in Anacapri the picturesque and cozy little town at the top of the mountain. The hotel has a first-class rating, so it says in the travel book I purchased back in Rome. I have since read where the former Egyptian monarch and International playboy, Farouk, had spent much of his pleasure time at the Eden Paradiso. Though I’m not a monarch, and am far from being a dissolute playboy I knew as soon as I set foot into the hotel that I could very well feel like a king and carry on like a playboy if I had the time and money to spend a couple of months in this luxurious playground of the filthy rich. I’m sure it’d work wonders in rejuvenating tired nerves and a flagging libido.
We dined on a patio at the rear of the hotel beneath an arbor of flowering vines, in the dappled shade of lemon and orange trees in full fruit. Although the dinner was not as sumptuous as I thought it would be, it was a reasonable facsimile thereof. One of the courses was ocean fish of some species I'd never heard of before, probably caught somewhere near the island. Of course no Italian dinner would be a dinner without a pasta dish. In this case we had several. The ‘macaroni al sugo’ with meat sauce was a bit more to our liking, according to consensus, than what we had been served at the Valadier. And to top the dinner off in grand style we sat back to enjoy glasses of Vino Tiberio, a local white wine that hit the wine taste buds off just right. And besides, we couldn't have asked for a more delightful luncheon and setting than what we enjoyed on this patio outside the Eden Paradiso.
A visit to the famous Blue Grotto came next, and on looking back to the horrendous ride up I thought it might be wise for me to go by way of another bus so I wouldn’t have to be subjected to another frightening ride. So, cowardly-like I sat myself amongst the passengers in the third bus down the line hoping no one would notice the stranger in their midst. I really shouldn’t have been concerned about this change of buses since we weren’t tied down to any specific bus anyway while on the island. I thought I had made a wise move, but once we got rolling for our short jaunt to the Grotto I quickly realized it wasn’t such a wise move after all. There was little difference between the driving style of any of the drivers. This guy was just as reckless and harum-scarum as the guy I had ridden up with. The only saving grace was that this particular jaunt didn’t have quite as sharp turns or as many as when we were on our way up, nor did we come anywhere near to the kind of frightening precipices. But even so, we did have a couple near-misses, as I would call it, to scare the daylights out of more than a few of us.
As the little blue book I bought at the souvenir stand by the Grotto stated; the Blue Grotto is without a doubt the most famous natural sea cavern in the whole wide world. As we look down from the balcony-like projection we see a strikingly blue expanse of water, a deeper blue than any of us had ever seen in nature before. Milling about in that blue scape of sea were at least a dozen rowboats bearing passengers, some waiting to enter the Grotto while others waited to unload enthralled tourists.
Only four passengers are allowed in each boat plus the grizzled old fishermen who man the oars. As we pass through the tiny opening into the Grotto we have to bend over because the opening is only about four feet high and just wide enough to allow the passage of one boat at a time. Once inside we find ourselves transported into another world, a world of phosphorescent, turquoise water with millions of sparkling sapphire-like gems stirred up by the oars of the helmsmen. The dome is alive with fluttering, grotesque shadows and the reflections of the rippling water. Our boatman breaks into song, and the happy and carefree notes of “O Sole Mio!” echoes within this subterranean chamber, mingling with the resonance of other voices joining in. Supreme Court Justice, Joseph McIntyre and myself, feeling the levity of the moment, add our own voices to the singing. We had no need to be ashamed of how we sounded, since our 'something much less than choir quality' voices are masked inside this echo-chamber. Who cared, anyway? We were having a great time what we were doing and that’s all that mattered.
The ride back down the mountain was nowhere near as hell-bent as I had expected it would be. Thank God! I don’t think I could have taken another heart-stopper. But then I wondered if maybe if I was getting used to living the daredevil life and that such minor events like careening around a twisting mountain road was an everyday occurrence, nothing to get excited about. Like hell! Or maybe it was because I just resigned myself to whatever would be, would be. At the halfway point a morbid thought crept into my mind. I began wondering how many tourists over the generations who visited this enchanted island met their maker a lot sooner than they would have wanted. It was only a passing thought and I directed my mind to more pleasant things, like, “This would have been a perfect place to bring Joyce on vacation.”
Capri, as one would expect, is loaded with souvenir shops, wine stores, and quaint little cafes. Since we had an hour or so yet to spend before skimming off to Naples, we were dropped off in Capri's shopping district where a thundering herd of souvenir-hungry Canadians descended on the overjoyed shopkeepers. It seemed peculiar to me how people be-have when they’re abroad and their money is burning a hole in their pockets or their purses. Let’s face it; most souvenirs are relatively cheap junk, or at best, something just to look at every now and then, and talk about for a moment in idle conversation and then finally to be tucked away in a drawer or packed away in a box to be rarely looked at again. Or more likely they end up in a garage sale. Yet I don’t suppose there’s a man or a woman who hasn't given in at some time or another to the irresistible lure of souvenirs. They spend as though their finances were infinite. And the people on this particular tour were no different. After a feverish session at the stalls and counters they waddle back to the bus arms loaded down as though they’d just found Captain Kidd’s treasure. And they love it!
And so it came time to depart this island, this beautiful island in the Bay of Naples, and I’m sure we all hated to leave it. “All good things must come to an end” so the saying goes? So, it had to be with our excursion to the Isle of Capri. One by one, two by two, and three by three the people troop back to the jetty and our waiting hydrofoil. Somehow, although I don’t know how, the hydrofoil was able to accommodate the passengers now burdened down with their proud purchases of baubles, beads, trinkets, knick-knacks and whatnot people like to buy but rarely ever put to use. If you strained yours ears enough or turned your hearing-aid up you just might have been able to hear the shopkeepers of Capri calling out to the departing throng of Canadians that old familiar and mildly derogatory expression; “Suckers!” That is, if there is such a word in the Italian language.
