In the Hotel bar at breakfast an elderly, vocal little man in jeans was sounding forth exuberantly to a group of Germans and gesturing to Monastery Hill, which we could see through the windows. It was probably his volubility that prompted another German — we’d seen him in the restaurant and out walking, courtly but crippled, with his wife and dog — to introduce the group to us, the English-speaking outsiders. The crippled man was a pre-war cartoon caricature of the German gentleman, limping along in a round peaked cap over longish, soft blond hair with his curled, nerveless fingers held at his waist, the old dog’s lead dragging behind. I thought he must have had a stroke.
The man in jeans had been on Montecassino to the end. Escaped without ammunition on the last night as the Poles closed in. Full of smiles he shook Dad’s hand.
When we went to Germany in 1969, Dad said to me, I saw a German in uniform. I felt like taking to the bastard. But I liked the place. The beer. The music. The countryside.
Here the old soldiers were friends. They had everything in common. The Germans shook a little with age. Their false teeth were loose, like ours. They shook our hands and grasped our shoulders, smiling. Later that week the TV cameras recorded the sentimental moments. Sentimental moments.
§
The New Zealanders, especially the Maoris, had suffered badly in the February-March assaults, demonstrating that heroics is a necessary but insufficient quality. The grim truth is that to dislodge determined defenders from favoured positions an attack must be both brave and overwhelming.
In any event the failure of the frontal assaults had meant an alternative must be found. Locally, this implied an attack from the higher ground to the north, which sweeps down from Monte Cairo and overlooks Monastery Hill (Monte Cassino). The strategic importance of this high ground to the defence of Cassino had already been recognised by both sides and the area was fought for grimly. This time the Allied task was given to the Poles, whose bodies now fill a cemetery up behind the Monastery on the ground they struggled for.
However the Poles were part of a much greater whole. The generals now saw that only weight of numbers would win the day and a massive seventeen division assault was planned, a far greater investment than in the earlier battles: not just the Poles but American, colonial French, British, Canadian and Indian forces. This mass would attack across the entire front between Cassino and the sea.
The battered New Zealanders played no major part in this last of the four battles. Instead, as Dad put it, they were told to get fit and stand by, ready to chase the bastards when the line broke. West of Cassino that eventually happened, with the German line buckling under the weight. After a week’s bitter struggle, however, the Poles had not dislodged the Germans from the ridges above Cassino. It wasn’t the obliterating bombardments of the Abbey and the town that won the day, nor the fate of Poles and Germans slaughtering each on the now summery mountain. Instead it was that huge mass of men and machines outflanking them on the plain. The Germans left the mountain at night, our smiling acquaintance among them. Only thirty-odd men were left, mainly wounded, and the many dead. A handful of Poles relieved the ruins of the monastery.
§
After breakfasting we sat down with the crippled German and his wife. I asked him if he had been at the battle. No, but his wife had lost a brother here, killed in an effort to relieve a surrounded German unit during the retreat — at Terracina on the coast. They had been here several times. As we talked, his wife’s asthma started to affect her. She was cartoon German, too, a white haired, buxom woman, fresh-complexioned, dressed in a white blouse hand-embroidered with red flowers, and matching slacks. A teacher. He was a lawyer. “Some of my best friends are lawyers”, I said. He laughed, the joke the same in German. “Some of my best friends are lawyers”, I said again. He had lived for years in England and his first wife was English. His son spoke only English and now lived in New York.
He has been crippled since child-hood, his wife said. It saved his life. In the dying days of the war his sixteen year old class mates were killed — every one, she said — manning an anti-aircraft battery. They died firing them directly at advancing Russian infantry.
Oh, the war, she said, wheezing. It was so terrible, so terrible. We did not know about the camps, or the Jews. I remember a Jew coming back to my town. “Mr So-and-so is back,” they said — he had been gone for two years. “Where’s he been?” He never ever said.
My father was captured, she said. At the end of the war he was escorting a group of prisoners. He became the prisoner and they the guards, but because he had been good to them they were good to him. But then they came to France, and the French were bad. They stoned him, and starved him, and beat him with sticks. We will treat you like you did the Jews in the camps, they said. I came home one day and there was this tiny little white-haired old man. I didn’t recognise him. We were hungry too you understand. We gave him potato. His stomach was like this — tiny. He could not eat. When he saw the potato, tears rolled down his face. My own father. He ate only a little. That was very wise. Some ate too much and died. My father could not sit. He was so thin the bones of his backside were through his skin.
Now our children say why didn’t you say no? Why didn’t you stop it? We would have been shot. Just like in the army. Our son — his son, not mine — does not understand. He thinks we won the war and they lost. Because they are poor and we are rich, he says.
We went to visit the German cemetery on a hillside behind the monastery. It was peaceful and grim. Many graves were unidentified. Almost all the dead were under 21. The memorials (for soldiers with no known graves) were carved in a compressed form hard to read, as if dead their individuality was of little importance, as in life. In a peculiar way the Commonwealth war grave credo made the same point — that all should be buried regardless of race, rank or status — for the best of reasons, clearly, but then we all have race and status. I felt their deaths and uniform graves confirmed these men as soldiers, not individuals, except to the families who came and were photographed with them. It is what made them so powerful, and dangerous.
§
Before mid-day we checked back into the Forum and left for the Roscilli’s. There was a little awkwardness while we waited for Franco to get back from work. In the kitchen fresh fetticune waited on the kitchen table. Finally Franco arrived and we had an aperitif of white vermouth (“cin cin”, said Agostino) and lunch was on the way. Franco was a help in that he was prepared to himself use my phrase book to advance the conversation. The fettucine arrived, with a light pommodoro sauce. Dad would not be taken in and ate very little. I had to have seconds. Then came the bread, the wine, the roast agnello and patate, the melanzane (obviously Angelina’s favourite, or the family’s), the crumbed vitello. I ate and ate and we all watched basketball on TV with the inevitable American imports. Plus the lotto results.
They took us to see the Russo house (we had identified the right place) and when we returned there was torte, coffee and a digestif of Amaro to knock back in a single hit. We toured Franco’s garden and then Agostino’s. We met a nephew who lived in Agostino’s compound, and his wife. We met the two children, very chic, who did not want to practise their English or have their photos taken, though they did unbend a little. We swapped addresses and looked through the (rather good) pictorial book of New Zealand we had given them. We urged them to come to New Zealand, but I found it easy to imagine that Heather and I had seen as much of Rome as they had, let alone further afield.
[And we haven’t been back to see them either. ~ Ian]
Agostino looked morose, bent over, imagining himself in a few years as old as my father, thinking of his dead wife and perhaps our earlier visits. “Come back?” he asked, in English. “Two years? Three?” Yes, I said. He had eyes like, like a terrier’s. We shook hands and bussed Angelina. As we left I could imagine she and Franco wandering back to the house saying to each other, Well, that went off OK — as Dad was just then saying to me, “Agostino looked a bit down in the mouth when we left.”
As we turned the corner Agostino was buying something from the travelling grocer, who’d pulled up as we were leaving.