Naples '44 E-Book

Norman Lewis

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Norman Lewis arrived in war-torn Naples as an intelligence officer in 1944. The starving population has devoured all the tropical fish in the aquarium, respectable women had been driven to prostitution and the black market was king. Lewis found little to admire in his fellow soldiers, but gained sustenance from the extraordinary vivacity of the Italians around him - the lawyer who earned his living by bringing a touch of Roman class to funerals, the gynaecologist who specialised in the restoration of lost virginity and the widowed housewife who timed her British lover against the clock. "Were I given the chance to be born again," writes Lewis, "Italy would be the country of my choice."

Leseprobe

For all my old friends of Naples. Especially for Sergio Viggiani

Contents

Title PageDedicationMapsForeword19431944About the AuthorCopyright

Foreword

Volunteers from the armed forces in World War II found to possess linguistic qualifications, but who had attended either a redbrick university, or no university at all, were frequently directed into the Intelligence Corps. There followed four months of basic infantry training, plus another two at the Corps Depot at Winchester, the latter period largely devoted to ceremonial marching and learning to ride a motor cycle. Only in a final two weeks at Matlock was any Intelligence instruction imparted. At the end of this fortnight, trainees considered to have shown promise were interviewed by the Selection Officer, who went through a pretence of discussing with them their future. What the trainee did not realize was that however encouraging the report on the major’s desk, or promising the dialogue that ensued, his fate had been instantly settled from the moment of the officer’s first quick scrutiny of his face. The Selection Officer believed that blue was the colour of Truth. To the blue-eyed trainees, therefore, went the responsible and sometimes glamorous jobs, while the rest were tipped into the dustbin of what was then called the Field Security Police. In this they were confronted with the drudgery of delivering army-style, pay-attention-you-fuckers lectures, of snooping, detested by all, in the vicinity of military installations in the hope of pouncing on unwatchful guards, or discovering significant scraps of paper not properly disposed of by burning, and of making up alarming rumours with which to fill in the emptiness of the weekly report.

The escape from this predicament was a posting to an overseas section. Most of these, composed at first of an officer and eleven NCOs, were located in the principal cities or ports of countries wherever there happened to be British troops. Others, known as Divisional Sections, accompanied the forces in the field.

Vague as their overseas duties first were, FS men tended more and more to be employed primarily as linguists, to bridge the gap between the military and the civilian population. Often the liaison was fumbling and imperfect. Corps selectors were straightforward men of war without patience for linguistic hairsplitting. Rather, for example, than waste Spanish speakers they were sent to Italy, it being agreed that Spanish and Italian looked in print and sounded much the same. It was typical, too, that a Rumanian-speaking friend should find himself incoherent and gesticulating among the Yugoslav partisans (both were Balkan languages), and that the FSO of 91 FS Section with which I went to Algeria should be an authority on Old Norse, but have no French.

The Field Security Service (as it had hastily renamed itself), brand new in its innocence, confronted emergencies that were undreamed of in England and there were no rules to go by. To have received an inkling of the political situation of the country in which we found ourselves would have been useful, but none was given, and we trod the hard road of trial and error. No. 91’s first action in Philippeville – after the FSO had assembled the town’s notables and lectured them in Latin – was to release from gaol a certain Giuseppe Moreno, who had convinced us that he was a fervent Gaullist victimised for his pro-Allied stand by the Vichy regime. In reality he was the leader of Algeria’s emigrant branch of the Sicilian Mafia, and under sentence of death for the murder of a rival. The mistake must have been fairly typical.

Readers of this diary of a year in Naples may be surprised at the evidence of lack of supervision of the activities of FS personnel. The degree of semi-independence we in fact enjoyed varied from section to section, reflecting in part the military situation and in part the temperament of the commanding officer, who might have a taste for adventure or be by nature timorous. The FS life was on the whole a free one, sometimes gloriously so. But it was a freedom that could go to the head. Protected by the general confusion both as to their duties and powers, sergeants sent ‘on detachment’ into areas too remote for effective control by their headquarters sometimes became a law unto themselves, engaged in spectacular commercial transactions, involved themselves in tribal intrigue, or even, in one case, married the daughter of a Berber chieftain. Such things were possible in the inaccessible mountains of North Africa, but not in Naples, where there were plenty of adventures, but of a different kind.

