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.)