“I can, sir.” Oh, Crazy Dancer, what have you got me into?
I slid into the driver’s seat and rejoined the convoy proceeding into the foothills of the Apennines, going north. There were scattered cypress here, myrtle, and a few stunted pines. Beyond these, vineyards were planted with veins of cold blue lava running through them.
The country rose steeply to a mountain grade. We came to another traffic jam. In order to let a tank company through they rerouted smaller vehicles onto a secondary road through the hills, though to me it seemed more rubble than road.
Italians didn’t bother with such things as guardrails, or perhaps they had been torn off. On one side of the narrow lane my side mirror clipped daisies off the bluff, on the other was a drop of a thousand feet into the valley. How close were my wheels to the unseen edge?
The palms of my hands were so wet I had to wipe them one at a time on my uniform. All this while we were climbing, but it became steeper, and I shifted into low.
Then, horror of horrors, an armored personnel carrier appeared, coming at me from around the bend. I was going up, they were going down—they had the right of way. I and those behind me would have to back all the way to the bottom.
I put the truck in reverse and crept backward, my huge antagonist honking at my slowness. The very size of the vehicle coming at me made me consider squeezing onto the shoulder so he could pass.
“Come on, lass,” the driver shouted. “The war’ll be over at this rate.”
I held my breath. I prayed. Where were my wheels? I inched backward into the tight elbow and heard the shrubbery scratch the fenders.
The personnel carrier passed us, the driver and a whole row of soldiers giving me the V sign for victory.
“Please, God, no more vehicles.”
And we met no more.
We reached the pass without incident and started a gradual descent. The quality of the air changed, becoming moist and fragrant. Pines were replaced by larch and beech. This was the Liri Valley, but we merely passed through a small corner of it before once again climbing narrow back roads. Our goal was to establish an aid station in the vicinity of troops who had bypassed Monte Cassino and would be attacking from the rear while the main force of the British Eighth Army kept up the pressure from the front. At least that’s what my passengers were speculating, now that they had somewhat recovered from our first casualty.
The guns that pounded the earth were only a few miles away. I was waved to a stop, then directed to the Field Surgical Unit up a side road, cut so recently that the backhoe was still at work a hundred yards ahead and there was a smell of turned earth. We piled out of the truck and I saw immediately that this was not the standard Advanced Dressing Station with the equipment I had been taught to employ. Except for what we had in the truck we were on our own. When I sat down to catch my breath, my fingers knotted up as though they were still clutching the steering wheel. The light snow had turned to rain and we made it a first order of business to set about erecting tents. This was one instance where my training paid off.
But casualties started to arrive before we were finished.
A convoy of wounded, and the tents were at the bottom of the truck, disassembled. Hurriedly we unpacked disinfectant, plasma, sulfa powder, morphine, penicillin, needles of all sizes, scissors, basins, bandages, cotton wadding, syringes, urinals, folding cots, blankets, sheets, towels, disassembled operating tables, anesthesia equipment—it was amazing what came out of that truck. Finally, under it all, canvas and poles, where some unknown quartermaster, God bless him, had stowed it.
A matron already on the scene had appointed herself triage officer. Priorities one and two were those so badly wounded they must be treated on the spot, with priority one reserved for the men who might possibly be saved. Priority three was for first aid, where bleeding could be controlled, broken bones temporarily splinted in bivalved casts, pain somewhat alleviated. These patients were evacuated to the general hospital. Walking wounded just sat there. Some bravely pitched in and helped fetch and carry.
Traditionally, the leading principle of medical practice in combat is rapid evacuation. The wounded are picked up by stretcher bearers and brought to the unit medical officer, who gives them the minimum attention necessary and passes them on to an ADS, Advanced Dressing Station, where more facilities are available. From there they are transferred to a CCS, Casualty Clearing Station, which is a small emergency hospital where urgent surgery can be performed.
