In September 2000, I received a short handwritten letter. “I had a stroke but I can write,” it said. “I know a lot about Pringle. I was his sergeant in Italy.” It was signed “Tony.” This letter was the best response I had received to a classified advertisement that I had placed in the Legion Magazine calling for any information about Harold Pringle. Unfortunately, there was no last name and no telephone number. On the back, however, there was an address in Peterborough, Ontario, a city about two hours from Toronto. I immediately wrote back, addressing my reply to “Tony, a veteran.” The following morning, I could barely function for thinking of the letter and what it might mean. Finally, unable to wait any longer, I got in my car, drove to Peterborough, found the address and knocked at the door. An elderly man with a perfectly groomed head of grey hair answered. He was wearing a white golf shirt and grey slacks. “I’m looking for a man named Tony,” I told him. “He is a veteran of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment and fought in the Second World War.”
The man smiled genially: “That would be me. We were just reading your letter.” “We” turned out to be Tony Basciano and his wife Patricia. Tony, who was born in Italy but grew up in Peterborough, Ontario, had joined the army in 1939 at age seventeen and had quickly been promoted to corporal and, once in Italy, to sergeant. He led a platoon “D” Company from 1943 to 1945, fighting in Europe and Italy. Tony admitted to being “banged up” a bit while in Italy. When pressed for a little more detail, he said, “Shells.” After only fifteen minutes talking with him I could easily see why he must have been an excellent sergeant. He had common sense and a quick sense of humour, and there was a motherly quality to him that demonstrated that he was a man who would not take unnecessary risks but was willing to take the right ones. In the Hastings and Prince Edward veterans’ association, he had a sterling reputation. “If Tony tells you something, you can take it for fact,” Major Robert Bradford told me.1
In a way, Tony had prepared his entire life to be a sergeant. He was the eldest child in a large Italian family; his mother had died when he was a toddler; years later his father was hospitalized for a very serious illness and the children were put in separate foster homes. That Christmas, young Tony went to the hospital and told his father that if he did not get better soon and come home the family would be permanently split up. Tony told him, “You have to get better. You have to come home.” His father did. That, I suppose, was Tony’s first order.
Tony heard about Harold’s execution in 1945 while he was stationed in Holland. After he returned to Canada, he went to Flinton with the intention of visiting Harold’s family: “I’d heard, you know, that the father had gone through the town holding the paper that told him Harold was dead and that he’d yelled at people, ‘Look what they did to my boy.’ ” Tony spent two days in Flinton trying to work up the courage to see William Pringle, but he never managed it: “I went right to the house and stood outside but I never went in. I couldn’t do it. I lost my nerve. I never met his dad and I am mad about that.”2
In 1946, Tony returned to Peterborough, where he trained as a barber and eventually opened up his own shop. He married, and he and Pat became proud parents and then grandparents. Tony became a regular at his grandson’s hockey games. Despite the passage of time, Tony never forgot Harold Pringle. His wife says that throughout their marriage, he would sometimes mention him, out of the blue: “We will be driving somewhere and Tony will say, ‘I wonder why they killed him?’ ”3
In 1985, a reporter contacted Tony about Pringle, but Tony did not want to discuss it then. He was protective of those he had fought with, Pat said. Between men from the same regiment there were bonds that transcended time. “People aren’t born to kill, but when the circumstances come up it’s kill or be killed,” she said. “That’s why a lot of soldiers, when they came back, would never talk about the war to their families. It was such a horrible experience. A couple of the guys Tony knew were winos. But he would never think of them that way. He would think of them the way they were when they were fighting together overseas, the way they sacrificed for one another. When Tony saw them on the street he would walk right up to them and talk and shake their hand.”
Time had changed Tony’s mind. “There is no point keeping quiet about Harold now,” Tony told me. “I’m the only one living, I think, who knew him. I always thought he was the only one in the family, the only one born to the family.” Here Pat added, “Tony used to say he got mixed up with the wrong people in the army.”4
Tony told me that being AWOL in 1942 was far from uncommon:
They often did that, you know. I was at a camp at Rygate where, heck, the guys never slept in their own beds. They slept downtown in some girl’s bedroom. Harold started to go bad in 1942. I can remember seeing him down at Rygate. Him and a guy, a corporal—heck, what was his name. The officers had him marked. We were told about certain guys and told to watch them. He was let out of prison to come and fight with us. None of us cared about his record.