Others in our group may have shown their lack of self-control in regards to spending their hard-earned money, but not me. There was no way I’d be taken in by the lure of garish souvenirs and the fast-talking hucksters. It wasn't because I was short of cash or that I was a miser or anything like that. It’s just that I didn’t go for all the gimcracks and bric-a-brac like a lot of people do. I just didn’t buy. At least I didn’t buy anything until I hit the shore at Naples. Here I got “’taken’, good and proper. He saw me coming, this weasely con artist. He latched on to me like a leech as soon as my foot hit the pavement, thrusting before me in that surreptitious way of underworld characters, a handsome gold wrist watch, offering it to me for the unheard-of price of twenty bucks. It looked to be a genuine, and expensive timepiece I had to admit, and if it was authentic, it had to be a real bargain. Stolen merchandise? What else? But I wasn’t in the buying mood on this day. I wasn’t in the market for watches, or for that matter anything else, especially after Sharon had warned us on the way down about this type of sidewalk purveyor of hot property. I tried to ignore him, but he hung on. Then I tried to shoo him away without appearing to be too rude, but this guy wouldn’t let me go. So I tried an insult or two, but insults rolled off this guy like water off an oil smear. The man knew a sucker when he saw one and kept up his high-pressure sales pitch. He not only had a lot of slick tricks up his sleeves he also had a lot of watches. His arms were full of them—silver ones, gold, jewelry-studded, leather strapped and expandable bracelet type. You name it, he had it. And not one of them looked to be the K-Mart type. They made my eyes fairly pop.
When the weasely one saw he wasn’t making any headway trying to sell me a man’s watch, he drew from some secret pocket the ‘piece de resistance’, an exquisitely jewelled lady’s wristwatch. The stones had to be rhinestones, not diamonds, but nonetheless, the watch was a beauty. Even I as a non-fancier of jewellery felt myself slipping into his clutches. He was a master salesman, no less. He knew he had me. I pictured it on my wife’s wrist, and that loving smile on her face, and the twinkle of pure joy in her eyes. Package deal! I bought two watches, one for myself and one for Joyce, and the amount of lire that passed between us is still in the category of classified information.
THE CAMEO FACTORY
CASSINO AND THE WAR CEMETERY The Cassino War Cemetery is situated close by the base of the height of Montecassino a mile south of the rebuilt and relocated town of Cassino. If you were able to pore over old battle-maps of the area around Cassino you would see that the Cemetery lies inside the loop of the railway that runs just outside the town. It was all through this area that the New Zealand Division battalions fought pitched battles against General Richard Heidrich's tough paratroopers.
Where there is now tranquillity, there was once a terrible bloodletting, a monstrous raging of man-made forces that seared and ravaged the towns and laid waste the valleys and the mountain slopes. Here, many men came to kill each other, and every day they carried away their dead, wherever and whenever possible, and buried them in temporary graves nearby. Here men were brutalized to a point beyond comprehension. For four long and agonizing months it was that the killing, the maiming and the destruction went on. Nowhere could a soldier hide without tasting, hearing, and smelling the hot fetid breath of bursting shells and mortars. Nor could he shut out from sight and ears the fear-some slash of the murderous MG 42. Everywhere around him Death was present in the bloated remains of long-dead men and mules. The suffocating stink of their rotting flesh permeated everything it came into contact with, and after a short time spent in this ploughed-up graveyard, this horrible garden of cadavers, a man soaked up enough of the stink till he smelled as though he too belonged in a grave. That a man's mind and his nerves could somehow main-tain integrity under the extremes of physical conditions and the daily con-frontations with violent death was in every way a miracle of the human spirit.
On this May day 31 years later, as we walk in the bright sunshine along the gravel roadway leading to the cemetery the air is clean and refreshing and the flowers are in full bloom along the once dangerous verges. The fields around are planted in grain, and wherever you look you see vineyards and olive groves. The land is serene, and in every sense beautiful again. The appalling signs of destruction and the mangled bodies of the dead have long since been cleaned away and new homes have been built. Nature, in cooperation with man has healed the deep wounds the valley and the surrounding mountains had suffered. The intrinsic beauty that is ‘part and parcel’ of the Liri Valley is presenting its prettiest face to the visiting Pilgrims. Even the cemetery with all its symbols of death adds its own special kind of beauty to the scene. Peace in every way has once again taken up residence here in the lyrical Liri Valley.
The entrance to the Cassino War Cemetery is not an arresting one of archways or columns or marble panels, but of a simple design of granite stairs at both ends of a brick wall upon which is inscribed in white stone in bold letters the words, CASSINO WAR CEMETERY. As we enter the cemetery our eyes at once take in the wide spread of gravemarkers. A tightness come to my throat. A sigh, almost a sob escapes me, and I find it hard to hold back the tears. What catches my eye is the central theme of a long and narrow rectangular pool, along the four sides of which runs a mosaic-tiled walkway. Along the walkway, squares of early-blooming flowers in a riot of colours blend harmoniously with low-cut box hedges. Standing like tall guardsmen on both sides of the pool, seven to a side, are the 15 foot high slabs of polished green granite on which are inscribed the names by Regiment and Corps of the 4,054 men who died in the Sicilian and Italian campaigns and whose graves are known only but to God. 192 names are those of Canadians.
At the far end of the pool a platform of gleaming white stone supports a three-tiered hexagonal pedestal above which stands the twenty foot high Cross of Sacrifice. On its face is fixed a large bronze sword, its length more than half that of the stone. All around this magnificent central theme of Remembrance are the gravemarkers, row upon row, mute testimony to the terrible legacy of war. Of the 4265 burials here, 855 are Canadian. Tall pines and acacia trees are planted all through the cemetery, their leaves gently rustling in the light breeze.
On our right as we face the Cross of Sacrifice rises the great mass of Montecassino, its crest capped by the rebuilt Benedictine Abbey. It was an impressive and dominating sight, visible to us from far down the Liri Valley on our approach along the via del Sole. The Benedictine Abbey is not the original, the one that had so impinged itself on the minds of the suffering troops whose misfortune it was to find themselves within the shadows of its menacing hulk. The original was destroyed in the pinpoint bombing administered by American B-17 Flying Fortresses, Mitchells and Marauders on the 15th of February, 1944. The destruction was so great, no one who had seen the mountain of rubble in those days of the war would have thought, even had they stretched their imagination to the limit, that the Abbey could or would ever be rebuilt. But, as it turned out, it was rebuilt, block for block, window for window, archway for archway, column for column it was put back together, an exact replica of the Abbey founded by Pope Benedict in 529 A.D. A stupendous feat of civil and architectural engineering sustained through a burning faith by the Italian people in the ultimate resurrection of the building.