Here, however, the whole carefully planned system was out the window. The bad roads, flooded valleys, constant enemy fire, and the severe nature of many wounds made normal evacuation impossible. Our Field Surgical Unit provided surgical services right at the front, using the generator that came out of our truck.
Surviving members of a tank crew dug privies, “six-holers” we called them, potato sacks piled between them for a semblance of privacy, but they were only waist high.
In back of the last tent was a row of stretchers holding those that hadn’t made it. All through the night we kept adding to their number. The burial detail didn’t arrive until noon.
Thank God there was already an operational kitchen and warm soup, enough to go around. I know it saved my life. Pea and carrot soup with a little onion will always be a special memory for me. I sat down and drank it slowly while the ack-ack rasped from the valley floor.
Restored, I went to help set up the field transfusion unit. To add to our problems, the rain turned to sleet. Our main task now was to get everyone under canvas. We actually hauled up the ward tents over the patients. We spread tarps across the mud and called them floors. The cots sank and we had to do our nursing on our knees.
I encountered a case that at the Sisters’ hospital would have been assigned “locked ward.” He was waving his rifle about in a wild way, and I was afraid he would shoot himself or someone else. I had to wrestle him for it. The barrel was slippery with blood, but he wouldn’t let go. “It jammed,” he said over and over, “the damn thing jammed on me.”
One of the walking wounded helped me pacify him.
The bright spot was that penicillin was delivered in quantity. It worked miracles and I thanked God for it.
My first sight of Major Farnsworth, the senior surgeon, was with a mop in his hands, trying to mop up the standing pools of blood and rainwater that collected on the canvas floor of the tent so he could keep his footing at the next operation.
I took over for him. He acknowledged this with a brief nod. You didn’t get to know people if you could help it. I did ask, however, about the high incidence of eye and head injuries. “It’s the topography mainly. Bullets and mortar fragments ricochet off the flint rocks and boulders into eyes and faces. Get used to it.”
By the time we had been there three days, we were beginning to function properly. Then orders came through to move. It was like untrimming a Christmas tree. Putting it together, decorating, that’s exciting. Undoing it is something else. But we disassembled and packed and tried to get it all back into the trucks, and even retain a vague memory as to where we’d put various items.
The line crawled forward and after perhaps forty-five minutes we rounded a bend.
There was Monte Cassino standing before us like a wall, and, on top of it, the famous monastery. From great ravines, rocky ledges, fierce slopes and jagged crests the dark escarpment rose stark, majestic. We had toiled our circuitous way to this point, and it loomed above us, sheer granite.
I stared in awe. Holding it, the Germans commanded an unobstructed view of the Liri and Rapido Valleys, the mountain pass of Abruzzi, all the way to Monte Trocchio lying like a beached whale along the Rapido River.
Looking at the featureless gray face of Monte Cassino, I asked, “We are going to take that?!” I watched shells hit and splinter on rock, the fragments spraying out in all directions. For days I had been seeing the consequences—raw gashes where eyes had been, skull fractures, depressed scalp wounds. A fly could not get up this formidable
precipice, and yet our boys, under German field glasses and German guns, had tried and would try again. And I would give them morphine when I couldn’t do anything else.
I continued to stare at that great mass. No trees. No cover. It was absolutely bare. No way to throw up protection. On it one was exposed, and under it, a target—as we were now. I thought of the slow Allied progress, hill after hill, pass after pass, a river to cross, and, at the end, to be met with this. I didn’t see how . . . looking back on it, I still don’t see how. This was Monte Cassino.
We began to unload, setting up behind the first shelter of rocks we came to, only a few hundred yards behind our forward troops. Our orderly, who was also our cook, provided everyone with a laugh. Yes, even here, in these circumstances, it was possible. We heard a dog howling, and Stan went to investigate. He came back carrying a large German shepherd, left behind by the Jerries because he was wounded. Stan classified the dog priority one and made room for him in the critical care tent. We couldn’t spare a cot, but a lot of the boys didn’t have one either. And in all other respects the dog was treated as well as anyone. Since he only responded to commands in German, Stan claimed he’d taken the unit’s first prisoner of war.
