Dear Lille Bror,
The German front is falling apart and our Second Corps is heading north on Highway 7, and we’re also busting out of the Anzio beachhead, and this made the Brigadier sad because he had to give up his ritzy quarters and take to the roads. He was playing Duke Ellington records last night and feeling very moody. He is afraid of getting whacked by an American mortar. His best friend, a Captain Merrill, was hit by a mortar shell while squatting over a latrine and there wasn’t enough of him left to bury so they just covered over the latrine and stuck a cross in it. The Germans are retreating but very craftily, and our line advances, it waits, it moves, it waits, it waits, and so we are edging toward Rome. Nobody expects the Germans will put up a fight there. They’ll make their stand farther north. General Clark let the Germans escape across the Tiber so he can put on his parade past the Colosseum and get his headlines. When we get to Rome, the Brigadier is hoping for a Palazzo. He has got his heart set on it. One with paintings and a gilded ceiling. Tonight we are bivouacked near a soccer field outside the city, a stone’s throw from Highway 7. It is quiet. Thousands of aircraft and tanks and trucks in the vicinity and a half million men on our side and a hundred thousand on the other side and it’s quiet as Sunday in Minnesota. We found a stone hut and the Brigadier is inside sleeping on a pile of electrical cables and I am sitting in the Jeep writing by lanternlight. Maria was assigned to go into Rome to mark the good locations for the newsreel cameras and I am sick from worrying that she will get shot or raped and be left bleeding in the street. I stand at the window praying to the God who doesn’t exist to watch over her. The Brigadier got very drunk today. He dreads the sight of dead bodies and today we drove through a little valley where there’d been some hard fighting an hour before and the carnage was still there to be seen. A tank driver who got roasted hanging out of his forward hatch and the flies crawling on him. The Brigadier closed his eyes and I drove around the tank and on we went. The historians will take an aerial view of the war but here on the ground it just looks like cruelty and stupidity rolled into a ball, a rolling opportunity to do despicable things and be admired for it. And in the midst of it, this woman whom I love who wends her way on the outskirts of horror. She sees the worst, fratricide, Italians preying on each other, partisans hunting fascists, patriots chasing the collaborators, and it’s pure cruelty under a thin veneer of principle. I don’t believe in any of it anymore, but I do believe in her. She is my true heroine.
Your brother,
Gussie