Even those in the tour who had not been here when the slaughter and destruction was in full vent could see at once why the gate to the Liri Valley had taken so heartbreakingly long to be flung wide open. It was the Abbey on the Montecassino crest, like a fierce predatory beast glowering on the fields and slopes where men were killing and being killed, that American, British, Indian and New Zealand troops blamed for their troubles. The threat was always there, affecting all men's thoughts and imaginations. What was not known, however, at the time the first two battles ebbed and flowed across the slopes on Monte-cassino and on the heights behind it, was the fact that the Abbey was not occupied by the Germans. The monastery was not responsible for all the calamitous things happening to the Allied infantry and machines of war mov-ing about in the valley or on the slopes around it. But the men over whom it held so much sway firmly believed that the Abbey indeed was being used by the enemy. Nothing could convince them otherwise. It was the ideal artillery observation post and the Germans would be stupid not to use it as such, so they thought. Setback after setback finally influenced General Bernard Freyberg, Commander of the 2nd New Zealand Division into believing that the only way to throw the valley wide open was to destroy the Abbey from the air, to obliterate the OPs in position behind its massive ten foot thick walls. He was sure that every move his men made, the Germans observed from their vantage points in the Abbey, and so after much wrangling in the caravans of the mighty it was finally agreed that the only way out of the impasse was to bomb Cassino and the Abbey.
On the cold, but clear windy morning of February 15, 1944, 143 B-17 Flying Fortresses came over at 18,000 feet, followed a quarter of an hour later by waves of Mitchell and Marauder medium bombers. In the short span of no more than twenty minutes 576 tons of bombs rained down on the huge building and on the surrounding slopes and also on the town of Cassino itself. For all of its massive construction of stone the Abbey was blasted and churned into a smoking hell of rubble and dust. It was learned not long after, that there’d been only a dozen monks and close to 1000 civilians inside its walls. The Italian peasants and Cassino inhabitants still remaining, had sought refuge from the fighting going on around their homes. Not a single German soldier, it was found, had been inside the Abbey. When the last bomb had fallen and the last numbing blast's echo had faded away into the hills and valleys, over 300 people lay dead beneath the huge mounds of rubble. The wounded exceeded three times that of the dead.
It has been proven since, that the few Germans who had entered the Monastery in the weeks before the bombing, had gone in to arrange for the transfer to Rome for safekeeping all art works, books, and religious documents. It was only after the Monastery had been reduced to rubble that the Germans took over the ruins and utilized it in their defence system. And as those of us who have read the books about the battles fought here know, the enemy utilized it to the utmost. In retrospect, they’d gained through a great Allied high-level blunder what proved to be an outstandingly strong fortress position. Once the building was destroyed the Germans had no qualms about using the ruins for defensive purposes. In the months that followed, the Allies were bled white trying to dislodge the enemy from the ruins and the surrounding heights, with little to show for their efforts. Only in the fourth and final battle which began one hour before midnight on May 11th did success finally come. Even then, the Montecassino Abbey, or the ruin thereof was not wrested from the paratroopers until seven days later when the Poles firmly planted the Polish Eagle flag in the rubble.
That General Freyberg had been proved wrong in ordering the bombing, is only hindsight. Anybody can be the perfect commander after a battle has been fought and the facts brought out. Under the circumstances I feel he made the right decision. His only mistake, or rather his lead Brigade commander's mistake was in waiting too long after the bombing before attacking the ruins of Cassino town. The delay cost them the battle and resulted in an almost three months continuation of the fighting.
As our bus made its slow and twisting way up the mountainside we got a close-up look at the kind of ground over which our troops had to fight. It was easy to see why the Germans were able to hold onto their positions for so long. In my estimation, even second-rate infantry could have done a creditable job of holding on to this rock-ribbed bastion. What made it harder for our troops was that it was no slap-dash bunch of nondescript infantry in position here. It was the best of the best German fighting soldiers, the 1st Parachute Division who had made it so brutally tough for our men. They were the same sonofabitches that fought it out toe-to-toe and eyeball-to-eyeball with our Seaforths and Edmontons in the streets of Ortona. They were the same guys who stopped the Perths and the Cape Bretons in their tracks in their battle baptism in the valley of the Riccio River close by Ortona. Yes, we Canadians knew them well.
The parachute boys were no ordinary soldiers, not by a longshot. They used their battle skills to the very hilt, turning every rock-pile into a miniature fortress, every cave and thicket into a hornet's nest, and made every minor height an unassailable barrier. To couple with their battle savvy they displayed a dogged determination not to give up what they held even if it meant certain death. These brave men had courage of the highest order, and the soldiers of every nation that had come up against them would, no doubt be quick to agree with me on this. The paratroopers, almost to a man, deeply believed that to die for their Fuhrer was the greatest honour they could achieve. As a result, taking terrain and the first-class soldiers they were, ready and willing to die for a cause and a leader they worshipped, it was understandable why the fighting at Monte-cassino had been so bitter and protracted. Along with the high-quality of the German army command structure from top to bottom one can readily understand why it had taken us so long to break through to Rome.
Above all the singing of high praises for the enemy troops who defended Cassino and the mountains around it and barred our armies' way on the Rapido River we shouldn't overlook the tenacity and bravery of our own troops who fought here: first the Americans, then the Ghurkas, the Punjabs, the British, the New Zealanders, the French, and the Poles. The living and the dead who once populated these hellish acres were just as heroic for it was even tougher for them, since attackers almost always suffer more casualties than the defenders. Just to obey orders, and it was common knowledge that at the front most orders were unpopular and at times even loathsome, was enough to put the stamp of courage on a man's character. Now, so many years removed from the fighting, as we look around we realize just how formidable a job it was for the infantry trying to move forward into the teeth of machine-gun fire, to grub their way over rocks while showers of grenades explode all around them, and then there were the mortars, a steady rain of mortars the most fearsome weapon they faced. They did far, far better than could be expected in the very worst of possible circumstances.
As the ceremony commemorating our Dead was about to begin, a stillness descended upon the great throng gathered around the central theme in the cemetery. One cannot say exactly when it fell and when it was lifted, but it was there in the briefest of moments, a communion of Remembrance between soldiers. What matter is it that so many lie as moldering bones beneath the green sod while another stands in full life, head bowed and remembering ? It was a communion beyond that which not one of us could hope to explain. Sufficient is it to to say that there was a 'coming-together' in which time, death, and lost youth could not keep from being. I felt the highly emotional moment, and I know that all those around me, now somewhat humbled by the years felt it too.
With the last, sad notes of the Lament signifying the closing of the ceremonies; in ones, twos, threes, and in small groups we drifted apart to walk solemnly along the long rows of gravemarkers. Each of us, men and women alike walked slowly along, pausing to read the inscriptions thereon, looking for names of those we knew, of buddies we had left behind in that tortured valley below Cassino town. There were widows and there were mothers amongst us who came to honour the memory of their dearly beloved. As I paused to read the name on a stone bearing the Maple Leaf design I looked to the grave on my right and saw a woman, a touch of gray in her hair kneeling beside the stone. A widow, a sweetheart, a sister ? I didn't know which. Her right hand rested on top the stone where she had placed a short-stemmed rose. Her head was bent in the attitude of prayer. She knelt there for perhaps five minutes,and then, as she braced herself to stand I saw a teardrop kiss the flowers on his grave. Tears welled up in my eyes and I turned away lest someone see. Why I should have been ashamed to show the deep emotion of sadness that came over me I'll probably never know. Many others shed tears as well.