Harold was a brave bugger, you know. He was to be shot sitting in a chair and he had the choice of sitting facing away from the firing squad. But he chose to sit facing them and with no blindfold. He walked in and almost took over, you know. He told the squad, “Come on, do what you’ve got to do. Let’s get it over with.”5
Tony recalled first meeting Harold Pringle in December 1944, when the 1st Canadian Division found itself advancing toward Ortona. The Hasty Ps and the rest of the Eighth Army had been fighting since July 1943 in terrain that most military strategists believe is among the worst an army can try to take. Italy is a series of valleys, rivers and mountain ranges from the end of the boot to the Alps, and the Allies never wanted to attack it by land. The British High Command wanted to conquer it in a series of amphibious landings, such as the ones the British and Americans made at Anzio, a small beach town south of Rome. Anzio, unfortunately, proved to be a disaster. Instead of breaking out and pushing on to Rome, the Allies were pinned down for months, suffering high casualties. Consequently, the Italian campaign became an infantryman’s war.
Harold Pringle had arrived in Italy from England by convoy on a route that made many diversionary changes to fool the U-boats that hunted Allied vessels. He disembarked at Naples, the Allies’ main port. The Americans had bombed Naples during the autumn of 1943, destroying the harbour and much of the city. Before retreating, the Germans had finished the job, mining and demolishing anything that could be of value. After capturing Naples, the Allies enlisted the help of the city’s top crime family, the Camorra, in order to fix it. The Camorra had a Robin Hood image and were ferociously anti-Fascist during Mussolini’s reign; the people of Naples both feared and admired them. They were merciless to their enemies, who could be roughly described as anyone who did not do what the Camorra wanted them to do. In exchange for its help, the crime syndicate received special favours from the occupational government. For the remainder of the war, the Camorra ran the black market almost untouched.
After landing, Harold Pringle was sent to Avellino, a small city of thirty thousand people located thirty-five miles east of Naples in the province of Campania. Ramsay Park had been sent there in December. Avellino was nestled in the Apennine mountains and was lush with pine and chestnut trees. It was here that the Canadian commanders had decided to set up their main reinforcement depot. The city was ideally situated between four main strategic points: Rome and Naples on the west side of Italy, Ortona and Foggia on the east. At Avellino, reinforcements were armed and outfitted and then shunted up to whatever regiment needed bodies. The average Canadian army infantry battalion had about nine hundred men and officers. There were four rifle companies, each consisting of three platoons that had three sections of ten men each. These companies were named Able, Baker, Charlie and Dog. Behind these rifle units were support companies that provided special arms fire, mortar companies, and pioneer companies that built roads and cleared mines. Each regiment had its own headquarters, with a medical attachment, intelligence officers and liaison officers. There were also various support troops who brought up supplies, food and armaments.
Avellino was a sort of unofficial court. A bad posting could be a death sentence. Michael Cloney, a lawyer from Toronto who had graduated from Osgoode in 1939 with Ramsay Park, found himself in Avellino in 1944. He was to be sent to the Hasty Ps as a reinforcement officer but at the last moment was kept back to act as a legal officer at staff headquarters. “That,” says Cloney, “pretty much saved my life.”6 After the war Cloney went on to a distinguished career in the Judge Advocate General, and then became an Ontario Appeals Court judge. Cloney’s pessimistic analysis is borne out by other veterans and by statistics. According to Canadian military historian Bill McAndrew, who along with historian Terry Copp wrote Battle Exhaustion: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Canadian Army, 1939–1945, few combat troops “managed to survive a year in action without being wounded.”7 During one of our interviews, I asked Tony Basciano about his responsibilities in the regiment. He told me he was a platoon commander. Wasn’t that, I replied, the job of an officer? “Yes,” he answered. “But they never lived long enough. They kept getting killed. So most of the time I did it.” Tony remembers one comrade who returned from the hospital, his second trip in six months, to find only one man remaining from the original platoon of thirty-five. “Where is everyone?” he asked the last survivor. “Dead or probably better off that way and I’m not sticking around to join them,” was the answer.8 That night both soldiers deserted.
