Washington D.C. December 2011
IT TOOK almost nine months to complete my editing of Patricia’s memoir, far longer than I ever anticipated. But then as she herself said, nothing about the Italian Campaign ever happened quite according to schedule. When I did finish it, to my satisfaction at least, I e-mailed Elyse a copy, so she could take a look at it too. I assumed she would just give me a general response as to whether she approved or not, but instead I got back a five page memo with very specific suggestions about additions and deletions she thought I ought to make. She also questioned my habit of writing in what she called ‘run-on’ sentences, something she said academics were prone to, and suggested I consider using more commas. But then I should have expected that, given she was a lawyer, and that’s what lawyers often do isn’t it, take every opportunity they can to demonstrate they’re better at drafting than any of us mere mortals?
Then after I’d made the changes she proposed, and I have to admit some of her points were pretty logical, she called to announce the memoir also needed a closing biographical essay to complete it, a ‘coda’ as she called it. “Why?” I asked.
“A lot of folk will want to know what happened to all the people she met in Italy after she’d gone back to London. They were all real people remember, and some went on to live very interesting lives.”
“You think so?”
“And they were all on their own life voyage too, just like Patricia was. And those voyages all intersected there for those few unique months. That is the way you said she thought about it didn’t she, intersecting lives, and everyone you meet being a potentiality for your own success?”
“And which particular intersecting lives do you think merit inclusion in this… biographical coda?”
“Take that professor of hers at Sarah Lawrence. He was still teaching there when I went in the 1960’s you know, and got his own show on the Public Broadcasting System. He went on to become really quite famous.”
“You attended Sarah Lawrence too?”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“You know fine well you didn’t.”
“Just add this little coda please, and it’ll be perfect. People don’t have to read it if they don’t want to. But my guess is if you write it well, they will. So take your time and do it properly.” And she chuckled in that way she did, and like it or not, I knew I had another few weeks of work facing me.
“Anything else?” I asked her.
“You said in your introduction that if you believe it, Patricia’s memoir explains everything about the destruction of the Abbey you wanted your documentary to.”
“If you believe it, yes.”
“So which part do you have most trouble believing? That there were hundreds more refugees in that Abbey than anyone has ever admitted to?”
“The photographs are pretty conclusive that there were.”
“So what is it you don’t believe?”
“That she and her friends managed to get most of them out.”
“Have you ever been to Monte Cassino?”
“The summer before last.”
“Ever been there in winter?”
“What difference does it make?”
“They’re having pretty bad snowstorms over there right now, did you know that, a lot like they had in early 1944?”
“So?”
“Don’t you think that you should try and see it the way all those soldiers did, in the cold and wet, with all those clouds swirling about it.”
“That might make some sense, I suppose.”
“Then when you’ve finished your biographical coda why don’t you go over.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said with a sigh.
“Then while you are, thinking about it, why don’t I send you a ticket,” she said with a chuckle as she rang off.
And here is that biographical coda she proposed I write, if you’re one of the ones inclined to read it. And Elyse was right, you should read it, because some of it surprised me as well:
After the liberation of Rome and the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, many aspects of the Italian Campaign changed, but few for the better. Just as Landers feared, most western correspondents ceased covering it at all, and left Italy for France. So to newspaper readers back home it quickly became the forgotten war it has remained to this day. Many of the more experienced American and French divisions in Fifth Army were withdrawn too, to serve in the Allied invasion of Southern France, which was designed to draw German forces away from the Normandy D-Day break-out. They were replaced by a Brazilian Infantry Division, which although performing very creditably, contributed even more to the polyglot nature of the Allied armies there, and the complexities of keeping them supplied. In the Fall of 1944 the Allies began another major offensive on the new German defense line north of Rome itself, now reinforced by the many troops of Senger und Etterlin’s divisions who had been allowed to escape from the Valmontone Gap. Nothing much changed here though either, as the Germans continued their very effective tactical retreat, and no decisive Allied breakthrough followed. Soon poor winter weather returned, and further withdrawals of Allied troops continued, this time of British and Canadian units needed in Northern France too. This brought Allied offensive operations to yet another halt until the following year.
Meanwhile Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met in Yalta on the Black Sea to discuss Europe’s post-war re-organization. After considerable haggling between the British Prime Minister, who wholly distrusted the Soviet leader, and the increasingly ailing American President, whose attitude to Stalin was curiously reminiscent of those British statesmen who supposedly appeased Hitler at Munich, Roosevelt’s ideas prevailed. Believing Stalin wouldn’t forcibly annex any of Eastern Europe, and instead collaborate with the western powers to maintain democracy throughout Europe, he persuaded Churchill that the eastern half of Poland from a line just west of Warsaw should be wholly controlled by the Soviet Union. This agreement also included Roosevelt and Churchill’s concurrence in over one million Poles being deported from eastern Poland and western Russia to Western Poland and East Germany, in an attempt to ethnically cleanse that area which immediately abutted the Soviet Union and Ukraine. Not surprisingly, the communiqué in which this agreement was announced in February 1945 caused considerable consternation amongst the two hundred thousand Poles then fighting under the command of the British Army, half of whom were serving with General Anders in Italy. By some estimates as many as thirty Polish soldiers, predominantly from eastern Poland, having heard they no longer were welcome in their own homeland, committed suicide. Many of the rest thought seriously of departing the Allied cause completely, but were persuaded by Anders not to.