We soon saw why we had been repositioned at the front. By morning the sky was silver with Flying Fortresses, followed by wave after wave of Mitchells. Shells fell all around us, and tracers occasionally zigzagged toward our tents. The din was constant. Everyone yelled, yet you couldn’t hear a thing. Our own people were hit. Nursing Sister Lander was carrying a basin of sudsy water. She was hit in the back; the shell fragment went right through her and struck the basin with a ringing tone as she dropped dead.
Wave after wave of shells, punctuated by machine-gun fire, the scream of rockets. Waste bags soon held arms and legs, even fingers. Injured arrived on stretchers, or on the back of a corps-man. The corpsmen, sometimes ridiculed by new recruits for their reluctance to bear arms, were worshipped on the battlefield. They snatched the wounded from beneath streams of arcing tracers, from places tanks couldn’t go.
I noticed several of the fellows I’d patched up back on active duty. We worked as fast as we could but boys held their wounds together with their fingers, waiting for attention. Others clawed at infected areas. Burn cases lay and screamed. You could go mad. Some did, and wandered away, only to be picked off by enemy fire.
A few feet to either side, that’s all it took to feel eyes from the monastery watching. The weather had taken sides and become a partner of the Germans. The mercury dropped, the snow turned to thin sheets of ice covering the rocks. Fog settled in, and the airstrike that was supposed to soften up the enemy for our forward push was called off. Our troops attacked with no air cover. The fog became wispy, then stringy, and in some places cleared. They were thrown back.
Most of our mechanized equipment was useless. Our tanks couldn’t climb these boulders, while below in the valley our vehicles, from personnel carriers to ambulances, were mired in mud. The Germans had opened a dam, flooding the plain, turning it into the kind of muskeg we have in Alberta after a chinook. The only means left for resupplying us in this forward position was by pack mule. So much for modern warfare. We would have had no plasma, no penicillin, and no morphine if not for the mules. As it was, they forgot to send batteries for our radio, and all communication was cut off for two days.
It was clear that the first concerted offensive for Monte Cassino had ended in a complete rout. Allied headquarters finally realized that Cassino was not simply the next range to be taken. It was the anchor of the entire German defense.
What were the boys thinking, whose limbs filled our garbage cans? It was hard to meet their eyes, hard to keep up one’s morale, hard to keep our patients from freezing. It was below 30°F and a captured German, who had fought on the Russian front, declared this was worse.
Scuttlebutt had it that there’d been an amphibious landing at Anzio. From there Allied troops were to fight their way through the Germans, and come to our aid in a pincer movement.
It was a brilliant plan and must have looked good on paper. But it didn’t work. They ran into the same seasoned German troops our forces had been up against, and had all they could do to maintain their beachhead. I began to think the war fought with globes and pulldown maps bore little resemblance to battlefield positions, and that much of their cleverly worked-out strategy was obliterated by what actually happened, as men tried for handholds on icy slopes and cover where there was none.
All I knew was that the formidable natural fortress before us, was still before us three weeks later, and, according to a report I helped Dr. Farnsworth fill out, we had lost over 1,600 men simply trying to stay where we were.
And where was that?
It did no good to think these thoughts, but they kept coming into my head.
Twelve
REINFORCEMENTS ARRIVED, THE 2nd New Zealand Corps under General Freyberg. They were to break into the Liri Valley, swing around, and attack Monte Cassino from the north while we tried again from the southwest. Of course, they never got together on the details.
Orders came from General Mark Clark’s staff at Naples to capture Colle Belvedere, a ridge partway up Cassino, take it at any cost, give no quarter. We heard that this threw our General Tuker into an apoplectic fit. “Blasted idiots. Don’t they know it’s already held by the Free French?” He muttered strings of curses for several minutes before gradually subsiding.