I’m sure most of the campaign veterans had a list of names, some short, some long, either on paper or in their minds, of comrades who lie buried here in Cassino War Cemetery. At the top of my own list was Sgt. Pete McRorie. Next was Cpl. Bob Adair. It took me only a few minutes to find Pete's marker and another few before I stood at the foot of Bob's grave. Pete had died only seconds after I’d said "Hi, Pete!" when we crossed paths on a dusty wagon-track up at the Isoletta reservoir near Ceprano. Bob died in the same Teller or box-mine blast that had killed Pete. It was May 26th, a beautiful spring day, warm and bright with sunshine, hardly a cloud in the sky, one hell of a day in which to die. But then, what day wasn't a hell of a day in which to die ? Holding back the tears I read the inscription at the bottom of Sgt.McRorie's stone.
UNTIL DAY BREAKS AND THE SHADOWS FLEE
I stand by the marker, looking down as so many others throughout the cemetery are so doing at other markers. I try to say a prayer, try to say something appropriate, but no words come to mind. I grope for the appropriate words, but nothing comes. Why is it that I've never found it hard to express what I want to express at lesser moments, but here when it would mean so much I’m speechless? Only my memory speaks. It brings to mind that awful moment when Pete and Bob died and how close I came to being killed along with them. Just a few seconds and a scant few feet the difference between life and death. Words seem to be irrelevant at this moment.I linger at each marker only long enough to read the names thereon, names of buddies I had marched with in England, went on schemes with, sat in canteens with, and when the time came to do what we had been trained to do, went into battle with by their side. I stood before their markers, each one of them, paused to pay my respects and then I continued along the row. I've never been moved in a cemetery as much as I had been moved here, except of course that day long ago in 1932 when we buried our father.
I hadn't come here, however, only to honour the memory of those of my Regiment who lie here, I come to honour all those whose last resting place is here. As there are far too many inscriptions to read I can only pause to read so many in each row. I read; Capt. GEORGE CLARKE. Capt. Clarke was a Lord Strathcona Horse troop commander. I try to visualize what he might have looked like and how he was struck down. Was his death clean and quick, a solid shot from an 88 straight on? Or did he die a slow and agonizing death trapped in the hull of his burning Sherman? At Plot IV, Row D, grave no.20 I read the name, Gnr. NICK KOLINIAK, and below his name, 8 Field Regiment, May 24, 1944, Age 20. So young to die. And one plot over, Plot V row C grave 9 I come to the marker of a young lad from my own company, Dog company of the Perth Regiment, Pte. WILLIAM PATRICK SIMPSON. May 27, 1944. Rusty-topped Simpson fell victim to a sniper's bullet at Ceprano. Age 22. On and on we go, row after row, plot after plot— names, names, names—18 years old—19—20—21, so many, so young. All the way up the ladder of eligible years. And then my eyes fairly jumped when I came to a stone that read — L/Cpl. JOHN JANZEN—RCCS, age 48. How in heck he managed to hang onto his place in the Sigs, especially up at the front at that age I couldn't understand. I thought they sent them home a lot younger than that.
And then it hits me, the impact of the deaths of these men and all the many others lying beside them; a country's future. Most were young, too young, in the full bloom of their youth. I ponder for a moment on what their lives might have been had there been no war. I think of the years of love that they missed and the families they would have raised. Therein lies the biggest tragedy of all. I walk slowly away tears running freely down my cheeks.
IN TRIBUTE Here, at Cassino War Cemetery, where the early morning shadows of the Montecassino Heights steal slowly, almost imperceptibly across the gateway to the Liri Valley lie buried the earthly remains of our Canadian Comrades. They gave their lives in a just war to preserve the freedoms we so dearly cherish, and now lie side by side with their British and Commonwealth comrades. The rich soil of Italy was made richer by the flesh and blood they had so freely given to it.
Their last resting place is one of incomparable beauty, so nobly designed, crafted, and maintained. Under the blue skies of spring and summer the wayward breezes sigh and murmur through the tall pines and acacias. Within shade and out in the warming sun stand rows upon rows of white headstones that mark the places where they sleep. Bright flowering shrubs and plants grow above them, and the green, green grass on which we walk is their comforting blanket. They lie here in an alien land far from the shores of the land they called home. They are heroes. They gave their 'all' as they stood at the threshold of what should have been an abundant and fulfilling life. Their dreams and the dreams of those who loved them have been shattered on the hard anvil of war.
They know no more weariness or pain, nor joy, nor tears of sadness, nor the torments of anger and despair. They are sleeping. They’ve known not the caress of a woman's love in the years since they fell, nor have they exulted in the love of a child in their arms. So much was denied them. In the years long past they awoke not to bright dawns nor heard the thunder or seen the lightning of a summer storm flash across the sky. The leaves of autumn have not scattered to the tread of their feet, nor did they know the joys of a flowering spring. They felt not the warming sun, nor the cold winds of winter on their cheeks They have been sleeping. Though the world has trembled again and again to the loud and frightful sounds of war, they are not afraid, for their peace is forever. They have fought the good fight, laid down their arms, and are now resting, a sleep that knows no tomorrow. We who have walked safely out of the shadows of the valley of death have remembered them. And we will remember them until that time when we too will climb the long stairway to Eternity. Stan Scislowski
I walk over to the great columns of green, polished granite where is recorded the names of those who have no known grave. At each column I look upward to whereon are inscribed the names of my Perth Regiment comrades. As I read the names I come to one, Johnny Clyde, from 17 platoon. Again, that knot in my throat. Johnny was an unassuming quiet sort of guy who’d joined the Regiment in Hunstanton about the same time as I did. He’d seen all of his Regiment's actions, and then on the night of December 20, 1944 his luck ran out when he came to an obliterating end at the Fosso Munio. Today no cross marks his final resting place. But then, I thought, wouldn't God have blessed the ground where this young man and so many others passed from the sight of their comrades and were no more? This I have to believe it. All those whose names are there on the Memorial have no grave where kin or friends may stand in quiet prayer. They have no stone where wreaths of Remembrance may be laid, yet their graves are everywhere. They are there on the mountain terraces and they are down in the gullies and the ravines. Along rich fields of grain their graves might be, or where the grapes are grown. They are there by rush-choked streams and in the mud of riverbanks. The streets of towns and villages are their graves. The whole of Italy is their grave.
