In Europe

sufficiently to issue a call for revenge: ‘Only blood can cancel so humiliating a page from the history of the
patria
!’ Hitler gave him permission to set up his own government in the northern town of Salò, but he was never more than a marionette. Alongside the war proper, a civil conflict arose among the Italians themselves that would last until the end of the war: a struggle between Fascists and anti-Fascists, between the diehard supporters of the formerregime and the partisans in the mountains and working-class neigh-bourhoods.
    In the mud with the American infantrymen, Ernie Pyle noticed little of all these political squabbles. ‘It's nothing but the weather and the lay of the land and the weather,’ he noted on 14 December, 1943. ‘If there were no German fighting troops in Italy, if there were merely German engineers to blow the bridges in the passes, if never a shot were fired at all, our northward march would still be slow.’
    The Germans had thrown up their first major line of defence, the Gustav Line, straight across the mountains between Naples and Rome, with Monte Cassino as the vital corridor. Later they withdrew to the Gothic Line, which ran between Siena and Arezzo. After that, almost until the end of the war, they held a third line, the Alpine Line, close to the Austrian border.
    Cassino today is a city without a heart or a memory, one of those piles of apartment complexes one comes across all over Europe, one of those places where a catastrophe must have taken place somewhere between 1939–45. In those days, this attractive, friendly Italian city had the misfortune of forming the gateway to Rome and the north of the country. On 19 May, 1944, when the Allies had finally broken through after months of fighting, Homer Bigart of the
New York Herald Tribune
described Cassino as a ghost town full of corpses and smoking ruins, ‘more grim than a Calvinist conception of Hell’.
    Martha Gellhorn counted no fewer than twenty different nationalities fighting together against the Germans all over Italy, and that is reflected in the gravestones of the war cemeteries around modern-day Cassino. Beneath the neatly clipped lawns lie thousands of young men from Poland, Britain, America, India, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Italy, Germany and France. Flags wave, visitors and family come and go, these dead boys want for nothing, save their lives.
    Cassino is a bitter place, a monument to waffling politicians and timid generals, the kinds of leaders who never pay for their own mistakes. That payment was reserved for the young men who lie here. Rome was finally liberated on 5 June, 1944. It could have happened nine months earlier. But the effect of that delay, and of Monte Cassino and those confusedSeptember days of 1943, extends much further: because of it, no iron padlock was put in place between the Soviet Union and Europe. On the contrary, an iron curtain was drawn across Europe itself. Churchill's vision did not come to fruition, but his nightmare did come true.
    Until autumn 1942 the war seemed to be going well for the Axis powers. Japan had conquered Malaysia, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, the German troops moved through Russia almost with the nonchalance of tourists. But from early 1943 the cards seemed to have been reshuffled: Japan's offensive in the Pacific ground to a halt at Guadalcanal, the German 6th Army was destroyed at Stalingrad, Rommel suffered one defeat after the other in North Africa. In July 1943, the greatest tank battle in history was waged at Kursk. For a whole week, 6,000 tanks, more than 20,000 pieces of artillery and 1.5 million soldiers fought on a muddy plain more than fifty kilometres wide. Then the Germans pulled back. Their troops were needed in the West, to head off the Allied invasion of Italy.
    After that summer the Axis powers suffered only defeats. From mid-1943 the Berlin papers were filled with the death notices of fallen soldiers and officers. Starting in 1944 there were so many names to report that they were all swept together into one huge daily combined advertisement under the rubric ‘a hero's death’. Life in the city was increasingly disrupted by the bombardments: by mid-1943 more than a quarter of the population of Berlin had been evacuated to the countryside. Just as in 1918, the streets were filled with war invalids, boys on crutches, men missing an arm or a leg. In autumn 1943 one even began to hear jokes about the approaching defeat: ‘What are