There are some places I’ve discovered where time has little or no meaning, where it appears to have almost stopped completely. A small craggy outcrop in front of a Benedictine monastery always feels like this to me. A narrow promontory, with a sheer drop on one side, and rocky slopes on the other, it flattens out like the body and head of a snake, and unsurprisingly was known to the troops as Snakeshead Ridge.
Here in 1944 was the front line facing Monte Cassino. Not the monastery, with its many rooms and hidden ancient treasures, not the uninspiring functional town below with its gridded streets, nor the green valley alongside Route 6, the road to Rome, but here, in this almost impossible position where soldiers of both sides perched in front of each other. For the British and Commonwealth troops the route up from the Jeep Head, the furthest point forward which wheeled vehicles could reach, was on foot or by mule. Everything came up this mule track: men, equipment, food, supplies, the daily post delivered by a Post Corporal, and then back in the other direction: the wounded, and sometimes the dead, taken back for burial.
The only shelter was the large mouth of what was believed to be a long-dead volcano, known as The Bowl to the troops. Here among stubby trees and rough undergrowth men could dig in across shallow earth. When I visited with an East End veteran who answered to his wartime name of Niccar, he pointed out where their mortars had been amongst sandbagged emplacements and remembered the long slog up the Mule Track, interrupted by rough ration box crosses marking the graves of those who had died in artillery Stonks. Serving in an infantry support battalion, they always had heavy loads and never enough mules to carry it all. He had literally sweated blood in that place.
Niccar had left behind a father in the East End, working as an ARP Warden. When he returned home to him after eighteen months of tough battles in Italy, he could never claim his campaign medals when he found out that his father, just a few months short of the medal entitlement to the Defence Medal, would get nothing. “How could I look the old fella in the face with my three gongs as a D-Day Dodger when he had nothing for rescuing kids and pregnant women for years?”
Sometime before I’d walked from The Bowl along the body of the Snake towards its head with another veteran, John-Boy. A Teenage Tommy who’d lied about his age, he was just seventeen when he arrived at Cassino. Serving in an infantry platoon, he’d lived in the forward positions where digging-in was impossible. Instead, they built circular stone walls giving some meagre protection, known as Sangars. During the day they laid inside, urinating into jam tins and tipping them over the side. The heat was so intense that it melted their bully beef, and when they opened it up, a dark rancid liquid flooded into their mess tins, floating among it congealed lumps of corned beef. Yet still, they ate it as if it were the food of Kings.
Only at night could they emerge from the Sangars and walk about, going to an old farm well to draw water. A sign on it showed that Indian Engineers who had been here months before had tested the water, and found it safe. Old Jerry opposite had no such well but seemed to sense John-Boy and his comrades were pulling on the rope to get some fresh respite, so charmingly interrupted the darkness with occasional bursts of Spandau fire. The rip-rip-rip of the machine gun echoed across the Ridgeline, bounced off the shattered walls of the monastery opposite, and seemed to fill the air. Soldiers scattered, but casualties were rare.
They lived here along the neck of the Snake like tramps, ate food fit for dogs, and faced a tough enemy: German Fallschirmjäger, their parachute forces. Mortars caused most casualties, but John-Boy remembered in his rich Devon accent how Jerry stopped firing when the Stretcher Bearers came out to seek the wounded, and let them ply their trade. For that they got begrudging respect, but there was no fondness. Nor was it really hate, more an indifference to an enemy out of control who needed to be put in their place so they could all go home.
Both John-Boy and Niccar spent months up there. It was a godforsaken place, full of bad memories that would haunt them always: the smell of the unburied dead, the randomness of enemy fire meaning you could never rest, sleepless nights as young men which would echo sleepless nights as old men, as they struggled impossibly to forget. But yet here was a beacon of their war, one they desperately wanted to see again: Niccar only once, John-Boy several times. Even years after we first stood there together as he mapped out the battlefield landscape with his finger, whenever I visited it, I called John-Boy at home and began each call with “Guess where I am?” He usually cried a little and thanked me like I’d brought him the hand of an old friend.
John-Boy and Niccar have both marched out of the sight of men now. But who they were is captured in the words they left me, and the memories we made on our travels across the battlefields of the Italian Campaign. I often say the veterans are my conscience when I return to these places, but it’s more than that with them. Each time I come back to Cassino I look up to the Snakeshead and know that impossibly they are somehow still there, standing guard for all time in that timeless place, among the crumbling Sangars, the spent cartridges, and the shallow impressions in The Bowl where the mortars once were. Together they mark both sides of my coin, the best and the worst of life, but always the best of men. If I live as long an innings as those two, I can only aspire to be a shadow of the kind of men they were.
Tonight as I write this, the Snakeshead is far away and blanketed by darkness, touched by silence. A forgotten corner of an all too often forgotten campaign. One day soon I will return once more, feel dear old John-Boy and Niccar, and countless others, walk beside me. And with words, most of them theirs, I’ll summon them out of the depths of that vacuous past. But there on that ridge, time will stand still, and because of that, for a while, they might live again.
Extremely moving account
Well written enjoy your podcasts so much .You are a master story teller with veterans stories