Rick Atkinson. The Day of Battle.

The first stray shell hit the abbey [of Monte Cassino] in mid-January. The monks went about their daily rituals, which began with matins before dawn. Seven more times during the day they assembled in the carved walnut choir stalls to recite the hours. The seventy-nine-year-old Abbot Diamare and his monks retreated to half a dozen rooms on two corridors of the lowest floor. German foragers confiscated fourteen cows and more than one hundred sheep, paying a pittance, and soon the remaining beasts, including goats, pigs, chickens, and donkeys were given sanctuary in the abbey. An entry in the abbey log pleaded, "May God shorten these terrible days."

Hundred of refugees sheltered against the outer walls, in farm buildings, and even in the rabbit warren. Artillery now rattled across the flanks of Monte Cassino, day and night, fraying nerves and killing innocents. A cannonade on the morning of Saturday, February 5, proved particularly unnerving. Forty terrified women rushed to the abbey's main gate, pleading for admission. Turned away by the reluctant monks, the women pounded on the oak door until their knuckles bled. "Insane with fear, they screamed, imploring asylum and even threatening to burn down the door," one account recorded.

The door swung open, the women rushed in. Soon dozens, then hundreds followed, until perhaps a thousand frightened people jammed the abbey. Fetid encampments sprung up in the porter's lodge and the post office, in the carpentry shop and the curial hall. Four hundred bivouacked on the abbey's grand staircase.

The monks chanted and prayed, seeking God's will in the liturgy of the hours. Day followed awful day, parsed by the rhythms of the divine office: matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline. "Idleness is the enemy of the soul," Benedict had warned them. Beyond the stout walls, the artillery sang its canticles (p. 400).

The ruined abbey -- "that tomb of miscalculation," in one U.S. Army corporal's phrase -- quickly came to symbolize the grinding war of attrition that the Italian campaign had become. Fifth Army's latest seven-mile advance had exhausted eight divisions and cost sixteen thousand casualties....

Public opinion in the United States seemed largely indifferent to the destruction. Twenty-seven months of total war had severed sentimental attachments to the Monte Cassinos of this world. A Gallup poll taken shortly after the bombing found that if military leaders believed it necessary to bomb historical religious buildings and shrines in Europe, 74 percent of Americans would approve and only 19 percent disapprove. The wolf had risen in the heart at home, too.


Yet as shell fire and the odd bombing sortie continued to carve away Monte Cassino's crest, those entrenched in the Rapido flats could not help but feel that once again something had been lost in this dark epoch of loss. Even Major General Walker, whose 36th Division had been gutted on the Rapido in Cassino's shadow, felt unease. "Whenever I am offered a liqueur glass of benedictine," he wrote in his diary, "I shall recall with regret the needless destruction of the abbey." Of course the deeper regret extended beyond ecclesiastical landmarks. War was whittling it all away: civility and moderation, youth and innocence, mountains and men. (Rick Atkinson. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. New York: Henry Holt, 2007, p. 441.)

(Rick Atkinson's stunning follow-up to An Army at Dawn is simultaneously appalling and revealing for the extraordinary cost in lives of the Italian campaign -- a campaign fought, essentially, to lure German divisions away from both the Eastern front and from the impending invasion of Normandy. That the ancient Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino should have been unnecessarily bombed into ruins only extends the range of loss and devastation. This terrific account of what has increasingly become a footnote to D-Day brings home the monumental cost of the war -- not only in lives, but also in humanity. I'll look forward to the final volume of Atkinson's liberation trilogy -- not so much for battle strategy, as for vivid, eloquent glimpses of the lives common soldiers, all uncommon heroes.)

John Keegan. The First World War.

They were not long stationary. Soon they would be moving, filled with hundreds of thousands of young men making their way, at ten or twenty miles an hour and often with lengthy, unexplained waits, to the detraining points just behind the frontiers. Long prepared, many of the frontier stations were sleepy village halts, where platforms three-quarters of a mile long had not justified the trickle of peacetime comings and goings. Images of those journeys are among the strongest to come down to us from the first two weeks of August 1914: the chalk scrawls on the waggon sides--"Ausflug nach Paris," and "a Berlin"--the eager young faces above the open collars of unworn uniforms, khaki, field-grey, pike-grey, olive-green, dark blue, crowding the windows. The faces glow in the bright sun of the harvest month and there are smiles, uplifted hands, the grimace of unheard shouts, the intangible mood of holiday, release from routine. Departure had everywhere been holidaylike, with wives and sweethearts, hobble-skirted, high-waisted, marching down the road to the terminus arm-in-arm with the men in the outside ranks. The Germans marched to war with flowers in the muzzles of their rifles or stuck between the top buttons of their tunics; the French marched in close-pressed ranks, bowed under the weight of enormous packs, forcing a passage between crowds overspilling the pavements. One photograph of Paris that first week of August catches a sergeant marching backwards before his section as they lean towards him, he like a conductor orchestrating the rhythm of their footfalls on the cobbles, they urgent with the effort of departure and the call to arms. An unseen band seems to be playing "Sambre-et-Meuse" or "le chant du depart." Russian soldiers paraded before their regimental icons for a blessing by the chaplain, Austrians to shouts of loyalty to Franz Joseph, symbol of unity among the dozen nationalities of his creaking empire. In whichever country, mobilization entailed enormous upheaval, the translation of civil society into the nation in arms. (John Keegan. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p. 74)

