In Europe

wounded Italian soldier to her door. ‘What am I supposed to do with him?’ she had shouted. The driver shouted back: ‘Think of something, he has a mother too!’
    She nursed him back to health; today he has a restaurant on Lake Como, with fifty tables. It all worked out in the end, for him.

Chapter FORTY
Cassino
    WHEN THE AMERICAN WAR CORRESPONDENT MARTHA GELLHORN FIRST set foot in Italy in February 1944, she could hardly believe her eyes: no hurricane could have done more damage than the German-American front lines as they slowly rolled back. ‘It is not possible that once these places stood up foursquare and people lived in them,’ she noted.
    She caught a lift in a French jeep, heading north from Naples, ‘in a steady stream of khaki-colored traffic’: trucks, jeeps, ambulances, salvage trucks, tank destroyers and munitions carriers. The windshield was folded down and the roof folded back, the icy cold hail struck her in the face. She saw endless tent encampments along both sides of the road. There was always a soldier standing alone somewhere on the flats, shaving ‘with care and comic solemnity’.
    When the road began to climb she saw Italian women washing clothes in an old water tank. A little further along, six-wheeled army trucks were pushing each other up a hill. Her French driver asked: ‘Have you ever had an Alexander cocktail, Mademoiselle?’ He himself was having a hard time of it, he was skinny and dirty, and he seemed ill. They drove past a burned-out American tank. An Alexander is a very sweet cocktail made with crème de cacao. A little further along, two army trucks had crashed into a ravine. They passed some marshes ‘where nothing grows except guns’. Finally they arrived in a mountainous wilderness, with the loveliest views one could imagine, ‘though everyone dislikes it, for the Germans are there’. ‘I do not mean to brag,’ Gellhorn's driver said, ‘but I made the best Alexanders in Casablanca.’
    A few kilometres further lay the monastery at Monte Cassino.
    I had sailed from Greece to Italy aboard ships from the Strintzi and Minoan lines, a peaceful crossing that lasted a day and a night. At Patras I had spent a warm, sleepy afternoon waiting amid dozens of complaining Hungarian truckers who had been forced into this detour by the war in Yugoslavia. Then came a restless night in a shuddering hut, and then, on the sunny quay at Brindisi, my own green van. Thoughtful friends had driven the thing south, so I could head back north, along with the Allied troops.
    The long, grim Italian war from July 1943 to April 1945, the five great landing operations at Sicily, Messina, Taranto, Salerno and Anzio, the enormous destruction of the country from south to north: this whole, bitter history has always remained in the shadow of the gigantic heroism of the landings at Normandy and what came afterwards. Still, more than 300,000 Allied soldiers died here, and more than 400,000 Germans. It was a slow, tough and nasty war that all parties wanted to forget as quickly as possible. It was not until April 1945 that the guns were silenced in Italy, but not because the Allies had won the fight; it was because all the other German fronts had collapsed.
    The war in Italy began on 10 July, 1943 with a landing on Sicily. It was the first time – with the exception of an ill-fated ‘trial invasion’ at Dieppe on 19 August, 1942 – that Allied troops returned to the European continent. In early September new landings followed, at the Strait of Messina, at Taranto in the south-east and at Salerno, not far from Naples. To speed up the sluggish advance a fifth landing took place in late January 1944, at Anzio, just south of Rome. That was not a success: the Allied troops captured a bridgehead of a few square kilometres in size, but could go no further. ‘You feel,’ the war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote from Anzio, ‘pretty much like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery.’
    Opening this Southern European front had pretty much been Winston Churchill's idea. The Americans were in favour of a much shorter route to Berlin, by way of the Channel, Paris and Cologne, but in 1943 their armies were not yet ready for an operation of that magnitude. At first glance, moving from North Africa through Italy to Trieste, Vienna, Prague and then Berlin did indeed seem like a vast detour. But in any case, the Italian Front was needed to keep as many German troops as possible occupied in Southern Europe and