News came that the Germans had mounted a counteroffensive at Anzio. Far from being able to help Cassino, our forces at Anzio were fighting for their lives. This did nothing to improve General Tuker’s temper. He took it out on his pet hate, the monastery. “Like the eyes of an oil painting, it follows you. No matter where you are, there it is, looking down at you.”
Another directive from General Clark’s headquarters had a curious effect on him. The fury that had swept him before was nowhere in evidence. He internalized it, became calm, became frostily correct, became the prototype of a soldier and a gentleman. As though he were ordering a taxi for the theater, he had his driver fuel up his car for Naples.
“Why in the world,” I asked, “is he going to Naples? Is it to shoot Mark Clark?”
The corners of Dr. Farnsworth’s mouth twitched, and he came as near to smiling as I’d ever seen him. “That would be an acceptable solution.”
Before the hour was out, Tuker was back. He was driving the car himself, with the corporal slumped beside him. We helped bring the wounded man in and set his broken arm. The general marched back and forth just out of earshot and unburdened himself to Dr. Farnsworth.
“Nurse Forquet.”
I turned, to be told I was driving General Tuker into Naples.
“There are no drivers available,” Farnsworth explained. “But I’ve heard you’re an ace with anything that burns petrol.”
“Well, I—”
The general looked me over. “You’ll do. Let’s go, Lieutenant.”
Once on the way, he dropped his abrupt manner and offered me tea from his canteen. Then he withdrew into his own somber thoughts, indicating that I was to do the same. The drive south on Route 6 was in striking contrast to the way up. The engineers had cleared and repaired the damage, wrecked vehicles had been towed away or rolled over the side, bomb craters filled and paved, and, wonder of wonders, they had drawn a yellow centerline.
On the other hand, there were the tanks that never reached us, the abandoned trucks with boxes of supplies from soap to bandages, and presumably batteries. All the things we so desperately needed.
When we entered the outskirts of the city, the general began to talk. “There’s no way to take Monte Cassino and not the monastery. I requested Fifth Army Intelligence to furnish all available information regarding it. The answer came back promptly. They had none. Nothing at all. It sits atop Monte Cassino, but they had no interest in it. Whether it is occupied by a German garrison no one thought to enquire. Although it has been a thorn in our side from th
e beginning, no one bothered to discover if the building has been reinforced over the years, and if so, with what.”
I kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t know how you replied to a major general.
“Therefore,” he said, “this trip into Naples has become necessary. In the middle of a battle it is necessary for me to stop everything and go to the library. That, young woman, is exactly where we’re headed, the library!”
I hope we get there, I answered silently. Following his directions, we’d left Route 6 and were prowling about in some corner of Naples, totally lost. But generals have plenty of practice in map reading. He calmly spread out a colorful assortment of road maps, on his lap, on my shoulder, on the dash, and got us to the library ten minutes later.
I helped him pull down volumes as old as the librarian, who, once he understood our mission, brought out ancient compendiums from storage. One was in English, and from it I absorbed a bit of the history of the Monte Cassino monastery. Founded in the sixth century by St. Benedict, the monastery was almost entirely rebuilt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and converted into a fortress in the nineteenth. The only entrance was by a narrow, low archway of stone blocks, each thirty-five feet long. The walls were a hundred fifty feet high, of solid masonry, ten feet thick at the base, and faced with cream-colored Travertino stone. It comprised a cathedral, a seminary, a fully equipped observatory, and a college for boys. Its famous library ran the entire length, with workshops for paper making, illuminating, and bookbinding.
The general sat at a table and made notes. An hour and a half later he closed the last reference book and looked over at me. “I would be pleased if you would dine with me, Miss Forquet.”
I gulped only once. “I am hungry,” I said.
Outside there was an American four-wheel drive parked next to our car.
“Take that one,” he said.
“But—?”
He waited, looking at me quizzically.
“Yes sir.” Military necessity, I would say to any American MP who tried to arrest me, a general at Cassino needs a four-wheel drive.