Given all these problems, the Allies’ final offensive did not commence until April 1945, and soon after its onset the Italian Partisans’ Committee of Liberation declared a general uprising. For some reason though no partisan ever made an attempt on Senger und Etterlin’s life, although they did on many other German officers, particularly those in the uniformed branch of the S.S. By month’s end the Axis forces in Italy were retreating on all fronts, and having by now lost most of its strength had little choice but to surrender. General von Vietinghoff, Senger und Etterlin’s immediate superior, formally brought hostilities to an end on 2 May 1945, the same day the Russians occupied the Reichstag and conquered Berlin.
Meanwhile in December 1944, Mark Clark had replaced Harold Alexander, now himself made Supreme Commander of all Allied Mediterranean forces, as Commander of Allied ground troops in Italy, including both the American Fifth and British Eighth Armies. Shortly thereafter he was promoted yet again, this time to full general. At War’s end, and with an odd touch of irony, it was Senger und Etterlin who was sent to surrender the remaining German forces in Italy to General Clark. It is recorded by General Clark himself, that after the formalities he asked Senger und Etterlin to remove his side arm, which the German general did, and left it under a tree. “Get that gun,” Clark ordered his aide as Senger und Etterlin walked sadly off. “I can use that among my souvenirs,” Clark explained.
Shortly after the War ended, Harold Alexander was appointed Governor General of Canada, where he proved very popular with the Canadian population. In 1952 he left that post to return to the U.K. as Winston Churchill’s Minister of Defence, and was soon after elevated to the peerage as Earl Alexander of Tunis. He retired in 1954, considered by many to be the worst Defence Minister Britain ever had, and died in 1969. He is buried near his family’s Hertfordshire home.
After the War, Mark Clark served as a U.S. High Commissioner of Austria, and soon after was made Chief of U.S. Army Field Forces. In late 1951, in an act of near staggering insensitivity, he was nominated by then President Truman as United State Emissary to the Holy See in Rome. Clark however later withdrew his nomination following protests from Texas Senator Tom Connally. To what extent residual anger in the home state of the Thirty Sixth Infantry Division over the Rapido River debacle played a part, is unclear. Certainly these feelings were strong enough to cause some Thirty Sixth Division veterans to unsuccessfully attempt to persuade the Department of War to mount a full enquiry into the whole matter. Clark then commanded the United Nations forces in Korea, and signed the cease fire agreement with North Korea in 1953. After his retirement from the Army he served as president of The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, and on his death in April 1984 was buried there. It was not until his private diaries became accessible to scholars, that the depth of his paranoia over imagined British attempts to liberate Rome before he could became as clear to historians as they had been to Patricia. Meanwhile, after two decades of declaring otherwise, it was not until 1961 that the Office of the Chief of U.S. Military History acknowledged that there indeed never had been irrefutable evidence the Germans had used Monte Cassino Abbey for military purposes. Ten years later they went further and corrected the written U.S. military record entirely, admitting for the first time that the German Army, the Abbot and the Vatican had all been correct, and Monte Cassino Abbey was ‘actually unoccupied by German troops.’
Lucian Truscott meanwhile, replaced Mark Clark as the commanding officer of Fifth Army after the latter took Alexander’s job, and remained in that position till War’s end. He then took over command of the U.S. Third Army in October 1945 from George Patton, and served in the German occupation forces until April 1946. After his retirement from the Army, he joined the CIA in 1952 as their principal representative in Germany. Thereafter he became a deputy director of the CIA in charge of foreign operations. He retired in 1958, died in September 1965, and is buried at Arlington.