THE RUINS OF CASSINO I tell you, these are arms not stumps of stone;
I tell you, they are praying and not stark;
The flesh is sped. Yet stands the whited bone
Beseeching in this chapel of the dark.
I knew this place before. I knew it when
A thousand furies ground it bit by bit
And, fleeing, strangled it with smoke, and then
Let silence bind the broken heart of it.
So hear me, those who lie upon the hill
Beyond the houses and beyond all heed,
Have symbolized their anguish and their will
With these arms that eloquently plead.
Rebuild or not, no matter, but take care
To hold the Peace they could not stay to share.
AnonymousFollowing is the Order of Ceremony after which all the Cemetery Services are patterned, except for changes in local speakers and Officials. Throughout it is a moving and appropriate Act of Remembrance. The solemn music of the Canadian Forces Band, the bugler's faultless Last Post, and the two pipers standing off to the side of the Cross of Sacrifice closing the ceremonies with the mournful strains of the Lament, made for a truly fitting tribute to all those who lie buried here and whose name are memorialized on the marble-faced columns.
THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE...
ORDER OF CEREMONY
General Salute
Inspection of the Guards of Honour
O Canada!
Welcome by Dr. Antonio Ferraro, Mayor of Cassino
Introduction of the Minister of Veterans Affairs by His Excellency, Klaus Goldschlag, Canadian Ambassador to Italy.
Address by the Honourable Daniel J. MacDonald, P.C. M.P. Minister of Veterans Affairs for Canada.
Address by the Representatives of the Government of Italy.
ACT OF REMEMBRANCE
PRAYERS
VOLLEYS
THE LAST POST
THE SILENCE
THE REVEILLE
THE LAYING OF THE WREATHS
THE LAMENT
(During the Lament, Youth Representatives of Canada and of Cassino will deposit flowers at the Cassino Memorial. Others wishing to lay wreaths at the Cross of Sacrifice may do so.)
THE BLESSING
INNO DI MAMELIAfter our walk amongst the graves we take a short ride along the old via Casilina, actually Highway no.6, to a roadside hotel near the mountain village of Piedmonte. The sole purpose of our visit to this modern hotel situated in mean surroundings of rocky slopes and down-at-the-heels farmhouses was to partake of a buffet luncheon of macaroni and cheese and the most delicious oven-roasted chicken. As usual, the wine flowed freely and there was even German bottled beer on hand. Who would have thought at the time when we were in the district when the Germans were doing their damnedest to knock us off and we were trying like bloody hell to do the same to them that we would one day be drinking their beer right here where all the shooting had been going on ?
This particular Piedmonte, of which there were so many all over Italy happened to be the northern anchor of the Hitler Line. After the Poles had planted their country’s flag on top the Abbey ruins they swung their line of advance along the slopes overlooking the via Casilina meandering along the base of the mountain mass. Because of the importance of this strongpoint in the Hitler Line defence system the Germans fought 'tooth and nail' to hold on to it. They took a devastating pounding from our artillery, mortars, and even our fighter-bombers who had a 'go' at it. By the time our people had finished with it there wasn't a heck of a lot left standing. But the Jerry survivors stuck it out right to the end, only a few managing to crawl out from the smoking ruins to make good their escape down the highway to wherever their commanders chose to make another stand.
With my hunger sated and my thirst quenched I went out to do a little exploring in this part of the battlefield where I had once watched with interest as our fighter-bombers strafed and bombed the village. On that warm spring day of May 23rd, 1944 I watched as a steady pall of black smoke from the bombs and white smoke-screen diffused into a dirty gray that clung to the devastated vill-age and the slopes around it. I was so wrapped up in watching what was going on I didn’t hear the rush of an incoming flurry of 88s. Lucky for me they hit about a hundred yards off to my left. I decided then and there it would be much safer to watch the planes from my slit-trench instead.
Today, 31 years later, no signs are evident to indicate the heavy fighting that had taken place here. Across the gravelled road to the side of the hotel (the name escapes me) a clover meadow was dotted with with scarlet-petalled poppies, the flower of Remembrance. I strolled across and picked a little bouquet to pass out to the ladies enjoying the sunshine on the patio at the back of the hotel. And how could I or anyone else in our group who'd traversed that long perilous corridor of the Liri Valley ever forget the waving fields of poppies all around us as we moved up to do battle with the enemy? I remember standing in the ankle-deep grass, poppies everywhere I looked, and as I surveyed the scene, the words of John McRae's immortal "In Flanders Fields" came to mind. I can't help but believe but that I wasn't the only one who gave thought to the grim possibility that death might be our destiny here where the poppies blow in Liri fields.
A dusty and rutted cart-track ran close by the hotel, climbing up-wards towards a couple of decrepit farmhouses, bringing back memories of the beat-up old houses we used to take shelter in at the front. Cactus grew along the drainage ditches, which surprised me since I can't recall having seen cactus the last time I had passed this way. Off to my right a small flock of sheep grazed on ground so barren I wondered how they could manage to live off such meagre pickings. An old shepherd draped in a black shoulder cape stood by with his long staff or crook. I was a bit surprised since I had assumed these old ways had died out a long time ago. I remember how common it was to see the villagers and farmers in southern Italy draped in black, the cape covering most of their face, and with black wide-brimmed cowboy-type hat pulled-down almost over their eyes they looked not unlike that pulp-magazine character of the thirties, ‘the Shadow’.
Curiosity got the better of me and so I went on up the crude roadway with intention of picturing the close-in fighting that had taken place here all along these slopes. A strange feeling came over me, the kind of feeling I had always experienced when entering an area recently occupied by the enemy, or in a place where I knew the enemy couldn’t be too far away. I may sound like I'm overdoing this, but I actually did get that same dread feeling of impending danger as though an MG 42 was about to open up on me. Perhaps I got carried away by my unbridled imagination, but with my memory cells working the way they did, for a moment I actually felt the skin at the nape of my neck tingle. Some places never seem to lose the aura of imminent catastrophe. Not for 31 years have I come anywhere close to feeling I experienced as I walked up this mountain wagon-track, for that’s about all it amounted to.
