What I Know I Cannot Say Read online

  I read, after the war, that some Germans who had been at both thought it was worse, in the closeness of the fight and the quickness of the killing, than Stalingrad. Some older men amongst us said it was like the Somme had been in the First World War. And the tanks, sent in to clear the way for us, were of no use, ruled out of the action by the vast craters the falling bombs had made. Craters so wide and so deep the tanks could not bridge them and fell into them, got stuck in them. Craters so large and so yawning that soldiers could only go forward by scrambling, hand over foot, into the holes and then having to pull each other, hand over hand, out of them on the other side whilst the stalled tanks, their engines choking or brewing up from direct hits by hand-held Panzerfaust wielders, only helped to block the planned and rapid advance of the Kiwis through the town.

  The craters filled with water as the rain came down again and became matte black pools to drown in. Maps and photographs of the town as it had been were useless in the rubble of streets collapsed before us. No landmarks recognisable. No street signs that pointed to any direction we needed to go. We guessed. We floundered. We were lost. There was no front line behind which to regroup and be steady. Killing, by us of them, was done from house to house. Pin grenades in to be met by stick grenades from them, and mad dash rushes across a scythe of machine gun firing. Boys falling. Any concerted attack was cut up. All was stop-start. In some buildings we entered we shared adjoining rooms with an enemy or we swapped positions floor by floor, and always so close you could see the men you killed or who killed you and heard the screams. Better be dead than what happened to some boys, and death was random in this killing place. Splintered wood or ricocheted stone could kill as indifferently as an aimed bullet or as all-embracingly as a mortar shell exploding amongst a surprised few. This, I tell you, cannot be imagined. Not by you now. Not even by me then. It was not, in the sense of knowing it as it happened, anything able to be experienced. It could only be endured. Only endured. As if it had no end to it. As if it was the only real thing. As if it was the end of the world itself. As if day by day and night by night, it was whatever life had become, with no exit, other than madness or death.

  All this happened in the third Battle for Monte Cassino for over a week in March 1944 in sunny fuckin’ Italy, until – nothing more to be done, slogged out by fatigue, some whole units crushed, beyond any conceivable objective being secured other than the holding of little bastions here and there in the town and up to the monastery on Castle Hill – with no breakthrough achieved, there was withdrawal, and the waiting all over again. It was called off and we left our dead, and their dead, amongst the ruins and we fell back. You asked and I have answered, and yet I have not said anything that is near to it as it happened then, and the rest is, ever since, a dream.

  * * * * *

  He lay flat out on his stomach with his back bared to the sun which was directly overhead above the stone-flagged yard in sunny fuckin’ Italy. Now, in late summer, it was indeed and at last sunny fuckin’ Italy, so they had taken off their webbing, their boots and their battledress blouses along with their coarse khaki shirts, and they lay, most of them, drunk and naked except for their trousers in the noon heat of the fuckin’ Italian sun. There were twenty or so of them, and no officers amongst them this afternoon. They had been on patrol in the morning, clearing a small town that was empty of threat.

  This was just to the north of Turin. And on the outskirts of the town, dull and industrial on its flat plain, was a distillery that made vermouth. They decided, on the instant, to liberate it, and to rest up. The air was a-shimmer in the heat and heady with the cloying aroma of alcohol, herbs and spice. No one had drunk this stuff before, neither the bianco or the rosso, though they had swilled gallons of the south’s roughest red wine and burned their throats with tumblers of grappa. Pissed. Arseholed. Fighting. Killing. All their way up the fuckin’ Italian peninsula. In rain. Through mud and snow. Across rivers. Over mountains. Down roads. Downhill all the way now. All lines breached. The partisans out and about. Bodies strung up. Women’s heads shaved. Germans gone.

  They whooped when they smashed open the heavy, hinged wooden doors to the courtyard and saw the rows of casks, huge oak barrels bound with iron hoops and stacked on their sides down three high crumbly brick walls. They used their rifle butts and their trenching tools to knock the bungs out of the barrels. The liquor spilled out onto the floor. They caught its pouring in their metal water bottles. They glugged the liquor, sweet and pungent, and cursed it for the shit it was, and drank it anyway.

  The courtyard was open to the sky. Its floor soaked up the liquor. The stone became tacky with the stickiness of the sugary liquid. The liquor seeped into corners and blistered in the sun. It pooled itself into glistening drops, small rainbowed puddles of it, between the rough flagstones and the bumpy cobbles. They lay, insensible, amongst the gift they had been given.