We now know that on April 17th 1944, Fridolin Senger und Etterlin had been called to Germany to receive the Oak Leaves of the Knight’s Cross, was not in command when Operation Diadem commenced on May 12, and could not return to his position until a week later. When he did return, XIV Panzer Corps continued its effective tactical retreat while making the Allied advance as complicated as it could. It had reached Pistoia in Tuscany when news came of the failed assassination plot on Hitler, a conspiracy of which Senger und Etterlin was aware, but in which he did not participate. Many of his friends, colleagues and associates of previous times would however directly and indirectly sacrifice their lives as a result of it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the author of the devotional text Senger gave to Patricia, was, as Senger hinted, already working as a double agent for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and the focal point of much of the German resistance to Hitler. Although ostensibly travelling on Abwehr business to other countries, including neutral Switzerland, Bonhoeffer was instead briefing various governments, including the British, on the depth of German anti-Hitler resistance, and seeking possible peace terms should it be successful. The British however did not appear to take his proposals seriously. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo, and executed at Flossenberg Concentration Camp by piano-wire hanging in 1945, three weeks before the Nazi surrender. Executed with him were his co-conspirators in the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and his deputy General Hans Oster, father to Senger und Etterlin’s General Staff Officer Major Hans Oster. Bonhoeffer’s Nachfolge was subsequently published in English as The Cost of Discipleship in 1948. It is considered a classic of what it means to be a Christian in a state bedeviled by criminal governmental activity. The von Kleist family, at whose home Senger und Etterlin first met Bonhoeffer, was also active in the anti-Hitler resistance. Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin was a member of the July plot and was guillotined on April 9, 1945 at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, and his son Ewald-Heinrich narrowly escaped the same fate. After the War ended, Senger und Etterlin was imprisoned in a British P.O.W. camp in Bridgend, Wales for three years, serving first as a gardener’s assistant and latterly as the camp’s press relations officer. There being no evidence of his complicity in any war crimes he was released in May 1948. During his incarceration he had been visited by a fellow Rhodes Scholar whom he had known at Oxford University named Kurt Hahn. In 1920 Hahn had established Schüle Schloss Salem a boys’ and girls’ German outward bound school. Under the Nazi regime however, being himself a known militant anti-Nazi Jew, Hahn was forced to emigrate to Scotland, where he then founded the British School of Salem at Gordonstoun, where the present heir to the British throne Prince Charles was educated. After his visit to Bridgend, Hahn helped Senger und Etterlin to be appointed headmaster at German Salem which is near Lake Constance, and has since gone on to become one of the most prestigious schools in all Europe. Amongst its most significant pre-War alumni had been Major Hans-Ulrich von Őertzen, another member of the Valkyrie plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler, who committed suicide when his complicity became known, and also Prince Phillip of Edinburgh, father to Prince Charles. After the War, Berthold Maria Graf von Stauffenberg eldest son of Klaus von Stauffenberg, the instrument whereby the July Assassination plotters hoped to end Hitler’s life, was also a pupil. Senger und Etterlin himself died in Freiburg on January 9, 1963.
Albert Kesselring continued as the head of the German forces in Italy until October 1944, when he was badly injured in a car accident. He returned to duty in early 1945 to command all the German troops on the Western front. It is difficult to deny that his record in trying to avoid the destruction of the many artistically and culturally significant sites in Italy was significantly more impressive than the Allies. Indeed, after hearing that some of his soldiers had looted some of the art works of Monte Cassino, he reportedly had them shot. Then, having already declared Rome an ‘open’ city, though short of actually de-militarizing it, he indeed did turn his back on the tactical advantages to be had by defending the Tiber bridges, and instead evacuated the city. He later also chose not to destroy many of the Florentine bridges, including the Ponte Vecchio, settling instead for booby-trapping them, which merely delayed the Allied advance while they were disarmed. All this contrasts with the Allies’ bombing of Rome more than fifty times, and their subsequent bombing of Florence. A 1945 investigation by the Allies even went so far as to acknowledge that Italy’s cultural treasures had suffered relatively limited damage at German hands. The investigation did not however include the damage done at Allied hands. Kesselring’s moral culpability in the Ardeatine Cave massacre in Rome in March 1944, in which 335 Italian citizens were shot in reprisal for a partisan attack, is however more problematical. It is however the case that many of the victims had already been under sentence of death and been pulled out the Regina Coeli, and Kesselring was clearly compelled to execute them by Hitler himself. Whatever the merits, after the War he was sentenced to be executed by firing squad. The Italian government however, who had abolished the death penalty in 1944 as an unwanted vestige of fascism, refused to carry out the sentence. Under pressure from Churchill, Alexander and Oliver Leese, Montgomery’s successor as head of Eighth Army, and facing the fact no post-fascist Italian authority was going to execute any German soldier anyway, the British released him in 1952. He died in 1960.
General Anders remained in Italy till 1946, but by then the communist government installed by the Soviets in Poland had deprived him of both his citizenship and military rank. Like over a hundred thousand other Polish soldiers, he took up residence in Britain, where he was active in the Polish Government in Exile. During his period in London he married ‘Renata’ who Patricia heard singing at the Polsh celebratory mass at Monte Cassino Abbey. Her real name was Iryna Jarosiewicz, and she gave many performances to entertain the Polish forces fighting in Europe. She was also one of the first singers to perform the ‘Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino’ – The Red Poppies of Monte Cassino. ‘Alfred’ who helped write it was Alfred Schütz the composer and actor and another member of the Polish Soldiers’ Theater. ‘Feliks’ who co-composed it, was Feliks Konarski, a poet, song-writer, and soldier in Anders’ II Corps. During the post-war Stalinist period Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino was banned in Poland, as the Soviet authorities preferred to downplay that there had been any Polish role in W.W. II at all. Anders himself died in London in 1970, and Renata had him buried, in accordance with his wishes, amongst his fallen soldiers from the 2nd Polish Corps at the Polish War Cemetery just below Monte Cassino.