It really wouldn't take much in the way of imagination to reconstruct what could very well have happened along this way as the Poles went after Piedmonte. I look to my left front and see a clump of gray boulders and at once saw it as a perfect place to set up a machine-gun. Nothing or nobody could have moved along this stretch of road without coming under fire of the gun behind those rocks. Off to my right about ten degrees I see a swatch of heavy scrub close up against an odd-shaped knoll. Another gun positioned there. For sure no one would make it up this road and live to tell about it. Back to the left again my eyes take in a lean-to stable. Even the stable, though more vulnerable to attack than the clump of boulders looks as threatening today as it must have looked to the Polish infantry scrambling from rock to rock and crevice to crevice to wipe the post out. I am finding out in my first visit to a battle site that some places have not lost that quality, after all these years, of making people aware that death had pressed its cold hands here, that death many times over had passed along this way. I found myself half expecting to hear the sudden ripping sound of a Spandau or the gut-wrenching swoosh of the deadly 88. The war indeed had left its eternal mark on the land around Cassino.
THE POLISH CEMETERY AND THE MONASTERY The afternoon was still young when we went up the long, serpentine road ascending Montecassino's steep slope. The view of the valley far below was most certainly one I’ll never forget. Never had I given thought to the possibility I'd be up here one day looking down as the Germans had been looking down on our troops for so long. Farther along the twisting road we pass a large stone structure, abandoned and still in a state of ruin. I recognized it at once as that castle on the knoll, known at the time when battles swayed back and forth all around it as 'Castle Hill'. The fighting that went on here was particularly fierce, a "no holds barred" brutal struggle between German grenadiers and our Indian and British troops. What made ownership of Castle Hill so necessary was the fact that it made an ideal jump-off point for an assault on the abbey from the Rapido valley side of the mountain.
As we approach the Abbey we come to a roadway branching sharply off to the right. This roadway had been laid down for the express use of visitors to the Polish War Cemetery. We turn here and soon come to a parking lot just off a flight of wide stairs. From here a long walkway, a good hundred yards or more, takes us straight to the cemetery. The site has been well-chosen, being situated in a saddle of the mountain between the Abbey and the high point of rock known as Point 569. Beyond this knoll rises another formation of rock designated by army map-makers as Point 593, or 'Snakeshead Ridge. At its crest the Poles have erected a tall, slender spire of stone inscribed with the following poignant lines:
WE POLISH SOLDIERS
FOR OUR FREEDOM AND YOURS
HAVE GIVEN OUR SOULS TO GOD
OUR BODIES TO THE SOIL OF ITALY
AND OUR HEARTS TO POLAND.
The arena of battle for the two Polish Divisions, the 3rd Carpathian and the 5th Kresowa proved to be hell at its ugliest worst. It was hell every bit as horrendous and degrading as the mud-wallow of Passchendaele and the sinkhole of the Somme. The sights, and the sounds of man's inhumanity to man, along with the nauseating stink of rotting flesh was everywhere. And then of course there were also the rats scurrying about the mountainsides, great big fat lethargic rats bloated from too many feasts upon the flesh of the dead. They had feasted so much off the bodies of men and mules that lay scattered all over the mountain slopes that they soon turned indifferent to the abundance of this variety of food. Instead they had taken to favouring the pulpy meat of fruit and vegetables.
In the vale where the Cemetery is located we find verdant fields of neatly-kept garden plots and vineyards with their tracery of vines and wire supported by white concrete posts. Beyond the fields the unworked slopes are thick with wild, matted growth of bushes and weeds, a soft backdrop to the harsh outline of gray rock. No more beautiful location could those responsible for selecting the site for a cemetery have chosen than this bowl overlooked by the Monastery and Points 569 and 593.
Four long months of continuous battle had churned the mountain greenery and profaned the rugged beauty of the slopes with livid scars. But today as we walk the long, paved avenue or walkway to the Cemetery, we who have been close by here or who have read all about what had transpired here, and had seen hundreds of photographs taken of the witch's cauldron, cannot help but marvel at how Nature has restored the heights and the valleys between to what they must have looked like before the fighting closed in. A fitting garden of repose for Poland's brave sons.
As we approach the terraces upon which the graves are laid out we walk past a circular design sculptured into the stone floor of the semi-circular enclosed area just below the rows of graves. In the centre of this floral design an Eternal Flame is supposed to burn. But there is no flame, simply because there's no money to pay for the gas. Neither is there enough money provided for maintenance of the Cemetery. As a sad result, the whole Cemetery is in an advanced state of neglect.
You see this neglect as you walk along the terraces, the degree of deterioration disheartening. The stone slabs covering each grave are blackened with grime and worn from the abrading effects of wind-blown grit and the rain, sun and frost of ten thousand days. Many of the stones are cracked and some have corners fallen away. On some, the inscriptions have been worn down to such extent one finds it difficult to read the name thereon. The Travertine stone crosses at the head of each grave are no longer white but streaked in gray. The question comes to mind; Why has this Cemetery been forsaken and left to the ravages of weather and time ? Why is it that this Cemetery is not accorded the same care as that of the Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries? Why? Because the Communist Government of Poland doesn't care to recognize the supreme sacrifice made by her gallant sons who are buried here. Their attitude seems to be that the battle fought here was not an important part of the same war against Hitler's tyranny as that which the Soviet armies waged. Just another outrageous example of Communism's unfathomable cold-blooded reasoning and heartlessness.
THE ABBEY In the little over two decades since the Abbey was rebuilt, it has seen a constant flow of tourists, a fair percentage being ex-servicemen of all the nation-alities who had fought and suffered within its environs. Now, those who had seen battle here mingle in the anonymity of civilians bringing with them a strong, almost compulsive need to see close up the one feature that had so impressed itself on their lives. If one could read the thoughts of all these Cassino veterans, whether from our side or the Germans they might find in them a single recurring question; How did I ever come through it all alive? Every man who comes to this battleground, or in fact, any battleground, I’m sure, has to ask of himself or his God this question, but no answer will ever come.
The 15 centuries old Monastery, built under the direction of Pope Benedict had been destroyed on three occasions by the hand of man in its history, in 581 A.D. by the Lombards, in 883 by the Saracens, and in 1030 by the Normans. And then some three hundred years later an earthquake completely devastated it. When rebuilt, it lasted through the centuries until the bombers came over on that February morning of 1944 and levelled it. It's a magnificent structure, built more along the lines of a castle fortress than a religious edifice. It commands a splendid view in every direction, a panorama that takes in all of the Rapido River valley, clear across the wider Liri valley all the way to the small villages at the base of the Aurunci mountains to the southwest. To the east, south and north rise the major and lesser peaks of the Matese mountains. The highest peak in the chain is the snow-capped crest of Mount Cairo five miles to the northeast.