My own slight knowledge of Adenese bazaar Arabic kept me occupied with the Arabs of North Africa. First there were visits to the dissident Caïds of Petite Kabylie who were planning the insurrection to come, against their French overlords, and who at that stage would have been happy for Algeria to become a British colony. After that, in Tunisia it was roughly a repeat of the situation, with the involvement this time of the Tunisian royal family. It was while I was engaged in secret conversations with one of its members that the moment came for sections to be reformed for the invasion of Italy. On 1 September 1943 I was posted to 312 FSS who had moved up from Constantine to Oran, and had been temporarily attached to HQ staff of the American Fifth Army. On 5 September we sailed in the Duchess of Bedford, leaving Mers el Kebir to join the invasion convoy bound for Salerno.

1943

September 8

On board Duchess of Bedford off coast of Italy.

It was announced to us at half past six today that an armistice with Italy has been signed and would take effect from tomorrow, when we are due to land at Salerno. It was clear that no one knew what awaited us, although air-raids on part of the convoy make it seem that the Germans are likely to fight on. We were lectured by an Intelligence officer who told us, surprisingly, that despite all the agents we had assumed to be working for us in Italy absolutely no information had come out regarding the situation. It was not even known whether Mussolini’s OVRA still existed. The lecture in fact was purposeless, and could have been summed up in a single sentence: ‘We know nothing.’

Except for us, all the troops in this ship are Americans. Although we were attached to the Headquarters of the American Fifth Army at their own request, because they possessed no security service of their own, we are cold-shouldered and left to our own devices except by some poker-playing sergeants, probably Mississippi ferry boat gamblers in civilian life, who remove my poker winnings accumulated in the past year in a half-hour’s play.

September 9

Landed on ‘Red Beach’, Paestum, at seven o’clock. Boatloads had been going ashore all day after a dawn shelling from the ships and a short battle for the beachhead. Now an extraordinary false serenity lay on the landward view. A great sweep of bay, thinly pencilled with sand, was backed with distant mountains gathering shadows in their innumerable folds. We saw the twinkle of white houses in orchards and groves, and distant villages clustered tightly on hilltops. Here and there, motionless columns of smoke denoted the presence of war, but the general impression was one of a splendid and tranquil evening in the late summer on one of the fabled shores of antiquity.

We hauled the motor cycles off the landing-craft, started them easily, and rode up over the wire-mesh laid across the sand, making for the cover of a wood. The corpses of those killed earlier in the day had been laid out in a row, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, with extreme precision as if about to present arms at an inspection by death. We numbered eleven: ten sergeants and a sergeant-major. Captain Cartwright, the Field Security Officer, badly smashed up in a car crash the day before we embarked, was presumably still in hospital in Oran. We had been given no briefing or orders of any kind, and so far as the Americans were concerned we might as well not have existed. This was the greatest invasion in this war so far – probably the greatest in human history – and the sea was crowded to the horizon with uncountable ships, but we were as lost and ineffective as babes in the wood. No one knew where the enemy was, but the bodies on the beach at least proved he existed. In place of the guns, tanks, armoured cars, barbed wire we had expected to see, all that had been landed in this sector of the beach were pyramids of office equipment for use by Army Headquarters. We had been issued with a Webley pistol and five rounds of ammunition apiece. Most of us had never fired a gun.

As the sun began to sink splendidly into the sea at our back we wandered at random through this wood full of chirping birds and suddenly found ourselves at the wood’s edge. We looked out into an open space on a scene of unearthly enchantment. A few hundred yards away stood in a row the three perfect temples of Paestum, pink and glowing and glorious in the sun’s last rays. It came as an illumination, one of the great experiences of life. But in the field between us and the temple lay two spotted cows, feet in the air. We crept back into the depths of the sheltering wood, burrowed into the undergrowth, and as soon as night fell, slept. At some time during the night I awoke in absolute darkness to the sound of movements through the bushes, then a mutter of voices in which I distinguished German words. The voices died away, and I slept again.

September 10

A warm, calm, morning. We set out to explore a little of our immediate environment and were admiring the splendid husk of the Temple of Neptune when the war came to us in the shape of a single attacking plane. Hearing its approach, we crouched under a lintel. The plane swooped, opened up with its machine-guns, and then passed on to drop a single bomb on the beach before heading off northwards. One of my friends felt a light tap on a pack he was wearing, caused by a spent machine-gun bullet which fell harmlessly to the ground. The experience was on the whole an exhilarating one. We appreciated the contrasts involved and no one experienced alarm.

