Winter at Monte Cassino

Editor’s Introduction

Washington D.C. December 2011

I ONLY became aware of the existence of Patricia Hampton’s wartime memoir in early 2011, while researching a T.V. documentary I was planning to make about the Allied Italian Campaign of the Second World War. Considered by most a forgotten one, indeed many of its participants immodestly labeled themselves D-Day Dodgers, it was a campaign that still fascinated me, and seemed worthy of far better treatment than it had received. Beginning with their landings there south of Naples in September 1943, it marked the first time an American army had helped confront a German one on the European mainland, and would eventually become the longest single continuous land action fought by any American forces in the whole War. Mired in argument before it even began however, the campaign would also become the most costly in human terms fought by Britain or America in that war, and would witness a troublingly large number of controversies that have perplexed all who have since studied it. Chief amongst these, and for many the most indefensible Allied act of the whole land war in Europe, was their deliberate destruction of the Benedictine Monastery at Monte Cassino in early 1944. The most massive and treasured Catholic abbey in the Christian world, it was reduced to rubble in three days of Allied air and artillery attacks employing more explosive ordinance than has ever been directed at one building in the history of warfare.

The claims and counter-claims surrounding this dreadful act began almost before the bombing had finished. Our side was quick to explain that the Abbey was occupied by German artillery observers, and that German soldiers were clearly seen trying to escape it as bombs rained down on them from all sides. The head of the German Army in Italy however, the local commander of their forces in the sector, and the Vatican herself, all decried the act, and just as publicly denied there was ever anyone inside, other than the Abbot, his monks, and an indeterminate number of war refugees. To make matters more problematical, in the days following the bombing no Allied general could produce any evidence there ever were Germans inside, and nor have any since. Most unfathomably of all perhaps, no informed military observer, including the Allied general who approved the bombing, has ever come up with a convincing explanation of why destroying it made military sense anyway, even if there had been Germans inside.

Anyone who has studied military history is of course only too aware that the recollections of generals rarely provide a balanced assessment of their own wartime actions. Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars inaugurated the tradition of the self-serving military memoir, and to varying extents most commanders who have followed him have emulated, if never quite surpassed, his utter lack of self-objectivity. Nor for that matter are official military histories much more trustworthy as regards the actions of their country’s armies. That was a trend begun just after the First World War by every country who participated in it, and has also been continued ever since. But usually both they and their generals’ memoirs can at least be relied on to outline why the tactical steps that were taken in any campaign were at least thought at the time to make some sort of sense. Not so with the bombing of Monte Cassino Abbey though, and the many questions these histories and memoirs left unanswered then have remained so to this day. Even if honestly mistaken, did the Allies really think there were Germans inside the Abbey? Even if there had been, why did they feel compelled to bomb it if, as even they seem to all agree, the act was devoid of logic? Regardless of the answer to either of those, why did they feel it necessary not just to bomb it, but completely obliterate it? Beyond the issue of possible German occupation, exactly how many civilians did anyone believe were in the Abbey when it was bombed, or did no-one think that worth much consideration either? Finally, and most disturbingly of all, why was it so many members of the Allied press and so many Allied soldiers cheered to the rafters when they watched the Abbey’s destruction, for cheer they apparently did, even the most Catholic of them, as their diaries and letters freely attest.

Surprisingly though, given the fertile possibilities this controversy seemed to provide, no documentary film-maker had ever taken on the fate of Monte Cassino Abbey and its occupants as a subject worthy of any comprehensive treatment. Certainly there were parts of larger documentary series dealing with the whole Second World War that had included coverage of the Italian Campaign, but then it had to be treated in some fashion, as a quarter of the Medals of Honor awarded to U.S. Army personnel in that War was won by those serving in it. Even still, to the extent these documentaries mentioned the arguments surrounding the Abbey’s bombing at all, they seemed to be included more for comprehensiveness’ sake, than in any honest attempt to explain why such a dreadful and apparently senseless event could ever have been allowed to happen. Instead, its annihilation was invariably dismissed as a predictable by-product of a horrendous period of our history for whose onset Germany was exclusively to blame. And even if revisionist commentators might subsequently decry it as an utterly egregious act, so what, when the enemy had committed infinitely more and far worse ones?

