Monte Cassino (29 page)

T
he mountain was trembling like a dying animal. A thick yellow cloud of fumes and dust hung above the monastery, which was slowly being coloured red by the licking tongues of flame. We knew that there were still some monks up there; but we did not know that at that moment they were celebrating mass below the basilica.

"They must have been pulverised," Barcelona muttered as he looked, appalled, at the smoking ruins.

Major Mike emerged from a great pool of mud. The padre was with him.

"Volunteers to go to the monastery."

We stacked our rifles. The mortars stood silent. We ran up the slope, and the Americans, English and French watched us intently. We ran across the remains of the walls. Padre Emanuel was in front and just behind him the MO. We put on gas masks as we entered the monastery and gathered those we could find in what until recently had been the central courtyard.

In silence they filed out of the monastery, carrying a large wooden crucifix at the head of the long line of them. We went with them as far as the bend. There they began chanting a psalm. The sun came out. It was as though God for a moment had looked down from his heaven.

The Americans were standing on the parapets of their positions staring at the strange procession. On our side, paratroopers and tank gunners rose out of their positions. Someone ordered: "Remove helmets!" Was the voice English or German? We all removed our helmets and stood with heads reverently bowed.

The last we saw was the crucifix, seemingly gliding through the air.

Then we ran back to our positions and the muzzles of our machine guns again pointed forward.

Gefreiter Schenck suddenly collapsed at my side. Two hundred yards in front of us an American flamethrower team died. A French lieutenant went charging down the serpentine road. He had gone off his head.

For a few brief minutes we had been human. Now that was forgotten.

The monastery was a heap of ruins. It was being shelled without intermission. There were fires everywhere.

One at a time we ran across the open space in front of the gate and slithered head over heels down into a cellar. Some paratroopers, who were digging themselves in, made fun of us.

"Have you sold your tanks?" they jeered.

The flames lit up the word PAX carved over the gateway. The central courtyard, the one with the statues of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, was piled with broken masonry. We dug ourselves in.

That night 200 heavy bombers attacked the monastery. In the course of a couple of hours they unloaded 2500 tons of bombs on top of us. Our foxholes were levelled with the ground.

Porta and I were lying side by side. We saw an enormous piece of masonry being sent soaring into the air. We watched it.

"Run," shouted Porta.

We scrambled to our feet and bolted. With a thunderous crash the masonry struck the exact place where we had all been lying. One third of the company was buried under it. It was hopeless to think of digging them out.

When day broke, we hauled our machine guns out of the earth and slime, arranged their tripods, loaded up, checked the belts. All was in order.

"They'll be coming soon," Porta predicted.

Mike crawled across to us. He had lost his helmet. One eye was covered by a loose flap of skin.

"How're things?" he asked, puffing at his fat cigar.

"Hellish."

"And there's worse to come."

Mike was right. Things got much worse. The holy mountain quivered like a dying bull in the ring. Colossal lumps of stone flew in all directions. Tiles that were hundreds of years old were ground to powder. Fierce fires broke out.

We abandoned our position and withdrew to the crypt. Nobody could have remained out there and lived. We found room behind the altar and stretched out there. The yard-thick ceiling was beginning to give. It was going up and down like a stormy sea. Some of the paratroopers tried to shore it up. It was no good. With a crash the ceiling collapsed, burying the paratroopers.

Our new minstrel, Gefreiter Brans, got shell-shock. He seized his trumpet and began playing jazz. Then he got it into his head that he ought to blow us all up. Tiny managed to wrest the T-mine from him and flung it out into the yard, where the roar of its explosion was drowned in the thunder of bursting shells.

A paratrooper who had had both legs crushed by falling masonry lay in a pool of blood in the middle of the floor.

"Shoot me, shoot me! Oh God, let me die!"

The ever-ready Heide raised his P.38, but the Old Man knocked it out of his hand. Medical Orderly Glaser bent over the shrieking man, jabbed his morphine syringe through his uniform and emptied it into the pain-racked body.

"That's all I can do for you, chum. If you'd been a horse, we'd have shot you. God is merciful." Glaser spat viciously at a crucifix.