Alphonse Juin went on to become Chief of the French Forces and was responsible for the much-needed post-War reorganization of the French Army. Thereafter he commanded CENTAG one of the NATO operational commands, a position which would latterly also be held by Ferdinand Senger und Etterlin, Fridolin’s son. Juin however vociferously opposed de Gaulle’s decision to grant independence to Algeria, just as he previously had that of granting it to Morocco, and as a result was encouraged to retire in 1962. Juin was the French Army’s last living Marshal of France until his death in Paris in 1967 when he was buried in Les Invalides. His involvement in the French colonial atrocities that followed the taking of Monte Cassino Abbey is however still unclear as was their eventual scale. The mayor of Esperia in Frosinone reported after the War that in his town alone 700 women out of 2,500 were raped and some had died as a result of Goumiers atrocities. According to other Italian sources, more than 7,000 Italian civilians, including women ranging in age from 11 to 86, children and many men, were raped by Goumiers. The number of men also killed defending them has been estimated by some as being as many as 800. In 1957 the Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote the novel La Ciocara based on the mass rape in the town of the same name. It was made into a movie called Two Women directed by the Italian neo-realist Vittorio de Sica. In 1960, Sophia Loren won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in it, the first time an actress had won such an award for a non-English-speaking role. What is reasonably certain about these outrages however, is that when Juin and the French authorities discovered them, they appear to have acted immediately, though some allege Juin in particular could have taken greater steps to prevent them in the first place. There were courts-martial, executions, as many as fifteen some say, and long prison sentences. There were also loud outcries against sending Goumiers to fight in the upcoming invasion of southern France, and even a complaint made to General Charles de Gaulle in an audience with Pope Pius XII. In spite of this, six thousand Goumiers were still included in the invasion forces, though this time accompanied by hundreds of Berber women as ‘camp followers.’ But just as they had been excluded from the liberating forces entering Rome, as a precaution they were also excluded from those entering Paris.
Bernard Freyberg also spent the remainder of the war in Italy, in charge of the New Zealand Division. In November 1945 he accepted an invitation to become Governor-General of New Zealand a post he held until 1952. The Crown raised Freyberg to the peerage as Baron Freyberg of Wellington, and after his term had finished he returned to England and sat in the House of Lords. In March 1953, he became Lieutenant-Governor of Windsor Castle and died there in July 1963, following the rupture of one of his war wounds. He is buried in Guildford, Surrey.
Following the end of the War, Wojtek the smiling warrior-bear was transported to Scotland along with many other parts of the II Polish Corps. Stationed in the village of Hutton he was made an honorary member of the Polish-Scottish Association. Following his demobilization in late 1947 he was kept at the Edinburgh Zoo, where he was often visited by former Polish soldiers some of whom would toss him cigarettes to eat. Wojtek also became something of a TV personality and was a frequent guest of BBC Children’s Blue Peter program. By the time he died in December 1963 at the age of 22, he weighed nearly 500 pounds. Among memorials commemorating him are a stone tablet in the Edinburgh Zoo, plaques in the Imperial and Canadian War Museums, and a monument in Sikorski’s Polish Museum in London.
Mr. Joseph Campbell, Patricia’s mythology professor at Sarah Lawrence, continued on the faculty there until 1972, by which time he had taught its students for thirty-eight years, and became a prolific writer, and much respected broadcaster and lecturer. His first work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949 and based on the same early lecture notes which Patricia kept a copy of, remains his most influential.
Alan Whicker continued in Italy till war’s end, subsequently becoming a journalist and broadcaster, and joining the BBC in 1957. He is best known for the long running Whicker’s World which was filmed around the world and ran for thirty years. Now in his mid eighties he has never married or had children. He did however re-interview Mark Clark during the General’s retirement from The Citadel, and noted in his own memoirs how much time the General spent seemingly re-writing his war diaries.
Norman ‘of the secret surname’ was possibly the same Norman Lewis who became a prolific travel writer, and whom Graham Greene described as one of the best of our century. He also wrote twelve novels and an account of his experiences in Italy entitled Naples ‘44’. He died in 2003, aged ninety five.
Bill Mauldin went on to become a hero to many of the American G.I’s serving in Europe. One of his cartoons even made the cover of Time Magazine as he himself also did in 1958. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, remained in the newspaper business till his retirement in 1991, died in 2003, and is buried in Arlington cemetery. His most famous cartoon though was published just after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, depicting the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial his head now buried in his hands, crying.
Robert Capa moved on from Italy to cover the invasion of Northern France, the liberation of Paris, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the First Indochina War. He was also romantically involved with Ingrid Bergman during 1945-6 who allegedly asked him to marry her. Capa reported that he declined her offer, as he would not live in Hollywood. In 1954 while covering the French Army in South-east Asia he stepped on a landmine camera in hand, and was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.
Margaret Bourke-White was best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent to be permitted in combat zones, and the first female photographer for Life Magazine, where her photograph of Fort Peck dam appeared on the Magazine’s first cover. During the Second World War she was accredited to the U.S. Army Air Force in North Africa, and then the U.S. Army in Italy and Germany, and later photographed Buchenwald concentration camp. She died of Parkinson’s disease in 1971.