Harold Pringle was no law school graduate. Without a special skill set worth preserving behind the lines, he was sent up to the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, which was slogging its way past the Sangro River on the approach to Ortona.
Judging by the regiment’s war diary, if Harold arrived in Italy that December, he arrived in Ortona early on the morning of Christmas Eve with 159 other young and poorly trained reinforcements who were brought up through the village of San Leonardo. In The Regiment, Farley Mowat describes how these recruits passed the bodies of a full platoon of Canadian soldiers on their way up. They did not have to wait long for an initiation in combat. The Germans dropped a barrage on them as they moved forward and caused seven casualties.
The Eighth Army’s commanders had not expected a fight at Ortona, a picturesque town nestled on the coast. They thought it had the potential to become a rest centre, so they had not subjected it to intense bombing. By December 1943, most of Ortona’s ten thousand inhabitants had been cleared out—the Germans had shipped the town’s young men off as slave labour. The two battalions of German paratroopers who held the town mined houses and streets, blocked streets with rubble, constructed machine-gun nests and camouflaged mortar and anti-tank guns. The result was the first street fighting seen by the Allies during the Second World War. The Canadians fought house to house, clearing tenacious German troops from the town. They developed techniques such as “mouse-holing,” in which the troops would blow a hole through one wall to gain access into a new house. They threw grenades into second-storey windows in order to bring the ceiling down on defenders holding the ground floor. CBC Radio reporter Matthew Halton described Ortona as a “death frenzy.” By the end of a week’s fighting Ortona had been flattened. The drive to it, which had crossed the Sangro and Moro rivers, had cost 4,206 dead, wounded or sick Canadians. And for many soldiers the worst was yet to come. “Everything before Ortona,” Canadian Major General Christopher Vokes later said, “was a nursery tale.”9
The fighting claimed many riflemen and officers and left the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment and other Canadian units in the Adriatic sector decimated. Vokes sent word to his British Corps commander that “in my opinion the infantry units of this division will not be in fit condition to undertake further offensive operations until they have had a period of rest, free of operational commitments, during which they can carry out intensive training.”10
Yet training and rest, by which the army meant any activity that did not include fighting, were not on offer. Instead, the 1st Canadian Division lined up along the Riccio River, north of Ortona, and settled into five months of static warfare. The Canadians found themselves on the opposite side of a channel at the foot of the Arielli, a high ridge on which the Germans were entrenched. This position blocked any advance north, and a stalemate ensued. Conditions were reminiscent of the trench tactics of the First World War. Winter rain and snow came down relentlessly as the Germans and Allies traded shellfire almost continuously. The situation was worsened by the fact that in London Allied generals were preparing for a major offensive in northwest Europe; supplies and reinforcements to the Italian sector dried up.
The Canadians entrenched along the Gully found themselves to be a smaller force attacking a larger one. The Germans had twenty-seven divisions in Italy, the Allies seventeen. Canadian Corps commanders believed that if the Germans discovered they were facing a smaller force, they might counterattack and pierce the Canadian line; they were determined to convince the Germans that their forces were at full strength. To achieve this, they decided to send nightly patrols out to harass the enemy. These diversionary attacks, which ranged in size from two to a dozen men, would also keep the Germans on the defensive and prevent them from reinforcing the German units fighting at Cassino.