Cameras are not allowed within the hallowed walls of the Abbey, and there are other strict rules that the visitors must obey. For instance, it's forbidden to enter the holy place unsuitably dressed, which is not easy to define, but it does emphasize that women are not to wear slacks. It's obvious that the women's Lib movement hasn’t, and most likely never will make significant inroads in their demands for women’s rights here in the all-male inhabited and administered Abbey. Smoking is also a "no no", along with loud talking and boisterous behaviour.
In the innocence of the excited tourist who for some reason did not make himself aware of the rules, I hurried past a sign in three languages saying NO CAMERAS ALLOWED, or words to that effect, with my pocket instamatic all primed and ready to shoot. I went at it with great gusto in the Cloister di ingresso snapping pictures with reckless abandon and wondering why no one else was doing the same. My first exposure takes in the great bronze statue of the dying St.Benedict supported by two of his faithful disciples. After taking several more snaps here I followed the crowd and find myself in the famous Bramante cloister. In the middle of the cloister is a carved ornamental stone well between fluted Corinthian columns supporting an entablature. I took a few more pictures here then hurried up the thirty foot wide stairway at the foot of which are statues of St.Benedict on one side and his sister St.Scolastica on the other.
Overlooking the Bramante cloister from three sides is the gallery called the Loggia of Paradise. Being totally ignorant of the strict rule against taking pictures I walked about clicking here and clicking there, and then I took several snaps of Cassino town far down below, and the valley to my front. I was in photographers' seventh heaven. I looked out across the Liri trying to spot some-thing I could identify with, but the haze made this impossible. I thought I might be able to get a view of either Pignataro or Pontecorvo but had no luck. Just about this time one of our group nudged me and warned me about the camera, saying that the monks might take it away from me. Feeling somewhat sheepish I quickly thrust it into my blazer pocket hoping none of the monks had seen me in action.
On our way back down the mountain we finally could realize the immens-ity of the job our troops were faced with in trying to scale the heights in the face of murderous machine-gun fire and everything else the Germans could throw and did throw at them. You didn't have to be an ex-Brigadier or a General to see the advantage the defenders enjoyed as they sat inside their bunkers looking down the throats of the poor S.O.Bs who had to literally claw their way up the slope. Oh, yes, there's no question about it; the Germans up here had been lords and masters of all they surveyed. Like falcons they were, ready to pounce on the first sign of movement on the slopes below.
I have a good idea what might have crossed more than a few minds as we wound our way slowly down from the heights, and that was the realization of the supreme defensibility of this mountain barrier. "Hell!" I could almost hear them say, "anybody could have held this goddamn place!" You knew at once as you looked around, that the Germans had no need for the the Abbey as the ideal artillery observation post. The upper terraces provided every bit as excellent vantage points for O-Pips as any window in the Abbey. From these vantage points an O.P. could observe every movement in the valley as well as anyone could from a window or a gallery in the Abbey. And wherever they chose to site their weapons showed their mastery of tactics and the use of terrain in defence. They covered every avenue of approach with at least three M.G’s. If one of our infantry platoons tried to outflank one position they immediately found themselves under fire of two others. The more we saw as we went down the mountain the more we realized that the whole affair that had gone on here was nothing short of suicidal.
At this point in my narrative I'm including an excerpt taken from an account I had written on my Regiment's three-week tour of duty in the mountains close by Cassino. In it I’ve tried to describe the conditions we faced, no less miserable than a different set of conditions we had to put up with on the Arielli winter front.
With the coming of the new day early-risers, bleary-eyed and stiff, stood in the shadowy coolness of dawn to stretch their cramped and aching limbs. They looked to their front and saw the massive and ominously dark hulk of Mount Cifalco. Wise to some degree by now to the ways of war they recognized the threat this pinnacle of rock would impose. But in the common behaviour of newcomers they momentarily let their guards down as they climbed out from their rock-enclosed positions to walk about, and to relieve themselves. At that precise moment high up on Cifalco's shadowed slope there were other early-risers as well. A German artillery observation crew were peering through their high magnification Zeiss binoculars. Seeing the Canadians moving about on the hilltop in careless manner, oblivious of the dangers of such behaviour, phoned a message to their artillery and mortars in the valley behind the mountain giving co-ordinates to the gun batteries. Less than half a minute later the first shells whistled overhead, plunging with reverberating crashes into the Canadian positions. For that brief half minute before the shells struck, the men walking about on the hilltop, spoke to one another in hushed tones, glad to get out from the cramped confines of their sangars. Their conversation couldn't have been for no more than a minute or two when in the next instant the hilltop, the rocks, and the sky above blasted apart in a flaming surge of ear-shattering thunder. Shrapnel and stone fragments buzzed like bees in fields of clover, ricocheting off the sangars in angry tones. And then all around them, mortars whuffled down, their deeper crunch far more terrifying than shellfire. In the rising crescendo of ten summer storms rolled into one, high-explosive churned the rock into grey powder and hissing fragments that killed just as quickly as any shrapnel. The hill literally boiled with the furious bursting of white-hot steel slamming into it. A thousand maniacal furies had been let loose.The overwhelming noise rolling back from the sounding-board of mountains mingled with new explosions in a horrific and maddening hell of detonations. To the men, eyes wide with fear, and hands cupped over their ears it had to be the very end of time.
Every man on the hill, cowering within the dubious safety of his rock shelter, alone with his dread, praying, trembling, perhaps even crying, resigned himself to what he could only see as the approach of instant and mutilating death, expecting in the next instant a mortar to smash into his rock shelter. The men cowering in the sangars saw no way out of it. In vain they tried to shut out the brain-numbing noise. In vain they tried to burrow with their fingers into the hard ground beneath their trembling bodies.Their efforts came to nought, for neither fingers, or even an entrenching tool could break into solid rock. To anyone looking on from outside this pocket of hell the only conclusion they could come to was that no one would be coming down off the hill except in their death-blanket. But, for all of the drumbeat of explosions and the air filled with whizzing steel and whirring rock, miraculously only one man had been killed and only six others suffered the pain of wounds. One mortar, plunging straight down from its high-trajectory flight burst within the tight confines of one man's sangar, and when the smoke had cleared, it left behind a ghastly welter of blood, and flesh plastered on the sangar walls, and the red, raw remains of what had only moments before been a human being. From other sangars came the pathetic cries of the wounded. Soon after, when the shelling had stopped, and the hill and ravines and gullies around once more became silent, the wounded were tended to and then evacuated down the long and tortuous trail to the jeep-head. From there they were taken along the Inferno Track to a Field Dressing Station set up close by a supply point called 'Hove dump' three miles away
As the days passed, the men lived more and more the life of insects and lizards. They scurried amongst the rocks and boulders, darted in and out of clefts and slithered into narrow crevices. They clawed and gouged their shelters out of the rocky slopes wherever possible, and they crawled like frightened beetles into tiny spaces between boulders. The piles of stones in which they sheltered became their living-room, their bedroom, their kitchen, and when Nature called, it was their toilet. Throughout the long hours of daylight they were never able to leave their positions for even an instant. To do so would be tantamount to suicide. Instead, they spent the interminable and punishing hours in the glare of the hot sun. Even though it was only early Spring the days were uncommonly warm up amongst the rocks. By mid-afternoon, with the sun beating down on their recumbent forms and with no breeze reaching them behind the rocks, their tight compartments became overheated hearths. They could only lie there in their torpor and wait until the shadows of evening brought relief.
