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backs, their bones, and nearly their spirits,” the American historian Rick Atkinson has written. “All roads lead to Rome,” said Alexander ruefully, “but all the roads are mined.” Booby traps and antipersonnel devices inflicted a steady toll of casualties. “A man’s foot is usually blown loose at the ankle,” a U.S. Army doctor noted, “leaving the mangled foot dangling on shredded tendons. Additional puncture wounds of both legs and groin make the agony worse.” Evacuating casualties from the mountains was a nightmare task, four men being required to carry each stretcher. The Germans created imaginative obstacles: north of the Sangro, they felled a half-mile-long line of roadside poplars. Before Allied armour could pass, these had to be cleared by bulldozers at the rate of one tree an hour.

Most men’s memories of the campaign were dominated not by the sun and natural beauty with which popular imagination endowed Italy, but by the horror of winter conditions. “The ground for fifty yards outside is MUD—six inches deep, glistening, sticky, holding pools of water,” gunner officer John Guest wrote home. “Great excavations in the mud, leaving miniature alps of mud, show where other tents have been pitched in the mud, and moved on account of the mud to other places in the mud. The cumulative psychological experience of mud … cannot be described. Vehicles grind along the road beneath in low gear. Either side … is a bank of mud, thigh-deep. The sides collapse frequently and the huge trucks, like weary prehistoric animals, slide helplessly down into the ditches … My men stand in the gun-pits stamping their feet in the wet, their heads sunk in the collars of greatcoats. When they speak to you they roll their eyes up because it makes their necks cold to raise their heads. Everyone walks with their arms out to help them keep their balance.” In November, the Canadian soldier Farley Mowat wrote from Italy to a friend in Britain: “I hate to disillusion you about the climate, but it must be the worst in the whole bloody world. It either burns the balls off you in summer, or freezes them off in winter. In between, it rots them off with endless rain. The only time I’m comfortable is in my sleeping bag, wearing woollen battledress and burrowed under half a dozen extra blankets.”

The U.S. battalion commander Lt. Col. Jack Toffey, a hero of the Italian campaign, mused aloud about how to develop his men’s killing instincts, to instil in them the tigerish lust to close with the enemy which alone could win battles: “Our boys aren’t professionals, and you have to condition them to enjoy killing.” By November, more than half the soldiers whom Toffey led ashore had become casualties. Another American likened fighting in Italy to “climbing a ladder with an opponent stamping on his hands at every rung.” The combat artist George Biddle wrote: “I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire … cold, wet, hungry, homesick and frightened.”

By 1 December, seventeen Allied divisions were deployed against thirteen German ones. The invaders enjoyed overwhelming air support, but this was of limited assistance in winter weather against defenders deeply dug into the mountains. In the four battles of Monte Cassino, fifty miles south of Rome, between January and May 1944, bombing destroyed one of the great medieval monasteries of Europe without significantly furthering the ground advance. The Allied armies, which now comprised a remarkable conglomeration of British, American, French, New Zealand, Polish, Canadian and Indian troops, displayed courage and fortitude in conditions resembling those of the Eastern Front, or of Flanders in World War I, but their sacrifices achieved little. Poor generalship and ill-coordinated attacks, together with German skill and intractable terrain, caused the failure of assault after assault. France’s Gen. Alphonse Juin was the only Allied commander to emerge from the mountain campaigns with