“A waste of time.” That is how Harry Fox, who became the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment’s sergeant major in January 1944, recalls the raids across the Arielli Valley. Fox, a Torontonian who before the war worked at Eaton’s, also remembers these patrols as exercises in terror. Patrolling meant crawling through freezing mud, negotiating tripwires rigged in vine fields and creeping along paths sown with land mines.11 Major J. K. Rhodes of the West Nova Scotian Regiment wrote, “Patrols were sent out with orders to beat up the enemy, to the same place, by the same route, several nights in succession. It provided the enemy with excellent opportunities to inflict losses and to take prisoners, seriously lowering morale. Daylight patrols were often ordered over flat country without any cover where we could actually see the enemy from our positions. Patrolling for no good reason seems to be only of value to the enemy.”12 In one forty-day period, a Canadian regiment sent out forty fighting patrols and another twenty-four reconnaissance patrols, as well as a plethora of security patrols. The Germans, meanwhile, sent out patrols of their own. The situation inspired one Canadian officer to suggest that “the only thing needed up here is traffic lights in the gullies to keep Canadians and Germans from bumping into each other.”13 Throughout this period, the Canadian units were woefully under strength. “I was supposed to have thirty-five men in my company,” Tony Basciano told me. “We never had more than seventeen.”
“Day after day,” one Canadian officer wrote, “you sit looking at a hillside and you go out on patrol and get shot at time and time again. After a while the hillside seems to become impregnable.”14
On January 30, the Hasty Ps made an attack against the Germans entrenched on the Arielli Ridge. The assault’s objective was the German soldiers who were holding the area around the Tollo River. The Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment advanced one mile in broad daylight across flat open ground while Shermans from the Calgary Tanks shelled the Germans. At four in the afternoon, two Canadian companies leading the assault came close to reaching their objective until they were hit with an enormous concentration of machine-gun fire. They fell back to a shallow gully, where they held on overnight. By morning, forty-eight men were down. Canadian brigadier Daniel Spry ordered a second attack over the same ground. In one hour, forty-three more men were killed or wounded. “It was,” the First Brigade’s war diary noted, “a very heavy price to pay for the knowledge that the enemy is holding the Tollo in strength.”15
As the Canadians toiled away in the Gully, morale weakened. Canadian military psychiatrist A. M. Doyle reported to Canadian headquarters that neuropsychiatric cases, dubbed “shell shock” in the First World War and “battle exhaustion” in 1944, had reached thirty-five per cent of total casualties and fifty per cent of those wounded. He informed his superiors that when neuropsychiatric casualties reached twenty per cent it typically was an indication that a unit’s morale and fighting capabilities were seriously in jeopardy.16 Some soldiers found an indirect route out of combat. Between December 1943 and February 1944, there were sixty-seven cases of self-inflicted wounds in the Canadian army. A decorated platoon commander later wrote that “lying in a slit trench during a shelling, the thought would occur to you that putting one foot up in an exposed position might be a sensible thing to do.”17
Some soldiers went AWOL or deserted entirely. Rumours began to circulate through the ranks about phantom gangs of deserters. One legend had it that a renegade Canadian captain had gone mad and taken his entire platoon AWOL. Soldiers said the rogue platoon was out there freelancing in the Italian countryside, living by their own rules. To accommodate offenders, the 1st Canadian Division created a Field Punishment Camp in the castle at Ortona. It opened in February 1944 with twenty soldiers under sentence. “And so things went on and on,” the war diary for 1st Canadian Infantry Division Field Punishment Camp states. “And our little family grew and grew, and at the end of March our guests numbered more than two hundred.”18 By the end of April, the Hasty Ps, which never had more than six hundred men in the field, had suffered four hundred casualties. It was a time, Mowat later wrote, “when each man believed that he and his unit had utterly been abandoned and forgotten.”19
For those who have never had to endure the effects of combat, a clear understanding can be found by perusing the Battle Experience Questionnaires the Canadian army had its officers complete following the end of the war. Captains and lieutenants with combat experience were asked to report on such topics as the types of weapons they used and the sorts of weapons that were used against them. “When moving forward,” they were asked, “did you clear your own mines?” Today these questionnaires—thousands of them—are stored in the National Archives in Ottawa. To those who have the time, they provide an eerie glimpse into the practical application of military objectives. They demonstrate that soldiering may be a patriotic calling, but it is also a skill, a craft practised by professionals. During the Second World War, Farley Mowat wrote in The Regiment, a Canadian infantryman had “to be proficient in rifle and bayonet, Bren light machine gun, two-inch mortar, .55 inch anti-tank rifle, Thompson submachine gun, Sten gun and five varieties of hand grenade,” as well as “elementary tactics, battle drills, map reading, field craft, cooperation with other arms, gas defence, military law, field hygiene, patrol techniques, enemy methods and equipment.”20