  In the middle of the courtyard were three industrial-size steel vats, about twenty feet high and ten feet across their oval shaped perimeters at the top. Fixed steel-runged ladders were etched onto their sides. He watched idly through one half-opened eye as some men started to pull themselves up the ladders, arm over unsteady arm, and then lurched, laughing, over the top into the vats. Splashing. Swimming. Sucking each other under in the fermenting liquor. More alcohol. Rawer alcohol, cooking away in the razzle dazzle sunshine beneath the open blue sky.

  More soldiers began to career about, hopping and falling around on the courtyard floor, some grabbing their oblong mess tins, pushing each other onto the sketchy ladders. He saw that little runt, Nipper, at the bottom, not going up, holding his left leg with his hand, shouting others on. He saw Lofty, slapping Nipper aside, on one leg, pulling his trousers off, scrambling, hooting, cursing, onto a ladder and climbing up. He stood perched on his toes on the rim of the middle vat, opened his thin-lipped mouth wide and kept it open as he screamed and went head first into the vat. He heard him splashing about and shouting and gurgling in the bruising heat of the early afternoon’s sun.

  He turned over, onto his side, and in the buttoned-down pocket of his blouse he found a hand-stitched wallet of soft brown calf skin. A souvenir, along with the memories he preferred to discard, of a week’s leave in a Naples, as degraded as he was by war. He took from the wallet the folded newspaper photographs he had cut out. He flattened the creases, smoothing the blurred images, his fingers gently passing over the past. One showed a wispy blossom of smoke, shell fire between the monastery and Castle Hill, almost like an apologetic cough as a calling card in January. The other, on a wider front, was of the firestorm that had been rained down on Cassino town at midday on 15 March 1944. The destructive hammer blow, the captions declared, that was to open the path to Nazi capitulation and Allied victory at Monte Cassino. He touched, with the index finger of his right hand, the black, mishapen form of Castle Hill, and he ran it down the direction they had taken that final night, back down to the town, down to the Hotel Continental to liaise with the Kiwi troops who would have taken that strong point. The Lieutenant had picked him out along with four others to form the platoon. To report how they’d thrown off the enemy, hand to hand, grenade by grenade, bullet to bayonet, from the walls of the medieval ruins as the Krauts had counter-attacked from higher up the hill, coming on them in waves until there were no more of them to come, and so how Castle Hill was being held, still, as a jumping-off point to the monastery. But the safety of the Hotel Continental would be no safety at all, and the monastery would not fall.

  He lay on his back and looked directly at the sun, and he closed his eyes, blinking and dazzled by the sun. Black spots and bursts of red lit up the screen of his shuttered eyelids and served as semaphore for memory. Not as the recall of any felt sensation, one to be transfixed once focussed in the mind. Instead this was memory as a known shaping of what had once happened. To him and to others. The creation of memory as a structure to let him move on, move away, act as the survivor he knew himself to be. A survivor. One of thr
ee out of six who had followed the officer out of the keep of Castle Hill over its rubble and into the darkness. Orders. Reconnaissance. Radio communication gone. Connecting and communicating. Onto the twisting bends of a path overhung by boulders and scree and overlooked – but where, and how? – by the recoiled enemy, half a mile precipitously down to the town. They passed other troops – Indian Army mostly – bivouacking under rock overhangs out of line of fire, and they took in the grim warnings they were issued as they pushed on, stumbling, on the trail, cutting their hands on splintered rock, gashing their knees, as silent as they could be in the darkness that wrapped them and concealed others in ambush for them.

  Now, in the sun outside Turin, he lay still. A survivor. One of three from that platoon. He looked again at his crumpled newsprint photographs. When he was in that battle – the third as they said later, with the fourth and final one in May to come, with yet more dead for whatever the victory was meant to be by then – he had known nothing, and thought even less, of what Cassino itself was. He had read more about it since, after he had been taken off the line and put in reserve for the breakthrough to the north. It was the officer he had propped up against a sofa inside the Hotel Continental who had begun to tell him. He had given the officer a shot of morphine against the pain of his smashed leg. A cigarette was stuck, smouldering, to his lower lip. His eyes were dilated, black, and depthless. He kept saying his name was Cleave, Lieutenant Timothy Stafford Cleave, Royal Kents. To tell his parents, please. If he was to die. Couldn’t remember the address. He had laughed at that, giggled. He’d said the College would know. To tell them, and they’d send the message on. To his parents. The college was Caius – he’d spelled it out for him – in Cambridge.

