Lull At Cassino

Matthew Parker*

[Background: At Monte Castellone, a peak on the massif above Cassino town and Monte Cassino Abbey, in central Italy on the German's defensive Gustav Line which sits athwart the Allies' path to Rome, the Germans have lauched a counterattack to regain this piece of high ground. Their assault has been repelled.]

The next day, 13 February [1944], the German regimental commander sent an English-speaking officer to ask the Americans for a truce in which the Germans could pick up their dead. The break in the fighting was arranged for between 8 and 10 A.M. on the next day, St. Valentine's Day, and the American chosen to administer it was Lt. Col. Hal Reese. Having made the grim journey up the mountain, past dead soldiers of both sides, he arrived minutes before the truce was due to take place. At that moment a white flag appeared on the German lines, and Reese and the battalion commander started off down into the valley, carrying a small Stars and Stripes. At a plateau they found two Germans who had a Red Cross flag. A third German was watching from behind a bush. It was a strange and tense battlefield encounter, and Reese found himself interpreting in spite of his rusty German. A group of Germans assembled, and one said he was from Koblenz and remembered American soldiers being stationed there at the end of the First World War. Reese said he had been one of those Americans, and, faced with German skepticism, he pulled out an old ID card with a picture of himself taken in the town in January 1919. Soon they were all pulling out wallets and showing photographs of parents, wives and children. A camera came out and new photographs were taken.

All the while, German stretcher bearers were busily moving their dead back to their lines. Reese spotted two men carrying interesting-looking heavy packs going into a clump of bushes about two hundred yards away in the direction of Monte Cassino. Smiling, one of the Germans engaged Reese in conversation again, moving closer to impede his view. The truce was then extended by half an hour as the Germans struggled to collect all their dead, and Reese and the other officer sat down in no-man's-land in full visibility in order to assure the Germans that the truce was still on. When Reese got out his binoculars and started to scan the hills behind the German lines, he heard the ping of a bullet, and then another, nearer. "Colonel," said Reese's companion, "I don't think they like us using those glasses on them." They then checked their watches: five minutes to go. It was time to get behind their own lines again.

*"Monte Cassino". (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 142-144.

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