BY ROGER SMITH
Extracts from the book
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Flies and worse in the Western Desert
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A peculiar addiction to Irish lyrics
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Burying the dead Tebaga Gap
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British Army at a minefield near Sfax,
Tunisia
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The countryside near Sousse, Tunisia
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The Padre's tools of trade
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A minefield near Takrouna, Tunisia
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Kelly in Cairo
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Housekeeping in a two-man bivvy in the
rain Sangro, Italy
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Falling asleep on duty Sangro
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Kelly dies at
the Sangro River
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Civilians caught in the frontline
Castel Frantano, Italy
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Getting sadness off your chest
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Giant drunken zooming fireflies
Alife, Italy
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Christmas 1943
back from the front
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Maori Battalion,
Trocchio, Italy
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Fear, and fear of fear Cassino,
Italy
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A break from Cassino
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All in a days work in the Cassino
rubble
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There for your
mate at the finish Terelle, Italy
=>
Place an order for UP THE BLUE |
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FEAR AND FEAR OF FEAR CASSINO,
ITALY |
As the sky paled to the breaking of a steely winter dawn,
the signal came. The company shook itself out, platoon by platoon, and we went down to the
road that skirted the shoulder behind Cassino. Forward we marched cold, wet, wary
and apprehensive. Rain had fallen during the night and the road was sloshy underfoot. We
marched with our shoulders hunched against the raw wind, half crouched with stomachs drawn
in to try and compress the disquiet of fear that seemed to knot intestines like a balled
fist. Fear, fear of fear, and the shame of feeling afraid. That merciless enemy born of
memory and imagination that can twist your mind until your body shrinks with the tingle of
apprehension. Your palms sweat. Your arm involuntarily flinches at a remembered vision,
flashed on your inner retina, of a gory sleeve with a severed arm beside it, still
twitching on the sand. Is any man immune? Can anyone face the imminent danger of violent
death or deformity with complacency? To be disembowelled by a clamouring blast of shell
fire, to be chopped in half by streaming squirt of Spandau, to be maimed and torn by a
bayonet through your groin or grenade between your legs, to be blinded, to be hunted, to
be shot at and to hunt and shoot in return, to suddenly find yourself a raging
berserk crouched over a lashing tommy gun, mad with the desire to kill. That is the worst
of all where lies the glory in such horror?
Yet above it all, rising through the agony and terror of slaughter, one can meet men who
possess a calm and gentle serenity that brings courage to all about them. Though I make
allowances for the fact that I am an arrant coward with an over-fertile imagination, I
must assume that others, being mortal, feel as I do. That others also have no wish to have
their legs crudely amputated from the navel by an S mine. Realising all this,
I am the more amazed by great acts of bravery performed in the midst of terror. Acts
worthily honoured by the highest decorations in the land, other acts unhonoured and
unsung, the glory of which remain as a source of wonder forever. So it seems glory and
horror must drive hand-in-hand, as do life and death the elemental opposites.
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