  This was all while they huddled in a room, its floor a carpet of chandelier glass and plasterwork, in the Hotel Continental. A salon of some kind. It was an hour since they had reached the Hotel. A salon, if the gaping walls and broken-up floors and stairwells and roofs open to wind and rain and the night could be called anything such any more. They had entered the hotel through what might once have been its front. It had still been dark, and they were hopeful now but cautious still. They had moved amongst the debris of armchairs, tables and cabinets and Persian carpets scarred and burned. They had split into two groups. He went left, with two others, into the salon where an upright piano stood intact, and so they were not killed instantly when the mortar whooshed in through the wide open hotel frontage. Inside the salon, they fell to the floor. After the explosion they heard Kiwi voices shouting, but across the street, not in the hotel. In the hotel, from the floor above them, they heard returning machine gun fire and German voices yelling back. He waited moments, perhaps minutes, before he crawled belly-down back to the reception area. He saw the officer, sitting, half-toppling, one leg crumpled beneath him but his eyes still open. The other two with the officer, their names not known to him, were not disfigured or bleeding. They lay entwined and dusted with white power from the plaster of ornate cornices, quite dead from the blast. He took their tags without looking at them, put them in his blouse pocket and closed up the metal button. Friendly fire. He took their rifles and some grenades and ammo, and he scuttled back, as low as he could be, to the two men he’d left in the salon. He knew them by name: Nipper and Lofty. He told them to fetch the officer and to carry him between them into the salon. They called the officer Lah-di-dah and were sullen. Then he ordered them to do it. Whatever weapon fire was to be heard was distant now, and the mortars were dropping their shells away from the town.

  “Here you are, Taff, the Wounded Hero”, Nipper had said, and he and Lofty had slumped Lieutenant Cleave into a heap against the back of an upturned ottoman, as he’d directed them to do. He’d cut up a damask tablecloth to make strips and tied a makeshift tourniquet tightly above the shattered knee. The lower leg was a jagged mess of splintered bone and shredded flesh. Lofty said that young Lah-di-dah had fuckin’ had it, the tosser.

  He told them to shut it. He positioned Nipper at the entrance to the salon behind the door which hung loose on one hinge. At the far end a hole the size of a window had been made by bomb damage. It looked into a passage between them and other rooms. With Lofty he pulled the piano over to it and they blocked it as much as they could. He told Lofty to sleep and relieve Nipper in an hour. He draped a thick velvet curtain over the officer and sat next to him to wait for the dawn to rise. They would need, he knew, to get out of this trap.

  On the floor were scattered pages of musical scores, headed writing paper and envelopes, and picture postcards to send home, of the town, of the abbey. He picked up a couple that were not damaged and pocketed them. The officer touched his arm, softly, almost as a plea. He leaned in to cradle him, holding the young man’s slightness in his stockier forearms. It was then he had lit the cigarette and put it between the officer’s lips, though he could scarcely draw on it; so he had taken it away and held it himself. The officer drifted in and out of his reverie. So he learned his name and the name of his Cambridge college. Lieutenant Cleave shivered, shook in spasms. He asked to be held closer. Nipper looked over and said Lah-di-dah was fuckin’ finished, fuckin’ glory hunter, and serve him fuckin’ right.

  He didn’t think Cleave could hear. He hadn’t been under this officer’s command when the battle had started. Most of those he’d entered the town with were dead, or missing, there or on Castle Hill. He’d known Lofty and Nipper since they’d landed a year before in Sicily. He had nothing good in his heart for them and saw no vantage in friendships so had made none.

  Lieutenant Cleave was looking at him in the half-light now filtering into the salon from outside. He was asked for his own name. He gave it. What had he done before the war? He told the officer. His arm was gripped. He was asked if he was a communist. He said no, and the officer giggled and said in Cambridge all miners from South Wales were thought to be communists, or should be, shouldn’t they? He said he knew some, but didn’t know. He knew miners who were not though. Lieutenant Cleave said that in Cambridge the Party was strong. That he had considered joining, that it was the future, wasn’t it? He said he didn’t know. The officer asked him what he would do after the war. The pits again? He had no answer to give to that, only felt a need to comfort this boy. He told him, then, that he liked to draw, to sketch, to use pen and ink – some coloured – on scraps of paper or in a notebook he kept of the places he’d seen, or where, to his inner eye, he’d been, even if not as they were. He said he’d show them to him, if he’d like, when it grew light, to see whether he’d actually caught anything right. He meant, though did not say, the whisper of silver among grey -green olive trees in a breeze; the dun colour of crumbling masonry in the southern sun; shadows flitting down the canyons of narrow Neapolitan streets as women strung washing out across the gap between buildings; and the filthy detritus of metal and machines, the scour of a war’s passing through all this landscape. The officer said it was a talent, he was sure, and there would, surely, come a time and place for it. No one had said anything like that to him before.