Along with Bill Mauldin, Ernie Pyle was the strongest reportorial advocate that the American G.I. had in the Second World War, and in 1944 wrote a column urging that the soldiers in combat got ‘fight’ pay, just like aircrew got ‘flight’ pay, and the divers got ‘dive’ pay. The resulting legislation was called the Ernie Pyle Bill, and authorized $10 a month extra for combat infantrymen. By late 1944 he himself succumbed to war neurosis, hastened one imagines by almost being killed in Normandy in a friendly fire incident with his own U.S. Army Air Force. Famous for having premonitions of his own death, he recovered to go out and report on the war in the Pacific. He was killed in April 1945, after being hit by Japanese machine gun fire on an island off Okinawa.
John Huston continued his World War II directorial responsibilities by making a film about the battle of San Pietro Infine, which was so unremitting in its veracity that it too was prevented by the U.S. Army from being shown to the public. Indeed many officers insisted it not be shown to the Army either. Huston himself meanwhile had also become very unpopular within Army circles, and accused of having made a film that was ‘anti-war’. His not unreasonable response was that if he ever made one that was ‘pro-war’ he should be taken out and shot. His reputation was probably saved by General George Marshall who came to the film’s defense, and it was subsequently used for training purposes at least. Huston also made a film about the American landing at Omaha Beach in June 1944 that was never released, as the U.S. Government again thought it showed too many U.S. casualties. His final Second World War documentary film about the traumatic effects of combat entitled Let There Be Light suffered no better fate, was confiscated by the U.S. Army and not shown publicly until 1981. After the war Huston went on to become one of a handful of America’s most celebrated film directors. He died in 1973 from failing health, exacerbated by the wounds he received while filming the battle of Midway and his life-long alcohol reliance.
Audi Leon Murphy, whom Patricia met at Anzio and was so captivated by, went on to become the most decorated U.S. soldier of all time. In the course of his army career he received the Medal of Honor, the U.S.’s highest military award for valor, along with thirty-two other U.S. and foreign medals and citations. After the War he became a very successful movie actor and eventually, if reluctantly, played himself in the film To Hell and Back, based on his 1949 autobiography of the same title. Made in 1955 the movie held Universal Studios in-house record for their highest grossing film until only surpassed in 1975 by Jaws. Murphy was active in the campaign to bring battle fatigue outside the closet, and spoke candidly of his own post-war insomnia, depression and nightmares. He died in a plane accident in Virginia on Memorial Weekend 1971, and is buried at Arlington.
At least one other participant in the Italian Campaign, had a film made about him. After capturing the hitherto presumed impregnable Monte la Difensa, General Robert T. Frederick would eventually receive two Distinguished Service Crosses, leave the 1st. Special Service Force and go on to command the 1st Airborne Task Force in Southern France and the 45th Infantry Division in eastern France and Germany. Winston Churchill would later go so far as to describe him as ‘the finest fighting general of all time,’ and suggest that ‘if we had a dozen more like him we would have smashed Hitler in 1942.’ The exploits of Frederick’s joint Canadian-American 1st Special Service Force both in training and in Italy were memorialized in the film The Devil’s Brigade in 1968, in which Frederick is portrayed by William Holden.
Walter Miller never fully recovered from the trauma of being part of the squadrons that obliterated Monte Cassino, and one of his closest friends later reported that Miller probably suffered from acute post-traumatic stress disorder for thirty years before anyone gave it a name. He converted to Catholicism after the War, and became a very successful science fiction short story writer and screenwriter. His most famous work, and the only novel he wrote that was published during his life time, was Canticle for Liebowitz which paints a chilling portrait of an Abbey in a post-apocalyptic world, and was heavily influenced by the events he witnessed at Monte Cassino. He managed to complete a sequel to Canticle but took his own life by gunshot in early 1996 before it was published.
Eric Sevareid the dark-haired man with the Norwegian surname whom Patricia met on the slopes of Vesuvius, remained with CBS for his whole career, and subsequently appeared in the coverage of every U.S. election from 1948 to 1976. On his last appearance on CBS News in 1977 his farewell remarks were notable both for their eloquence and emotion. He died of stomach cancer in 1992 and was eulogized by Dan Rather. His recording of the Vesuvius eruption never however made it on the air, as according to Sevareid CBS deemed it “not of network quality.”