The Battle Experience reports are especially telling because they were written by men who were about to leave the army and who therefore had no incentive to lie. As a result, they have a searing candour. Roy Stuffe, a major with the 4th Canadian Armoured Division, wrote, “Some men who had seen their buddies blown to pieces suffered a subsequent mental shock and had to be evacuated.” Mortars, another officer wrote, were an infantryman’s greatest fear, and different reasons for this, such as “Can come out of nowhere,” were given. There were other morale busters. “Hearing noises and not knowing what makes the noise,” wrote a captain in the Essex Scottish Regiment. Captain Gordon Crutchen, of the Carleton and York Regiment, cited “being ‘buggered around’ without reason. Allowing men to get sloppy in appearance and long periods of idleness.” Another officer referred to “being shelled by own artillery (or aircraft)” and “an unsuccessful action that appeared to be due to poor planning on the part of a leader.” Another lamented “being kept in the dark as to the Big Picture.” The officers adopted a clinical tone when responding to questions about their own tactics. “Some men will not carry hand grenades because they fear a piece of shrapnel or a bullet hitting the grenade in their pocket,” one officer wrote. “There have been some bad experiences.” Their language is infused with military jargon but their manner of speaking remains civilian. They are like plumbers discussing a faucet. “It is very handy to have a Tommy gun and some hand grenades on the turret of the tank,” one officer wrote, “in case one encounters a slit trench.” The use of “handy” and “machine gun” makes for a strange juxtaposition. One captain summed up fighting spirit: “Canadians must be led—they will not be whipped.” Another officer complained, “Physical and mental fatigue under battle conditions was highest in new recruits who were too often brought to a company one night and participated in an attack the next day without a period of adjustment to battle conditions.” Words were not always necessary to get a point across—one officer simply wrote his name, rank and serial number and left his questionnaire blank.21
By April 1944, Harold Pringle was no longer a new recruit. He had become a full-fledged member of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment. Tony Basciano remembers him as “the nicest guy, a good-looking young fellow. He was always perfect. His dress was just perfect. We used to wish we could dress like him. He was a likeable guy. Always trying to get along. Just A-1.”
Tony made particular note of Harold’s disposition: “Pringle always smiled—he was always smiling. Pringle, when he was fighting, he’d be there smiling.” He also recalled a capable soldier, one who kept his cool under fire:
He was an A-1 soldier. He was a good soldier. He was a brave bugger, you know. You had to have a man like that with you in action. ‘Cause there is no limit to what you can do with him. When we were on parade we used to call each other by rank. But when we got into action, it was call us anything. If you had a parade at three in the morning, you’d tell him and he’d get his gear ready. All the sergeants liked him but he had a hell of a temper. God, he had an awful temper. He would have made sergeant easy, if he wanted to, if he didn’t have that temper. He took orders but he didn’t like it.22
ON APRIL 11, 1944, Harold was ordered out on patrol. Activities for that night were to be laid on fairly heavily. The Hasty Ps were dug in near San Tommaso and shells roared down, as they had all day. So far, however, there had been no casualties. The previous day, a soldier who had just arrived had been killed. The patrol for April 11 would send men from “D” Company, led by Captain Beauclerk, out to a fortified house on the German lines that the officers had nicknamed “Daisy.” A fighting patrol from “B” Company would go to “Petunia,” and a recce patrol from “C” Company would go to “Cornflower.” Once darkness fell, Harold and the others would go. As he waited, Harold ate and thought of the patrol. Now that spring had arrived, the nights were shorter and that left less time. The patrols had to go out and get in. If dawn came and you were still out there—well, that would not be a good place to be.23
Harold Pringle sat in his slit trench and polished his belt buckle methodically, something he would do for hours before going on patrol. Harold worked that buckle until it shone, but he would leave it back at camp since its glimmer would draw fire on patrol. Harold also had other, more practical pre-patrol rituals. If there were any extra grenades lying around, he would shove some into his tunic: he had come to consider them a good means of introduction. In fact, he would not enter a house without first chucking one in. Harold polished his belt buckle and thought about Flinton and how good it would be to see the kids skating on the Skootamatta River. Then his thoughts returned to the evening’s patrol. Captain Beauclerk, whom he liked, would be leading it. Captain Beauclerk was a good officer. And how.