  Lieutenant Cleave pulled on the cigarette placed again between his lips. He seemed calmer now, and said that he wished to live, get this bloody leg fixed. In turn, he said nothing of the leg that was, in no real sense, there anymore. But, said the officer, if, you know, things did not work out, then he had a letter on him, half-written before they’d jumped off, and could he send it to Robin, a Cambridge friend, a don in fact, still in college. He said he didn’t know what a don was, and Lieutenant Cleave didn’t say, only to be sure to include the map he’d made to go with the letter, and that Robin would be so amused by it. It was a map, he said, of this hell they found themselves in.

  It was a map Lieutenant Cleave had drawn of the place before its recent full destruction. He said Robin had been his tutor in Classics. Did he, Corporal Maddox, know that the abbey they were fighting to take, the monastery they had flattened into a ruin the previous month , was a sixth-century Benedictine foundation? Despite loot
ing and sieges over centuries it had been a bridgehead, a moral and intellectual powerhouse, between the values of the classical world and the ruins of the barbaric one that had come after it. Robin had wept when the bombs fell unceasingly upon it in February. Robin had written of the new barbarism. Lieutenant Cleave had made the map to show his mentor, graphically, what the world as it was had made of the world of serenity and scholarship now entombed in the monastery on Monte Cassino. It was, he had written, as if a sheet of tracing paper, with place names, real and assigned, had been fitted onto the three-dimensional shapes of the space and collapsed them with the breathtaking mercilessness of time.

  “Look, Robin,” the letter said of the map, “here is the boundary marker, the river Rapido where the Yanks, attempting to cross by night, were shot up like fish in a barrel in the swollen water at the first battle for Cassino in December. Here, to the north, is the road improbably called Caruso. Did he stay? On his way north, too? In one of the hotels, the one called Roses, or the grander Continental, perhaps? The abbey on the top, squat and all-seeing, window embrasures implacable, shell blasts pocking its walls, its gathered treasures and marbled splendours spirited away along with its monks. Castle Hill, a half-way house, a wind-bitten bastion against ancient quarrels. All around, above and below, ridges, ravines, slopes and flanks of limestone and granite from which troops could almost throw stones at each other, so close are they amongst thickets of brush, thorn and scrub and barbed wire, scarcely dug in; so flinty is the soil, so unyielding the rocks they pick up and pile together to make inadequate defences. Only not stones, not stones to hurl like children; but grenades, stick bombs, the tracery of automatic fire, the whine of Nebelwerfers, the hiss of mortars, the crump of shells. The men look up and call that defile Snakeshead Ridge. They see through the mists the trail of Phantom Ridge and the overhang of cliff just underneath the abbey where a broken pylon sticks out like the shape of a gibbet. So they call that spot Hangman’s Hill, with more accuracy than irony.” The lieutenant wondered if Robin thought the names made it all sound rather like an adventure story. Something like Swallows and Amazons, maybe? Or a tale by Robert Louis Stevenson? A dangerous quest for the munificence of the Abbey? A sequel to Treasure Island? Lieutenant Cleave asked him if he’d ever read that. It had a map, too, he said. Then the officer closed his eyes again. It was barely dawn. Firing had started again. Nearer this time. He decided they would take the officer with them, and he told Nipper and Lofty they would need to carry him again. He instructed them at the point of a rifle. They cursed, but they lifted the boy, awkwardly because of their respective heights, and slung his arms onto their shoulders. From the back of the hotel, beyond the hole in the wall blocked by the piano, he could hear the turned-over engine of a tank. A Panther. Readying in some part of the building. To the front, through the rubble of the reception area, he glimpsed squads of New-Zealanders, Maori troops, pulling out of the post office, covering each other with fire to break up the machine gun and sniper fire to their left and from on high.