Here is a scene of utter desolation such as only this war can produce. It is nearing noon and the last Germans left this relic of a tortured town some few hours ago. They were prisoners. Their last stronghold ╤ the Continental Hotel ╤ had gone up with a bang a little while before that. It was the final retreating blow that the Germans in Cassino struck.
There were fewer than thirty prisoners taken in Cassino itself. Our men felt bitter about that. ╥This is the first time I have ever been able to stand outside in the open air,╙ said one of them, ╥and now I have only seen ten Germans.╙
He had come into the open air to stand bolt upright for the first time this morning. He had come from a dug-out that was in the rubble of a battered house where day was dark as night, and where only in the hours of darkness you dared to crawl out so that the next section to hold this post might crawl in.
╥THE CRYPT╙
A little behind us is ╥The Crypt.╙ Its rightful ecclesiastical name ╤ for it is below the chapel of a convent ╤ remained relevant in the cruel circumstances of war. It had had ninety-nine direct hits on it from German shells up to the arrival of the British troops who took over about ten days ago. Since then it has received fifteen direct hits.
They tell one that nothing less than a direct hit from a 1,000lb bomb would penetrate the crypt. That is some measure of the protection which the Germans enjoyed last March when the Allied Air Forces bombed this town in the greatest strength ever put on a target of comparable size.
The crypt inside and outside might pass for any front-line soldier╒s picture of a dig-out. Its dangers were supremely the dangers of the front line itself. One British sergeant whose head was visible in daylight above its entrance for less than a split second was killed. Enemy snipers never left this spot uncovered. So it was all through Cassino ╤ ceaseless, vigilant watching, with every opportunity seized by both sides to strike down whoever could be seen to move.
Much of this town is built flush with the rock of the hillside up which winds the road to the monastery on Monte Cassino. So much is this the case that to-day, in its bare remnants of shattered walls, Cassino looks just as if it were mainly a series of caves in the hillside.
Castle Hill, rising sheer within the town on its north side, stands like a steep crag, its pinnacle a jagged rock now unrecognisable as buildings. The castle itself had remained in our hands since the latter part of March. Below it the ruins of houses were in the hands of the Germans. Thus our own troops on the top of Castle Hill were just above the Germans, who in turn were only about fifty yards from another line of our troops in the opposite direction, towards the centre of the town and the River Rapido. This was a typical example of how our own positions and the enemy╒s in the town were close upon each other in a series of loosely formed lines, almost intermingling.
╥CENTRE╙ OF THE TOWN
One writes about the ╥centre of the town.╙ To-day it is but a guess which or what was the centre of the town. Across there there is a stinking quagmire, with disabled tanks half-buried in its mud; craters coloured a dirty yellowish green with the slime of stagnant water; blasted trees, the gaunt remains of a stone wall or two, a medley of twisted metal ╤ all the mess and disarray of horror that comes in the chaos of ceaseless shelling and air bombardment. That, we were told, was the centre of the town; the piazza had just passed into unquiet oblivion.
Just outside the crypt was another crater. Its muddy water had served as washing water ╤when purified by the medical officer ╤ for the first-aid post within the crypt. The convent beside the crypt stood like a crazy house of cards about to collapse. In one of its walls was embedded a tank, a reminder of the days when New Zealanders had fought along this way.
Soldiers who had known this scene only through the slits of defensive sentry posts were looking round freely this morning. They still moved warily, cautious of mines and traps. Ahead of us was a small sangar made of a pile of stones. Flies hovered over it and it smelt. Two men had been sitting there few days ago when a German mortar shell burst exactly between them.
ON MONASTERY HILL
High above the town the Monastery stood like jagged spikes of rock on the hill-top. It was no more like any building than is the natural rugged peak of a mountain. Yesterday it had been like the sullen smoking crater of some volcano, and for most of the day one could watch smoke both ascending and descending round its shattered precincts. To-day rumours ceased, and the Monastery was in fact no longer in German hands. From Cassino it seemed to have regained almost something of peacefulness, at least it was quiet.
British troops looked down on us from the lesser height of Castle Hill and waved cheerfully. They are irrepressibly cheerful these men who have endured so much with such stolid, simple courage. One of them is exploring a tank in the quagmire that may be the centre of the town and shouts across that he has found an old wireless set. ╥See if you can get us any news,╙ call out his comrades like one man.