As afternoon closed out, the heat subsided. It had been a very warm April, a nice contrast to the cold of the past three months. The evening promised to be fresh and cool, just like the evenings back home in Canada. Sometimes that was how the soldiers thought of patrolling, trying to convince themselves that it was just a hunting trip, an excursion out into the bush. Of course, there was an important difference: the deer didn’t shoot back. The Germans did. One second a man was crawling along, and the next he was in the middle of a fight. Mortars were coming down, ripping everything to shreds, and there was screaming and darkness and nobody knew what the hell was going on.
Just after dark, Captain Beauclerk’s patrol slipped out and began to make its way to “Daisy.” Slow and sure was the way there, Harold reminded himself; advance on your belly or with at least one knee on the ground at all times. Keep low. Listen. The night sky always looked low in Italy. It wasn’t big the way it was back home. And the birds, they were noisy. The slow push out went on for hours. Darkness. Silence. Breathing. Hand signals. Captain Beauclerk guided them closer and closer to the enemy. This was a fighting patrol, and that meant finding the enemy and engaging him. On a reconnaissance patrol, you just tried to spot him and track his whereabouts, gathering information. Harold pushed his nerves down. Remember: Beauclerk’s a good officer. He knows what he is doing. It did not take much to be a veteran here. There were only two hundred of the original Hasty Ps, the ones who came over to England in 1940, left in the regiment. Harold Pringle crawled along, his rifle snug in his hands and his grenades well out of harm’s way.
The patrol moved toward “Daisy,” and as “D” Company came close to its objective, the Germans opened up, unleashing heavy machine-gun fire and grenades. The Canadians returned fire with their rifles, but the Germans began to bring more on. Captain Beauclerk was hit badly; tracer fire streaked through the bush, lighting the darkness. The bullets buzzed by. Two privates were wounded and it became obvious that “D” Company was in trouble. Harold and the remaining members of the patrol gathered up the wounded. It was tough work. Men screamed when they were hit. If they were really badly off they sank into a state of silent shock; in some ways that faraway look was more disturbing than the shrieking. The eyes drained and took on a dreamy glaze. With the wounded assembled, “D” Company moved out. Harold and another private gave covering fire as the patrol withdrew, blasting bullets into the darkness. Harold relieved himself of his extra hand grenades; they exploded in the bush, creating a bright orange glow that illuminated the blackness like a light going on in a darkened room. He could not be sure how many, if any, Germans were killed, but that was not the main goal. The important thing was to cause as much destruction as possible so that the Germans who were attacking became occupied with the business of defence. So Harold poured it on. One of his patrol caught a glimpse of him in the darkness. He was smiling.
The patrol made it back. Captain Beauclerk was still alive; he was sent to the hospital but there was no guarantee he would be alive for long. The two privates were dead. Harold and the survivors settled in. There was tea and a little bread for breakfast. Most of the men who went into combat would tell you that you did not always feel scared when you were in the middle of it. The head had to remain clear: you had a job to do. But when you got back and you felt a little safe, then the stress worked its way out. “You start to shake or cry or just come apart,” one Hasty P later recalled. “It creeps up on you. When you’re back, that is when you feel it.”24
Unable to sleep, Harold wrote a letter home. Perhaps not surprisingly, the question of health was uppermost in his mind.