In our small way we have become seasoned to the hazards of war. Some delicate inbuilt mechanism of the nerves has accepted and acclimatised itself to a relative loss of security, and minor dangers. This happy situation did not apply in the case of some of the American HQ troops we encountered, who were utterly raw and had been shipped out here straight from the eternal peace of places like Kansas and Wisconsin. The state of their nerves constituted a much greater threat than the FW 190 which paid us a visit about once an hour. Armed hillbillies were constantly jumping out from behind a hedge to point their rifles at us and scream a demand for an answer to a password that nobody had bothered to give us.

Our isolation continues. Battles must be going on somewhere, but all we know of them are the rumours picked up when we join the chow-line. At meal times, when the Sergeant-Major tries to talk to any of the HQ staff, he is waved away, so we are free to come and go exactly as we please, and occupy ourselves as we think fit. My own personal isolation is of a more absolute order – an isolation within isolation – for as a newcomer to the section I am unavoidably something of an outsider. These men I have known little more than one week have been through the North Africa campaign together, and whatever their original incompatabilities, they have long since shaken down to form their own little closed society. When trouble comes they lock their shields together, and keep their heads down. For the moment I am very much of a stranger.

September 11

The Fifth Army Headquarters has moved, and we – helplessly parasitic as we are – with it, to Albanella Station, just south of the Sele river. This is set in a delicate fusion of landscapes: apple orchards full of glowing fruit, vineyards, and olive groves haunted by multitudes of brilliant blue grasshoppers. A few hundred yards away both the road and railway line are carried on a bridge over the river. This, somewhat damaged, is under repair by a team of British engineers, and it is assumed that sooner or later we shall cross it to advance. Fifteen miles or so away to the north a greyish bruise on the otherwise faultless sky indicates a conflict of which we see or hear nothing, and which in our perfumed Arcadia seems remote and unreal.

For all that, an uneasy feeling is beginning to grow that the present unnatural calm cannot last, and that the Fifth Army does not altogether realise what it is doing here. There are still no tanks in sight, no artillery but a few ack-ack guns, and no signs of any defences being prepared. The only urgent activity in our neighbourhood is that of hundreds of soldiers streaming like ants to bring typewriters and filing cabinets up from the beach. Those not occupied in this way hang about in desultory street-corner groups, many of them unshaven. We get the impression that they have slight confidence in their leaders and we are frequently asked when we expect Montgomery and the Eighth Army to arrive. Unfortunately Montgomery is still a hundred miles away. So far the only evidence of German interest in our presence here is an occasional visitation by five FW 190s. These cause great alarm but do no damage, as their target is the great armada of ships anchored in the bay.

This afternoon we proceeded with our private exploration of the neighbourhood. We are surrounded by a beautiful desolation. All the farms are abandoned, the trees are heavy with apples, and the ripe tomato crop will soon wither. Unhappy animals mooch about looking for water. Two Americans, tired of their packet K rations containing the ham, cheese, biscuits and sweets that seem so desirable to us, chased after a cow that first galloped, then limped, then staggered as they fired innumerable bullets from their pistols into it. Finally they brought it down and hacked off a hindquarter, with which they departed. We took over an empty farmhouse, littered everywhere with the debris of a hasty departure: articles of clothing strewn about, unmade beds, a pink-cheeked doll on the floor. Italian soldiers who had walked away from the war were plodding along the railway line in their hundreds on their way to their homes in the south. Their feet were usually in terrible shape, with blood sometimes oozing through the cracked leather of their boots; they were in tremendous spirits, and we listened to the trail of their laughter and song all through the day. I spoke to one of these and gave him a few pieces of cheese salvaged from K ration packs jettisoned by the thousand after the candies they contain had been removed. In return he presented me with a tiny scrap of tinselly material torn from a strip he pulled from his pocket. This was from the mantle of a miracle-working Madonna in Pompeii, and by carrying it on my person I would be rendered bulletproof for at least a year. ‘You never know when it might come in handy,’ he said, and I agreed. I thanked him profusely, and we shook hands and parted.