Padre Emanuel laboriously made his way through the piles of masonry, white with dust. He bent over the wounded paratrooper, held the crucifix to his lips, clasped his hands and prayed. His face was gashed by a shell splinter. Glaser wanted to bandage him, but the padre thrust him angrily aside and went across to a SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer, who was in a bad way, having had his belly torn by an incendiary.

"Bugger off, padre," the dying officer hissed. "And take your God with you." He poured oaths and curses over all and sundry.

Padre Emanuel was deaf to it all. There was no putting him off. He held the holy cross over the cursing Hauptsturmfuhrer. The man's guts welled up out of his ripped-up belly.

Glaser rushed across and tried to restore the bloody mass to its place. The wounded man bellowed. Porta toyed thoughtfully with his pistol. Tiny picked up a club. If the man did not die soon, we'd kill him. His screams chilled even us to the marrow.

Glaser had no more morphine.

"Gag that bugger," Porta called, desperately.

Padre Emanuel moved on to the others who were dying. There were many. As soon as they were dead, we chucked them outside. It wasn't a pretty sight, when the rats started on them.

A ten-ton bomb hit the crypt, and there was a hail of beams and masonry. We were imprisoned behind the altar, which was built in a cloister.

Fresh bombs kept exploding. We were almost suffocated with the dust. Hour after hour it went on. We lost our sense of time, had no idea whether it was day or night.

Padre Emanuel was sitting in the middle of the floor, his uniform in tatters, his face bloody and begrimed. He looked round, searching for a place to try and laid hold of a great balk. He was as strong as an ox.

We watched mockingly while he struggled with the balk. It would have taken a tractor to shift it.

"God's servant is very keen to get out of the Master's house," said Heide, grinning. "Take a seat, Padre, and peg out with the rest of us. It's lovely in God's heaven. Or don't you believe your own bunkum?" This was Heide's favourite topic. He hated God, the same way as he hated the Jews.

Padre Emanuel turned towards him. On his mouth a broad grin, but his eyes flashed dangerously. Slowly he walked towards Heide, who scurried nervously back against the altar and drew his knife.

Emanuel landed a kick on his hand that sent the knife flying in a wide arc. He seized Heide by his tunic, pulled him from the altar and banged him against the wall by the side of the great crucifix.

"Julius, mock God once again and I'll smear your brains over the wall. You won't be the first whose head I've bashed in. Don't get me wrong, even if I am a priest. If there's anyone here afraid to meet his God, it's you, Julius."

The blast from a huge bomb flung us in a heap together. Padre Emanuel gave his head a shake, spat out some blood. The Old Man handed him his water bottle. The Padre smiled gratefully.

A big stone whizzed past his head. Heide was standing with another stone ready in his hand.

The Padre drew himself erect. He stuffed his crucifix into a breast pocket, tore off his stiff dog-collar and went towards Heide with the alert watchful movements of the practised wrestler.

Heide hit at him with his stone, made a lightning dart to one side and landed a dirty kick. But the Padre was made of tough stuff. He seized Julius by the throat and flung him to the floor. The whole thing took only a few minutes. Then Heide had had enough.

The Padre returned to his balk as if nothing had happened. Tiny spat on his hands and went to his help. They set their feet against it, the two of them, the priest and the killer, each as strong as a horse, and the incredible happened: The balk gave. They grinned at each other proudly. No one else could have done it. We managed to dig a little tunnel and got out into the front chamber.

The basilica had fallen in and there lay a colonel with arms stretched out, eyes wide open.

"What the hell are you gaping at, Colonel?" Porta exclaimed. "If you're dead, chum, shut your peepers!"

A flock of rats scurried across the floor. Furiously I flung my steel helmet at them. One of them dropped something it had been carrying off. It was half a hand. On one finger was a swastika ring. Gefreiter Brans, our minstrel, gave the hand a kick.

Padre Emanuel bent over the wildly staring colonel. He had been killed by blast. His face was like a soft-shelled egg. Everything beneath the skin had been crushed. It was a thing we had often seen, when the big mines did their weeding out.

"Put him over by the wall," ordered the Old Man.