Finally, Norman Lewis’s description of what happened to the real-life Dorothy Lawrence is accurate if possibly, though far from definitely, overly conspiratorial. She had been born in Warwickshire England in 1896, but was abandoned by her mother and adopted by a guardian of the Church of England. She was living in Paris at the time the First World War broke out, and had indeed had a few articles published in the London Times. Neither the Times nor any other newspaper would however accept her offer of working as a war correspondent, as that was considered then as far too dangerous for a woman. Norman’s description of her impersonation of a soldier, she took the name of Dennis Smith of the Ist. Battalion Leicestershire Regiment, is for the most part correct, and she did work for ten days for the British Expeditionary Force Tunnelling Company, having bicycled to the Somme. After her true identity was discovered, she was interrogated and detained in a French convent, and made to sign an affidavit promising that she would not release any description to the British public of how she had hood-winked the Army. On her return to England she settled in Islington London but did publish an account of her experiences entitled Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier in 1919. It is not clear whether this was suppressed by the authorities also. In 1925 however, she claimed that she had been raped by her guardian, was adjudged insane, and indeed sent to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in Barnet London. To what extent her confinement and her memoir were connected is not clear. How long she spent in the asylum is also not clear, though she did certainly die at Friern Hospital, which was formerly known as Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, in Barnet in 1964.
***
Monte Cassino, Italy January 2012
My biographical coda completed to Elyse’s satisfaction, I decided Elyse was right, and I did need to see Monte Cassino Abbey in winter. So I took advantage of the ticket she sent me and booked a flight to Naples and a room at a small hotel in Cassino Town. I e-mailed Elyse my itinerary in case she needed to get in touch, and flew out there to complete this postscript.
Just as it was after the Saracens razed it to the ground, the Abbey had been painstakingly rebuilt after the War in essentially its previous form. Of course none of the monks who were there that dreadful day in February 1944 were any longer, I knew that already. Abbot Diamare returned shortly after, but died of malaria on September 6, 1945 four days after the Japanese surrender ended the Second World War. Having tried so very hard to protect it and those inside it, it is not surprising he chose to be buried in the Abbey walls. His then secretary Martino Matronola, who later became Abbot, died in 1994, and best one can determine was the last surviving monk who had been inside the Abbey when the bombing took place. How much residual bitterness there was amongst the monks was of course difficult to assess. I had found it interesting though that on my previous trip they had gone to great lengths to make me understand that it was Italy, and Italy alone, that paid for the Abbey’s reconstruction. Whether significant or not, I had also noticed that few of the signs inside the abbey seemed to be in English.
The hills and valleys round Monte Cassino are now home to a number of national war cemeteries including the British Commonwealth, the Polish and the German. As I had also discovered before, it was difficult for me to walk through any of them without shedding a tear. Indeed I found it impossible not to shed many tears. The British and Commonwealth Cemetery near the Abbey is the final resting place of the many New Zealand, Canadian, Indian, Gurkha, South African and British casualties in and around Monte Cassino and at Anzio. There are now 4,266 servicemen buried or commemorated there of which 284 are unidentified. A memorial inside also commemorates over 4,000 additional Commonwealth servicemen who took part in the Italian campaign, but whose final resting places are ‘Known Only to God.’ Suitably enough, the Polish Military Field of Honor was placed on the slopes right under the Abbey itself. 1052 soldiers are buried there and at the entrance two gateposts say – ‘We Polish soldiers for our freedom and yours have given our souls to God, our bodies to the soil of Italy, and our hearts to Poland.’ The third cemetery near the Abbey, the German one, is at Caira a few kilometers north of the town of Cassino. It holds the graves of 20,027 Germans who fell at Monte Cassino, Salerno and on the Adriatic Coast. In its own way I found it perhaps the most evocative monument of all, with its focal point of a statue of a man and woman grieving silently for a lost son.
This time though I was also anxious to visit the American cemetery at Nettuno, which I had been unable to do on my previous trip, and is where almost eight thousand American soldiers were eventually buried. True to Elyse’s weather report, it was wet and sleety that day I arrived there, and although the cemetery was open I still found myself the only visitor. At least that’s what I thought. But when I walked around the thousands of crosses I discovered I wasn’t quite alone. For there in the middle of them was someone sitting in front of a grave appearing to be reading something. I gradually and discretely made my way up and down the rows of crosses till I naturally wandered up beside him. Except it wasn’t a ‘him’ it was a she’, a well-dressed woman in her sixties with reading glasses and a typed manuscript in her lap. I recognized the manuscript of course, it was my edition of Patricia’s memoir. I knew who the woman was too, even if I’d never met her. So when she had finished reading it I said as gently as I could “Elyse?”
“Your hotel told me you were coming here today,” she said as she looked down at the well-thumbed pages. “Like I told you, it’s wonderful. It’s everything I hoped it could possibly be, far more in fact. You should be very proud,” she said as she started to cry.
Not quite sure what to do, I looked at the gravestone she was sitting in front of. It said ‘Jack Hampton. Captain U.S. 36th Infantry Division. Died January 21 1944.’
“You read it to Patricia’s brother?”
“Every word,” she smiled through her tears.
“Why?”
“Because he has a right to know why he was killed.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean why did you read it, I meant why did you read it to him in particular?”
“Because he was my father.”
“You were the child his wife Mary gave birth too?”
“I gave you so many clues I thought you were bound to guess.”
“That’s why Margaret brought you up.”
“I was put in foster care for a few months, but then she quit the Army for good, in disgust I think, and looked after me instead.”