From the moment the sun broke over the dark-faced mountains to the east the companies holding the forward positions resigned themselves to another day of complete inactivity. Those who had had the foresight of bringing along reading material with them had plenty of opportunity to fill their other-wise empty days reading over and over whatever they had. To read even the labels on cans became a pastime. The greater problem, however, much more so than the lack of reading material and what to do with one’s time was that of ‘body eliminations’. When the need to relieve one’s self became ‘pressing’, the men used whatever was at hand to hold the reeking mess—either a bully-beef or an M&V can, or even an edition of the Maple Leaf forces newspaper—and then tossed outside their sangar. The proliferation of cans on the hill used for this purpose inevitably brought on an overpowering outhouse stink that took quite some getting used to. But even worse than the stink were the clouds of flies drawn to the hill. It was something just short of miraculous that dysentery failed to run rampant through the Regiment.
At night the hills and wooded ravines came alive with activity as supply trains of men and mules made their stumbling and clattering treks up to the forward positions. The main burden they carried was water and rations. The water was sent up in Jerrycans strapped to the backs of mules, and both commodities were carried as far as Company H.Q. located in a cave about a hundred yards behind the forward platoons. From here the water and rations was transferred to the trusty backs and sturdy arms of men from the reserve platoon who manhandled the load the remaining distance. This was no easy job, and the men selected for these carrying-parties were in no way envied by their buddies.What was nerve-wracking for everyone was the the racket generated as the supply detail made its exhausting way through the woody tangle in the ravine. The men in the forward positions could hear them coming from a long way off, bumbling and stumbling their way through the tangle of roots and underbrush of the ravine. It was not only Canadian supply columns, however, that were up and about. The enemy too was having his problems with mule-trains. The treacherous tracks and footpaths on the much steeper Cifalco slope were cause for nervous concern when it came to resupply. Their movements could likewise be heard by our people. So, it was only natural that both sides more or less decided to leave well-enough alone in order to escape retribution.
Night was also a time for patrol activity, and rarely did a night go by without the deliberate tac-tac-tac-tac of a Bren or the rapid answering fire burp of a Schmeisser. And as usually happened when patrols bumped into each other in the dark there’d be a flurry of shots from both sides, the thud of grenades and then silence as the patrols pulled back to their own lines. Night was not a time for relaxation. It was an all-night stand-to, ready for come-what-may.
THE SILVIA PARK HOTEL This hotel where we spent the night at Cassino was a modern structure, perhaps even a little too modern for our tastes, but it was comfortable and clean, which was more important. It was of a radical design, unlike any motel I’d yet seen. If you can picture a stack of three huge pentagon-shaped boxes each one at right angles to each other then you will have some idea of what this building looked like. This unusual construction’s appearance was accentuated by its robin’s-egg blue paint job. Its six floors however, were nicely appointed, and the view from its northern balconies couldn’t be beat. Especially at sunset was the view most impressive as the last rays of the sun dipping behind the Aurunci massif to the west played on the Abbey walls crowning the Montecassino height.
The grounds ‘round about were well taken care of, with a generous plant-ing of small trees and flowering shrubbery. Rectangular flower-beds resplendent in multi-coloured flowers greeted the visitors at the entrance to the grounds, while scented bushes and shaped hedges added balance to the garden scheme. And for our aquatic pleasure there was swimming-pool in the garden with a spacious patio surrounding it. Had it been warmer we might have used it, but then I didn’t think anyone had the presence of mind beforehand to bring along their bikinis(?) or prim and proper bathing suits.
The Silvia is situated on the exit road from Cassino to the Autostrada del Sol, the super highway that runs almost the full length of Italy on its western side. The hotel’s location is ideal in that it not only provides us Italian Campaigners with the very best view of Montecassino and the Abbey, it also happens to be close by the Commonwealth War Cemetery. If one is inclined towards walking for exercise, then a walk to the cemetery is a good start towards getting life's juices to flowing.
In the evening after enjoying a most delicious supper we sat outside on the raised cedar deck sipping wine, each in our own way contemplating all that had happened on and around the property three decades and a year ago. The evening was in some respects much like the evenings we had known when the Canadian Corps was priming itself for the big push it would launch once the Gustav Line was broken through and a bridgehead established over the Rapido. Rome was the big prize far up the valley corridor. It was comfortably cool on those last few evenings before the big guns opened up, as it is now as we sit out on the open deck relaxing in quiet conversation. We heard nightingales singing then as we hear them singing in the darkness now. Far off across the entrance to the Liri Valley looms the black mass of Mount Trocchio the southern gatepost to the valley. Ground mist gathered in the fields as we spoke, just as it had gathered in those last hours before the heavy hammers of war opened up in a mighty cannonade, surpassing in volume of fire even that of El Alamein. So many years have passed since that May 11th night when the mighty forces of destruction were unleashed. It is most heartening, as we have seen, that time and Nature are great healers The face of the land changes only when man chooses to change it, whether for good or for evil.
Inside the hotel, those not wearied by the day’s events sat around tables in the lounge telling each other stories of the small part they had played in the battle, while others in more boisterous mood sang songs they used to sing during the war. Who cared that some voices were off-key? Their hearts were into singing and that’s all that was needed to liven things up. They sang with uninhibited feeling because they were having fun, and in having fun they were recapturing the memories of another day, another time. The day had been one of subdued emotions, of sad memories for those of us who had seen friends die in battle and have just hours before stood for the first time by their graveside. There were many ‘moving moments’ for us this day, and now it was only natural that we temper the sober reflections of the past few hours with some fun, some songs, and a whole lot of laughter. In a way it could be called a ‘wake’, a ‘wake’ that circumstances back then hadn't allowed for, as we were too busy trying to stay alive ourselves. And in realizing this our voices grew louder as we sang, the very boisterousness of it scaring away the more melodic nightingales to other more peaceful corners of the valley.
He