April 11, 1944
My Dear Dad, + Mother + all,
Just a few lines again to say I am Well and in the very best of health. I sure hope this few lines find yous all in the very best of health. Well Dad I had a nice letter from Aunt Ida last night and I sure was glad to hear from them. Also to hear they where all quite well. So when you see them give them all my best regards. How are all the folks around Flinton. I sure hope they are all in the very best of health. And also give them all my best regards. Well Dad I was out on a fighting patrol the other night and was it ever hot. But we all came back. One of hour officers got hit this morning But I think he will be OK I hope. As he sure was good. And how. I sure hope you can read this awful writing as it is rather hard to write as we have to keep hour heads down. And how.
But I dont think it will last much longer now at least we all hope not anyway. Say Dear Dad how are all Grandmas. I sure hope they are all well and in the best of health. I havent run into Earl Pringle yet. But maybe he is still in England. I sure would like to see him. Say Dad how are all my Sweet Brothers + Sisters + Dear Mother. I sure hope they are all well and in the very best of health. Well Dad I guess I will have to ring off for now. But I will write again real soon. So I will say cheerio for now with lots of love and the very best of luck to everyone + all to My Darling Dad + Mother And My Sweet Brother + Sisters please write real soon.
From your lonesome son
Harold
Answer Real Soon.
XXXxxxxxxxx25
The following day, there were no fighting patrols. The Canadians set up forward ambush patrols in the hope of catching Germans, but the enemy did not take the bait. Canadian artillery and mortars threw down fire on suspected German positions and there was some success. An ambulance was seen racing to where the Canadians had directed their barrage. On April 13, a patrol went out at ten thirty in the evening. After it crossed the first river opposite Canadian lines, the patrol heard movement. The Canadians open up with grenades and Tommy guns. They heard a yell but found nobody. At three in the morning, a strong German patrol attacked “A” Company. A heavy firefight ensued. No casualties were reported.26
That night Harold wrote his mother. He was worried about the family finances and promised her that “you will soon get that Money again so please let me no just as soon as you get it.” Harold was concerned about the farm. With his father an invalid, Harold’s younger brothers and sisters were helping out and he complimented them for their effort. As the eldest, and the one who would naturally take over the farm, Harold promised to treat Charlie well: “He sure is a wonderful worker and a good boy isnt he and I sure wont forget him when the war is over. And give him my advice and tell him never to start smoking or drinking.”27
The rest of April was spent patrolling, crawling out along the same routes that the Hasty Ps and other regiments in 1st Canadian Division had been tracking since Ortona. On April 14, the Germans unleashed a large-scale bombardment on the entire Canadian front. On April 15, the shelling was again heavier than usual. The Germans dropped propaganda leaflets, which the Canadians found amusing. They contained advice on surrendering and a fairly explicit description of what the men at home were doing to the girlfriends of the men overseas. The Hasty Ps’ mortars caught a dozen Germans moving forward and killed at least three. A patrol from “B” Company fought a German patrol. On April 18, a fighting patrol was sent to the caves outside a key point called “Johnnie.” The patrol discovered that the caves were occupied by Germans; they threw in hand grenades. After that there was no movement from inside the caves. The weather each day was warm and bright.28
The nightly patrols seemed interminable, but the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment would shortly move away from the trenches along the Arielli to the Apennine Mountains in the province of Lazio, the region beneath Rome. There they would see the Liri Valley, a flat and fertile stretch of land that ran up from the southern province of Campania to Rome. To Pringle, to the Germans, to the Allies, to the Italian peasants, this valley would become Valle di Morte, the Valley of Death. The English and the Americans had already lost thousands there in futile attacks up Monte Cassino. Thousands more would be buried there. Olive trees, planted after the war, would nourish themselves on the undiscovered bodies of Allied and German soldiers, and for decades afterward farmers would believe that their blood fertilized the soil and fed bumper crops. The Allies had levelled the Benedictine Monastery on top of Monte Cassino in February 1944. At the foot of the mountain, in the town of Cassino, Italian parents had scrambled through the rubble, trying desperately to find dead children. Then more shells rained down and killed them.