“I’m sorry. I should have realized.”
“No. It’s me who should be sorry. I should have made sure you understood.” She stood up and I picked up her small folding chair and we walked off. “So if you still don’t believe that they rescued all those refugees, do you at least believe all the rest?”
“Yes.”
“That she and Karl Lucas actually met that German general, Brother Frido?”
“That Senger und Etterlin commanded the western sector of the German defensive line was no great secret, and Freddie and Karl had already told Patricia that. But that his headquarters were at Castelmassimo, I doubt there’s any other way she could have known that.”
“Couldn’t she have picked it up at Fifth Army Command?”
“He didn’t move his headquarters back there till sometime in January 1944, so I doubt even they knew. And anyway, there’s far too many other things she knew about him that she just couldn’t have unless she had met him.”
“Like what?”
“That he did indeed study at Oxford after graduating from Freiberg University just before the First World War. Or that he was an officer in German Field Artillery Regiment 76 on the Western Front. Or that he did indeed dig his brother’s body up outside Cambrai. Or that he called his wife ‘P’ even though her name was Hilda Margarethe.”
“And was he a lay member of the Benedictine Order too?”
“Yes. And his batman really was named Feuerstak, one of his divisions was indeed commanded by a General Baade, and he had two officers reporting directly to him by the name of Altenstadt and Oster.”
“And what happened to them?”
“Oster I don’t know. Von Altenstadt died in late June 1944 from a thrombosis that resulted from injuries received in a car crash. Feuerstak continued to serve Senger und Etterlin until April 1945, when he was injured during an Allied fighter-bomber attack in Northern Italy and had to have his leg amputated.”
“And Baade?”
“He must have been quite a character that man. He did wear a kilt and had a habit of calling the enemy and asking them not to shell him on his way back to the rear lines. During the German retreat up Italy it was also his practice to leave a bottle-mail for the enemy including his own name, his dog’s, and the date of his retreat. Unfortunately he was killed by Allied aircraft fire on the Western Front in May 1945 within a few miles of reaching his home.”
“And the Rapido River crossing, do you believe she was there too?”
“There isn’t any doubt. And the photographs they took seem pretty conclusive that they overflew the Abbey too and got inside it.”
“But you stil don’t believe there were hundreds more civilians and nuns in there that they got out?”
“Surely there would’ve been some piece of evidence. I even checked down in the Abbey Scriptorium. There’s no tapestry of Daniel leading Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego out of any lions’ den. And there’s no hidden rusted old gate or escape tunnel in case of more invaders.”
“That doesn’t mean there wasn’t in 1944.”
“But it doesn’t mean there was either.”
“Did you bring a car?”
“I came by bus.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“Drive me where?”
“You’ll see when you get there, won’t you?” And she pulled me off in the direction of the car park. But as we walked back up to the entrance she stopped for a moment. “They had a service for all the American dead here you know, on Memorial Day, May 31, 1945.”
“I know. Lucian Truscott gave the address.”
“He didn’t like Patricia’s godfather very much, did he?”
“He certainly wasn’t very complementary of him in his own memoirs. Said he clearly disobeyed Alexander’s orders when he couldn’t resist entering Rome. Said the clear objective of Operation Diadem was to cut off Senger und Etterlin’s army and that’s what they should have done. But then Alexander said pretty much the same in his memoirs too, as did Winston Churchill.”
“Margaret came back for the service you know, to see where Jack was buried. She said Truscott was so affected by all the crosses he saw, that he intentionally turned his back on all the dignitaries on the dais, spoke only to the graves, apologized to them that they had to die, and admitted that he himself wasn’t sure what they died for. Then he walked off without even turning round.”
Elyse as it thankfully turned out was not quite as fast a driver as Patricia appeared to have been, so I had a chance to ask her the one burning question I really wanted to, and when the moment seemed ripe I did. “You said that Patricia disappeared in occupied Berlin in 1945.”
“She was on assignment for Life Magazine there, just after the War ended. Something to do with a secret weapons program the Nazis were running.”
“And your Aunt really did believe there was a connection between her disappearance and Margaret submitting the final draft of Patricia’s manuscript to the War Department?”
“It seemed too coincidental to be happenstance.”
“Berlin was a mess in those days. Anything could have happened to her.”
“But not to all three of them.”
“All three of who?”
“Didn’t I tell you, Karl and Freddie were with her?”
“And no trace of them was ever found either?”
“If you ask me, they staged their own disappearance, and lived happily ever after under assumed names.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I don’t think Patricia for one would have been all that easy to…”
“Eradicate?”
“Well do you?”
“Near impossible, I’d say.”
An hour or so later we were parked on the side of Mount Trocchio, the hill overlooking the south end of the Liri Valley. Looming up hundreds of feet above us, and half covered in clouds and sleet, was the Abbey. Except from this angle it didn’t look like any abbey, it looked more like a huge, dreadful mausoleum lying ready to house the dead bodies of any who fell around it. “It is kind of scary seen this way, isn’t it?” Elyse said. “Not at all what I’d like to be looking at, if I were up to my shoulders in freezing mud getting shelled on day after day.”