Tiny took the corpse by an arm and began pulling it along. All at once he found himself holding just the arm. For a moment he was at a loss. Then he gave the hand a shake: "Good luck, old fellow. Never meant to pull your paw off!" Then he flung the arm at a flock of squealing rats that were trying to clamber up the wall.

Porta was gazing avidly at the corpse's long black officer's boots.

"I rather think I'll acquire those two foot-warmers."

A paratroop lieutenant looked the other way and mumbled something about plundering bodies. Porta pulled the boots off the colonel. They fitted as if they had been made for him. He caught sight of Eagle sitting in a corner and insisted that he salute the boots. As a Stabsfeldwebel reduced to the ranks it was his simple duty to salute a colonel's boots, said Porta.

Eagle refused as always, but after being beaten about the head he gave in and saluted the boots.

"You are and always will be a half-wit, Stahlschmidt! The next time you get up on your hind legs, you'll have your bum kicked by a pair of colonel's boots."

The bombardment continued without pause. The monastery was swaying. We sat scattered about the place, hands clasped round our weapons. Time no longer existed. Porta tried telling a story, but no one could be bothered to listen. It was about a man in Bremen who traded in dogs. A certain Herr Schultze.

Oberfeldwebel Lutz went mad and ran head first, like a goat, at the wall.

A swarm of rats came pouring through the basilica. There were hundreds of them. All crazed with fear. They climbed squealing up our legs. They had only one thought in their heads: away from that hell of flames. We went at them with our infantry spades. The moment they smelled fresh blood, they went for each other: an inferno of snarling, bleeding scratching shapes.

Padre Emanuel stood with his back to the wall hitting out savagely with an infantry spade. On his one shoulder sat a rat, half its hair singed off it, hissing at the others attacking it. The Padre dropped his crucifix and a rat bit at it furiously. Tiny crushed its head with his heel. We ought to have been grateful to the rats. They saved us from madness.

There was a momentary pause in the bombardment, but shortly afterwards it resumed with renewed fury. Later we learned that two thousand flying fortresses were used to bomb us. In that one day and night more bombs were dropped over our little area than were ever emptied over Berlin.

At that moment Padre Emanuel was holding his crucifix out towards us and blessing us. We had made another altar out of boxes and broken beams. It had cost him a few cuffs and blows to get us to do it; but if the Padre intended to say mass there was nothing we could do.

We gathered round him. He glared down at us.

"Remove helmets!" he commanded. "Kneel for prayer!" Tiny was a bit slow in getting to his knees and received a swinging box on the ear to encourage him.

Then the Padre prayed. It wasn't a prayer he could have learned at the college, but it was a prayer that gave us courage. And then he began to preach. His booming voice drowned even the roar of the exploding shells.

"Don't you imagine that God is afraid of you," he said pointing an admonishing finger at Tiny. "That box on the ear came to you at God's command. You snivel with fear at the thought of dying, but have no scruples about killing others. This Company has lost 86 killed in three days. That's a lot. There will be more yet. You had better seek God through me, while there's still time."

He went on for a quarter of an hour, storming at us from his make-shift pulpit.

"He ought to have been a general," Porta whispered. "Some commander he would have made."

A rain of shells struck the monastery.

The Padre was flung out of his pulpit. With blood running over his face from a deep gash, he climbed back into it. Raising a machine-pistol above his head, he held it out towards us threateningly.

"Don't kid yourselves that this is the only power in the world. Don't shut the door in God's face. Life is only on loan. Machine-pistols have nothing to say where God is concerned. I know you. I know what you're thinking there. Don't you grin, Porta. Not even your dirty Berlin wit will get you out of it with God. Don't believe what's on the buckles of your belts. God is not with you. Any more than he is with the others. A war is the height of human stupidity. The Devil's work. Some have called this war a crusade. That is blasphemy. It is a war for plunder. The world's greatest act of manslaughter."

A colossal crash put a full stop to his sermon. The basilica collapsed. The flaring Hindenburg-candles were extinguished. We worked furiously to get out of the smoke-filled room, crawling on our bellies through piles of stone. There was a different sound to the bombardment now. It was no longer the nerve-destroying scream of the bombs that predominated, but the whine of shells. Artillery. More concentrated. Quite different. Regular. More congenial.