Naples '44 Read Online Free

could not be carried in the tank, and as a result he is naturally a propagandist for what he accepts as the general high standard of German humanity. Another, more lastingly indoctrinated, has announced his intention of strangling the only wounded German in the ward, an eighteen-year-old Panzer Grenadier, as soon as he, the American, has the strength to get out of bed. However, the Panzer Grenadier, cheerful and chirpy despite a bad wound, and with enough of a command of Englishto display an unabashed sense of humour, is making friends all round and rapidly consolidating his position.
    This tentful of men – and there must be at least two hundred of them – are a very mixed bag. One, a lay-preacher in civilian life, conducted the nearest possible thing to revivalist prayer meetings in a situation where all members of the congregation were on their backs, and a proportion had tubes feeding into their nostrils or sticking out of the walls of their stomachs. A great deal of hymn-singing went on in competition with bawdy choruses of the Eskimo Nell variety, and there were frequent ecstatic shouts of ‘Bless you, brother, are you saved?’ and ‘Halleluja!’
    A tremendous cannonading by a battery of 105 howitzers in a field a couple of hundred yards away went on through the day, and most of the night. In the end most patients got used to this and were no longer disturbed by the crash of nocturnal salvoes. Yet so finely attuned are the nerves to danger that even in a deep sleep I was awakened instantly by the faint, distant whine of shells from German 88s as they passed high overhead on their way to the ships in the bay.
October 3
    A gale of the kind no one ever expects of Italy blew down our tent in the middle of the night. Pitch darkness, hammering rain, the suffocating weight of waterlogged canvas over mouth and nostrils, muffled cries from all directions. A lake of water flooded in under the beds, and gradually rose to the level of the bottom of the mattress. It was several hours before we could be rescued. All my kit stowed under the bed was lost, and only my camera and notebooks in the drawer of the bedside table survived. One patient was killed by the main tent-pole falling across his bed.
October 4
    Discharged from hospital and kitted out temporarily as an American private with bucket helmet, hip-clinging trousers and gaitered boots, I picked up a lift in an American truck going in the direction of Naples, which had fallen three days before, and where I supposed the sectionwould already be installed. At Battipaglia it was all change, with an opportunity for a close-quarters study of the effects of the carpet bombing ordered by General Clark. The General has become the destroying angel of Southern Italy, prone to panic, as at Paestum, and then to violent and vengeful reaction, which occasioned the sacrifice of the village of Altavilla, shelled out of existence because it might have contained Germans. Here in Battipaglia we had an Italian Guernica, a town transformed in a matter of seconds to a heap of rubble. An old man who came to beg said that practically nobody had been left alive, and that the bodies were still under the ruins. From the stench and from the sight of the flies streaming like black smoke into, and out of, the holes in the ground, this was entirely believable. No attempt had even been made to clear the streets of relics of the successful strike. So much so that while standing by the truck talking to the old man I felt something uneven under one foot, shifted my position, and then glancing down realised that what had at first seemed to be a mass of sacking was in fact the charred and flattened corpse of a German soldier.
    Thereafter on through Salerno and across the base of the Sorrento peninsula in a second truck. This is a region on which all the guidebooks exhaust their superlatives, and the war had singed and scorched it here and there, and littered the green and golden landscape