Lining up for chow this evening we were told by Americans belonging to the 45th Division that they have been ordered by their officers not only to take no German prisoners, but to use the butts of their rifles to beat to death those who try to surrender. I find this almost incredible.

September 12

Suddenly, today, the war arrived with a vengeance. We were sitting outside our farmhouse, reading, sunning ourselves and trying to come to terms with the acrid-tasting wine, when we noticed that a rumble of distant cannonades, present from early morning, seemed suddenly to have come closer. Soon after, a line of American tanks went by, making for the battle, and hardly any time passed before they were back, but now there were fewer of them, and the wild and erratic manner in which they were driven suggested panic. One stopped nearby, and the crew clambered out and fell into one another’s arms, weeping. Shortly afterwards there were cries of ‘gas’, and we saw frantic figures wearing gas masks running in all directions.

Chaos and confusion broke out on all sides. The story was that there had been a breakthrough by the 16th Panzer Grenadier Division, which struck suddenly in our direction down the Battipaglia road, with the clear intention of reaching the sea at Paestum, wiping out the Fifth Army HQ, and cutting the beachhead in half.

Rumours began to come in thick and fast, the most damaging one being that General Mark Clark was proposing to abandon the beachhead and had asked the Navy for the Fifth Army to be re-embarked. No one we spoke to believed that this operation was feasible, the feeling being that at the first signs of a withdrawal the Germans would simply roll forward and drive us into the sea.

In view of the general confusion, and the absence of precise information of any kind, Sergeant-Major Dashwood decided to send four members of the Section on their motor cycles to Salerno tomorrow, using a narrow track running along the shore. The hope was that the Field Security Officer might have arrived there by now, and be able to issue the order releasing us from this absurd predicament. It sounded a hazardous adventure for the people concerned, as no one was even quite certain whether or not the Germans had reached the sea at any point between us and the city. They are certainly in solid possession of the main road running parallel with the track.

This afternoon distraught American ack-ack gunners brought down their third Spitfire. This had just flown in from Sicily and, taking off in pursuit of FW 190s, was immediately shot down, while flying at about three hundred feet.

September 14

We are in an olive grove two miles south of Albanella Station. The battle for the beachhead has been going on for twenty hours – all through the day and night. Throughout the afternoon the noise of the bombardment strengthened and drowned the happy chorus of the Italians trudging by incessantly down the railway track on their way home. By nightfall the din was tremendous. German tanks coming down the tongue of land between the Sele and Calore rivers and making for Albanella had reached a point just out of sight of our hastily-dug slit trench, possibly a mile and a half away, where they were taking a pasting from the heavy guns of several battleships anchored just offshore. Every time these opened up with salvoes of fifteen-inch shells our uniforms fluttered in the eddies of blast. To the north a great semicircle of nightscape had taken on a softly pulsating halo spread by a kind of ragged fireworks display, and occasionally a massive explosion opened up like a pink sea-anemone with wavering feelers of fire. At about eleven o’clock an excited American officer dashed up in a jeep. He was distributing light carbines, and we got one apiece with the warning that the failure to return them next day would be treated as a serious military crime. With these weapons, and our 38 Webley pistols we were ordered to assist in the defence of Army Headquarters against the Mark IV and Tiger tanks that were now rolling towards us. What this officer did not tell us was that he and the rest of the officers were quietly pulling out and abandoning their men.

Outright panic now started and spread among the American troops left behind. In the belief that our position had been infiltrated by German infantry they began to shoot each other, and there were blood-chilling screams from men hit by the bullets.

We crouched in our slit trench under the pink, fluttering leaves of the olives, and watched the fires come closer, and the night slowly passed. Then at four o’clock we learned that the Headquarters was to be evacuated after all, and that we were not to be sacrificed. We started up our motor bikes, kept as close as we could to the armoured car that had brought the news, and by God’s mercy avoiding the panic-stricken fire directed from cover at anything that moved, reached this field with its rabble of shocked and demoralised soldiery – officers separated from their men, and men from their officers.

Official history will in due time set to work to dress up this part of the action at Salerno with what dignity it can. What we saw was ineptitude and cowardice spreading down from the command, and this resulted in chaos. What I shall never understand is what stopped the Germans from finishing us off.