(By my book, John Keegan is the most literate, readable, and engaging of the historians of war, and this is an extraordinarily stunning account of what Europe still calls, justifiably, "the Great War." Compare the brief memorial plaque for the dead of WWII to the lengthy memorials to those who died in WWI in the entry way to many an English church, and you will comprehend the meaning of the word "great." For the counterpart to this joyful scene at the onset of WWI, check out Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War 6.30-31, in which Athens' vessels set out for the disastrous Sicilian expedition. And for another of Keegan's fine books, look up The Face of Battle -- Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme -- for the role of military technology on the battle front. For the preface to WWI, see especially Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, about Europe oblivious, on the brink of disaster; and for its aftermath look up Macmillan and Holbrooke's Paris 1919, which is, basically, about why we spent the rest of the 20th century picking up the pieces of WWI. And just for the record, no, I didn't just read O'Brien, Hemingway, and Keegan: I just wanted to note these memorable passages in these extraordinary books, before they slipped through my fingers entirely.)

Rick Atkinson. An Army at Dawn

To deal with the inevitable traffic fatalities a sliding scale of reparations was established, paid in the oversize French currency GIs called wallpaper: 25,000 francs ($500) for a dead camel; 15,000 for a dead boy; 10,000 for a dead donkey; 500 for a dead girl....

For the Yanks, it was all new: the skinned goat carcasses dripping blood in roadside stalls; the Algerians hawking grass mats and bolts of blue silk; the cursing muleteers; the peasants leaning into their iron-shod plows; the buses propelled by charcoal engines lashed to the bumper and stirred by each driver with a poker. American units chosen for the vanguard strutted with pride. The 2nd Battalion of the 13th Armored Regiment rolled out of Arzew toward Algiers and beyond, their tanks stuffed with eggs and hidden bottles of Old Grandad. The 5th Field Artillery Battalion swung onto the road with guidons snapping; each battery presented arms to the 1st Division color guard, and "When the Caissons Go Rolling Along" crashed from the division band.

Eastward the caissons rolled, past Algerian villages with adobe walls loopholed for muskets, past groves of mandarin oranges "hanging like red lamps." Past clopping French army columns of hay carts drawn by crow-bait horses, past mounted artillery officers in double-breasted tunics. Past stubbly wheatfields that had once served as Rome's granary, and past aqueducts dismembered during the Vandals' century of anarchic misrule and now bleaching like stone bones in the sun.

At dusk they bivouacked. Soldiers swam in the chill Mediterranean or washed from their helmets in the delicate ritual called a whore's bath. They staged scorpion fights in gasoline flimsies or spooned whiskey into pet lizards to watch them stagger about. The evening mist rose from fields with a scent like fresh-mowed hay, which troops had been taught was the odor of deadly phosgene; at least one unit panicked, with shrieks of "Gas! Gas!" and a mad fumbling for masks before reason returned. Soldiers sharpened their bartering skills with hand gestures, talking loudly in the distinctively American belief that volume obviates all language barriers; one sharp trader swapped a box of candy, piece by piece, for three bottles of perfume, a dozen eggs, a large portrait of Petain, and a small burro named Rommel (pp. 168-69).

Harold Macmillan, whose mother was from Indiana ("I am a Hoosier," he declared with perfect Oxbridge diction upon introducing himself to Eisenhower), advised a British officer: "You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans--great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt. We must run AFHQ as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius" (p. 258).

Churchill, upon hearing Montgomery boast that abstinence made him "100 percent fit," replied that he both drank and smoked and was "200 percent fit" (p. 418).

[Omar Bradley] descended from hardscrabble Missouri farmers and one itinerant schoolteacher, his father. Eisenhower had contributed a generous accolade for his classmate's yearbook entry at West Point: "True merit is like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes" (p. 485).

God's bounty meant nothing to these men. Beneath the vernal landscape every soldier now saw topography, just as a pathologist can see the skull beneath a scalp. A streambed was not a streambed but defilade; pastures were not pastures but exposed fields of fire. Laurel thickets became ambush sites, and every grove of cork trees might hide a German 88. No soldier could look at this corrupted terrain without feeling that it had become sinister and deeply personal. (Rick Atkinson. An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-43. New York: Henry Holt, 2002, pp. 480-81).

Washington Post journalist Rick Atkinson won the Pulitzer Prize for this first volume of his so-called Liberation Trilogy, the second volume of which, Day of Battle, treats the allied invasions of Sicily and Italy. (I suppose the third volume will have the word "dusk" or "night" in it.) It's a well-written and gripping account of the US and British invasion of Algeria and its assault on Tunis, and it's especially revealing on account of US naivete and incompetence -- the allies had a long ways to go, before they could work as a team, much less manage logistics and field maneuvers. Equally revealing is Atkinson's account of the education of Eisenhower, his generals, and his soldiers -- all of whom were obliged to learn the twin arts of self-confidence and ruthlessness. At any rate, Atkinson makes it clear that the US and English were in no shape to assault Fortress Europe in 1942 -- that they had very, very much to learn. The allies suffered 70,000 casualties in North Africa.