“Me neither.”
“And if I thought I was about to meet my end here, I’d rather it wasn’t looking down on me when I did.”
“Maybe Landers was right about one thing at least.”
“What’s that?”
“Remember he said that whoever controls the image controls the truth?”
“Yes?”
“Perhaps the only truth those soldiers knew was that they were never going to escape the Abbey’s gaze as long as it was there.”
“And if they couldn’t somehow escape its gaze, they were never going to escape the horrible death it held in store for them.”
“Come on, there’s something I want to show you.”
“What?” I asked.
“Know what that is down there?” Elyse said as she pointed down to an ancient circle of high ruined stone walls. “It’s the old amphitheater Mark Anthony had built.”
“Where Patricia took her first photos of the Abbey?”
“Let’s go down and take a look at it, shall we?”
“Why?”
“Come on.”
When we’d driven down we walked over to a small church a few yards off from the amphitheater. In front of it was a sign that said ‘Capella Delle Monache.’ “How’s your Italian?” Elyse asked.
“Not good enough to translate that.”
“It says the Nuns’ Chapel” said Elyse. “They rebuilt it too after the War. Fancy seeing inside?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really, no.”
So she took me inside to where an older woman, perhaps approaching her eighties, and in the mantle of a mother superior of the Benedictine Order, stood waiting for us. “This is Mother Carlotta,” Elyse said. She is in charge of the nunnery here. This is the man I told you about, the one who edited Patricia’s memoir.”
“The doubting Tomas?”
“Yes.”
“I hear you are still wondering if it was true about her, whether she did rescue us all that night,” Mother Carlotta said in faltering but effective enough English.
“You’re the Carlotta Patricia said she brought out?”
“Come. See for yourself.” She took us to the back of the chapel and there hung on the wall I saw it – a tapestry half-hidden in a corner, the tapestry of Daniel leading Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego out the lions’ den. “It survived the bombing, so we rescued it and brought it down here while the Abbey was being rebuilt.”
I noticed the air ruffling it from behind. “May I?” I asked, and moved the tapestry over a little to see the source of the draft. Behind was an iron grated door rusted by the centuries and behind it a dark rock-corridor leading up into darkness.
“It collapsed that night of course, but we dug the first few feet out as a kind memorial to what happened.”
“Then she did rescue you all?”
“Over a thousand of us.”
“It’s still hard to accept that no-one other than Patricia ever wrote a single word about it,” I said to Elyse.
“Ah, but someone else did,” Mother Carlotta said.
“Who?”
“I’ll show you if you don’t mind getting a little dusty,” Mother Carlotta said as she opened the old rusted iron door and beckoned me in. And there carved in the rock just behind it was an inscription that said – ‘Salvato dalla grazia di Dio e santo Patricia. Giorno del Signore nostro 15 febbraio 1944’.
“It means saved by the Grace of God and Saint Patricia, day of our Lord February 15, 1944,” Elyse whispered.
“I wrote it myself that night we came out the tunnel,” Mother Carlotta added.
And beneath it in a far sloppier hand was scratched – ‘Et Hic Erat Sapsovitch’.
“And Sapsovitch was here? He actually wrote that?’
“I gave him a quick Latin lesson,” Mother Carlotta said.
“Good God, so it was all true,” was all I could think of responding.
“We have to get it published,” Elyse said. “Don’t you see, her memoir is the elixir Patricia was sent on her life-voyage to bring back,” begged Elyse. “The truth about all this that will set us free. And isn’t that what truth does? And what was it Karl said? If we want one day to become a properly civilized world we can’t just do it by remembering the light…
“Sometimes we have to remember the darkness too,” I continued.
“Please?”
“Okay, okay, you win. I’ll get it published, somehow. Everyone happy now?”
“Thank you,” Elyse said and she and Mother Carlotta embraced, and the two of us headed back to the car.
But as we were getting in I said to Elyse, “You didn’t just happen across Mother Carlotta accidentally on this trip, did you?”
“No.”
“So when did you happen across her?”
“After I first read Patricia’s memoir I came out here and found her. She was the youngest of the refugees Patricia brought out the tunnel, so she was the one most likely to still be alive.”
“Figures.”
“Mad at me?”
“Maybe.”
“Then there’s something else you have to know too.”
“What?”
“Do you remember that first telephone call we had, when you thought I was a, what did you call me, a gin-sipping, drugged-up, spinster with nothing better to do with my time than pester people like you?”
“That’s not quite what I said, but yes, I remember.”
“Then you should know that I lied to you during that call too.”
“About what?”
“Something unforgivable.”
“How unforgivable?”
“To be absolutely honest, I don’t really understand the first thing about baseball’s infield fly rule at all.”
“At least something’s still sacred.”
“But there is one thing about baseball I certainly do know.”
“Which is?”
“The poor Cubs have still never won the World Series again.”
FINIS