September 15

Miraculously Moore, one of the four sergeants sent to Salerno, got back; a hair-raising twelve-mile drive by jeep, round the edge of a battle raging all the way. The FSO had arrived in the town, and we were ordered to leave the motor cycles and do our best to get into the town by any vehicle that might attempt the run and could be persuaded to take us. After much negotiating Dashwood managed to line up a command car, but at the last moment we were told that there was not enough space to take us. Later we saw the command car depart, loaded up with wine. The cannonading has been going on all day but the din is lessening. Confusion is still intense. Many of the men we see wandering about have no idea where their officers are and have not seen them since the German counterattack began.

September 17

Attempts by the remaining section members to reach Salerno having been abandoned, I could find nothing to prevent my taking a sightseeing trip. I therefore motor-cycled up to the hill village of Capaccio, which had always been in sight from the beachhead, presiding with cool if distant charm over the raucous confusion below and representing for me all that was most romantic in the landscape of Southern Italy.

At close quarters its charm was even more pungent; a place of delicately interlocking white masses, and sparkling light. I rode with some caution into a street which could have been almost English, with narrow, picket-fenced front gardens in which grew such recognisable favourites as zinnias and sweet peas. The peace of this place after four days of the racket of warfare was stunning. Two aged women in black gossiped into each other’s ear, and a white-bearded old man, a kind of Italian Father Christmas, spoiled by a crinkling, obsequious smile, sat at a table by his garden gate, selling wine. It was immediately clear that the local belief was that the Germans had gone, never to return, because as soon as he spotted me he held up a notice Vivono gli Alleati. I pulled up, bought a glass of wine which looked and tasted like ink, and asked him whether there were any Germans about, and he put on a hideous smirk. He got up and beckoned to me to follow him into his cottage, where a uniformed man was sprawled, head on his chest, in a deep chair. This was the first German I had seen, and he was dead. Speaking in some local dialect quite inaccessible to me, the old man tried to explain what had happened. He was clearly accepting responsibility for the German’s death, and expected praise and perhaps even a reward. His gestures seemed to claim that he had put poison in the soldier’s wine. I couldn’t decide whether or not this was a piece of sycophantic bluff.

I pushed him aside and went out. A disgusting old fellow, but a reliable barometer, I suspected, of the Germans’ prospects in this particular theatre of war.

September 18

Today in the chow-line we spoke to a paratrooper of the American 509th Parachute Battalion, still numb with resentment following his experiences of the night of the 14th, when he had taken part in the wild and foolish drop of six hundred men sent to disrupt communications in the enemy’s rear. The objective, he said, had been Avellino bridge and tunnel, but some of the planes had made the drop up to twenty-five miles off target, and others had dropped parachutists on the roofs of high buildings in Avellino itself, from which, unable to disentangle themselves from their gear in time, they had fallen to their deaths. Men such as this survivor are bitterly critical of their leadership.

In the afternoon another cautious excursion a mile or two up to the Battipaglia road. Shortly after crossing the Sele bridge, I saw a number of the German tanks which had almost reached us on the night of the 14th, and had been put out of action by the naval shelling. Several of these lay near, or in tremendous craters. In one case the trapped crew had been broiled in such a way that a puddle of fat had spread from under the tank, and this was quilted with brilliant flies of all descriptions and colours.

September 20

We finally got through by jeep to Salerno, but found a battle still going on in the outskirts of the town. German mortar bombs were exploding in the middle of a small square only a hundred yards from Security Headquarters. Here I saw an ugly sight: a British officer interrogating an Italian civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with a chair; treatment which the Italian, his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called in a private of the Hampshires and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, ‘Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?’ The private’s reply was to spit on his hands, and say, ‘I don’t mind if I do, sir.’ The most revolting episode I have seen since joining the forces.

September 21

Having spent all night patrolling the streets of Salerno on the watch for German infiltrators, there was a meeting with Captain Cartwright, his face covered with plaster. The Captain told us that much as he regretted to say that our presence at Paestum served no purpose of any kind, the Section was still officially attached to HQ, American Fifth Army, and a token presence there was essential, so that five of us, including myself, would have to drag ourselves back. Thus, under compulsion, we returned to the lotos-eating life of the beachhead at Paestum. Here we studied the strange bright grasshoppers, we bird-watched, read a little poetry, practised our Italian on fugitive soldiers, studied again the details of the temples, and sometimes strolled to the sea’s edge to watch the great parade of ships, and their magnificent and awful retaliation of fire against the few FW 190s which teased and plagued them with their attacks.

This evening for the first time since the landing we were allowed at last to contribute to the war effort. Someone at Army Headquarters reported suspiciously-flashing lights at night in the village of Castello Castelluccia, and someone else remembered the presence of Intelligence personnel in the camp, so we were sent up to make a stealthy Indian approach through the darkness and catch the supposed spy who was presumed to be signalling to the enemy in the hills. We surrounded the village, waited for the light to begin its flashing and then moved in, only to capture a man with a torch on his way to the single outside latrine, used by the entire village.

September 28

Admitted to the American 16th Evacuation Hospital at Paestum with malaria – possibly a recurrence but more likely a re-infection. I was informed by the doctor that the marshes here are still malarial, and the mosquitoes believed to have put paid to the thriving Greek colony of antiquity, as active as ever. Most of the patients have battle wounds, and from several of these I received confirmation of the story I found so hard to believe, that American combat units were ordered by their officers to beat to death Germans who attempted to surrender to them. These men seem very naïve and childlike, but some of them are beginning to question the ethics of this order. One man who surrendered to a German tank crew was simply stripped of his weapons and turned loose because he could not be carried in the tank, and as a result he is naturally a propagandist for what he accepts as the general high standard of German humanity. Another, more lastingly indoctrinated, has announced his intention of strangling the only wounded German in the ward, an eighteen-year-old Panzer Grenadier, as soon as he, the American, has the strength to get out of bed. However, the Panzer Grenadier, cheerful and chirpy despite a bad wound, and with enough of a command of English to display an unabashed sense of humour, is making friends all round and rapidly consolidating his position.

This tentful of men – and there must be at least two hundred of them – are a very mixed bag. One, a lay-preacher in civilian life, conducted the nearest possible thing to revivalist prayer meetings in a situation where all members of the congregation were on their backs, and a proportion had tubes feeding into their nostrils or sticking out of the walls of their stomachs. A great deal of hymn-singing went on in competition with bawdy choruses of the Eskimo Nell variety, and there were frequent ecstatic shouts of ‘Bless you, brother, are you saved?’ and ‘Halleluja!’

A tremendous cannonading by a battery of 105 howitzers in a field a couple of hundred yards away went on through the day, and most of the night. In the end most patients got used to this and were no longer disturbed by the crash of nocturnal salvoes. Yet so finely attuned are the nerves to danger that even in a deep sleep I was awakened instantly by the faint, distant whine of shells from German 88s as they passed high overhead on their way to the ships in the bay.

October 3

A gale of the kind no one ever expects of Italy blew down our tent in the middle of the night. Pitch darkness, hammering rain, the suffocating weight of waterlogged canvas over mouth and nostrils, muffled cries from all directions. A lake of water flooded in under the beds, and gradually rose to the level of the bottom of the mattress. It was several hours before we could be rescued. All my kit stowed under the bed was lost, and only my camera and notebooks in the drawer of the bedside table survived. One patient was killed by the main tent-pole falling across his bed.

October 4

Discharged from hospital and kitted out temporarily as an American private with bucket helmet, hip-clinging trousers and gaitered boots, I picked up a lift in an American truck going in the direction of Naples, which had fallen three days before, and where I supposed the section would already be installed. At Battipaglia it was all change, with an opportunity for a close-quarters study of the effects of the carpet bombing ordered by General Clark. The General has become the destroying angel of Southern Italy, prone to panic, as at Paestum, and then to violent and vengeful reaction, which occasioned the sacrifice of the village of Altavilla, shelled out of existence because it might have contained Germans. Here in Battipaglia we had an Italian Guernica, a town transformed in a matter of seconds to a heap of rubble. An old man who came to beg said that practically nobody had been left alive, and that the bodies were still under the ruins. From the stench and from the sight of the flies streaming like black smoke into, and out of, the holes in the ground, this was entirely believable. No attempt had even been made to clear the streets of relics of the successful strike. So much so that while standing by the truck talking to the old man I felt something uneven under one foot, shifted my position, and then glancing down realised that what had at first seemed to be a mass of sacking was in fact the charred and flattened corpse of a German soldier.