For myself though, I found such explanations morally dismissive, and professionally wanting. Sure, the Germans were responsible for by far the vast majority of the atrocities that occurred throughout Europe during the War, but not every single one of them. So we Allies shouldn’t be above holding ourselves to account for those where we might have been. And on the surface at least, willfully destroying the most cherished icon of Catholicism outside the Vatican appeared to qualify as one of those. This seemed especially the case, given that the Allied Command in Italy had made it clear on many occasions that such buildings had to be left undamaged unless military necessity dictated otherwise. Indeed for the most part the German Army in Italy did likewise, and in spite of their otherwise reprehensible scorched earth policy as they withdrew north, this rarely included any structure of a religious nature. Yet for some reason the Allied Command suddenly decided Monte Cassino’s wholesale destruction was such a military necessity. I wanted to know why, and like most documentarians egotistic enough to fancy they carried a sacred public trust, I believed the world should know too.

Perhaps in retrospect though, a wiser egotistic documentarian might still have reflected more carefully on why so many of his predecessors turned their back on this seemingly fascinating subject. Perhaps he might also have wondered why all those Allied generals and official campaign historians seemed lost for any intelligent explanation of why it happened either. But no, just like the Trojans, I chose not to be wary of Greeks bearing gifts. So anxious to get my documentary off the ground before any of my colleagues belatedly woke up to its potential, I approached all the military and historical archives in the United States and Europe for their assistance in obtaining the large amounts of official material I presumed was still buried away on the subject, and with the passage of time should be becoming more freely available. For good measure, I also made an appeal in a number of U.S. and British history magazines seeking interviews with, or the as yet unpublished private papers or diaries of, any retired soldiers who had participated in the Italian Campaign itself.

It was in response to this appeal that a few months later I received a telephone call from a Ms. Elyse Ryan. I remember the day well. It was wet and gray, and by this time so was my mood. I had made many documentaries and written several books during the previous years about aspects of U.S. military history, and prided myself I knew my way round the public and private institutions where most of the documents dealing with it were lodged. I even knew many of the staff who worked in them and pretty much without exception had found them cooperative to a fault in responding to any legitimate historical enquiry I made. This time however matters had already been proving different, very different in fact. It wasn’t that they were no longer cooperative, or that all of a sudden cited secrecy restrictions no-one had ever invoked before. Nor was it that they didn’t respond to my letters and telephone enquiries. No, it was far more as if those many archives were all strangely bare of anything that bore thoughtfully on the subject of Monte Cassino at all.

For those of you less familiar with the history of the U.S. military, you should understand that apart from being instruments of war, American armies in the field are also paper machines, so constructed to supply the primary material on which subsequent official U.S. military histories rely. But this time there didn’t seem to be any hitherto unread trove of forms and documents, and all those battle orders, combat action reports and assessments I could obtain for other campaigns, were noticeably far less available for this one. Worse still, the few papers those institutions could find that treated the monastery’s destruction were equally evasive to the point of doublespeak about its cause. Indeed their explanations were eerily reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when even that superb author’s powers of vocabulary left him at the point he had Kurtz explain the evil inside his own soul, and he had to settle instead for having Kurtz merely repeat ‘the horror, the horror.’

To compound my problems further, I had learned that sadly few of the soldiers who had witnessed the Abbey’s destruction were still alive. Meanwhile those who had recorded their experiences of watching its end, all seemed to agree that beyond the incredible spectacle it provided, its most memorable aspect was the universal satisfaction it evoked. And on the question of how many monks and civilians were in the Abbey when that end came, there was nothing but confusion too. One Italian civilian reported seeing as many as fifteen hundred inside in the days before the bombing, but only the remains of just over a hundred were found afterwards in the rubble. Even allowing for the hundred or so everyone agreed had escaped after the first day of bombing, what happened to all the rest? So as I say, faced with the increasing suspicion that I was developing a documentary about an event whose circumstance was shrouded in impenetrable mystery, I probably wasn’t on my best form the day Ms. Elyse Ryan called.

She was, I remember, very well prepared for what she had to say to me, and given to short declarative sentences that brooked little room for misinterpretation or disagreement. With the benefit of hindsight that alone should have put me on my guard about who exactly she was. But it didn’t, so I wasn’t on my guard, and as soon as she’d satisfied herself she’d reached exactly the person she wished to, she informed me she was the niece of a Miss Patricia Hampton and had in her possession a memoir Miss Hampton had written that dealt specifically with the fate of Monte Cassino Abbey.

What do you mean deals specifically with it? I enquired, without feeling very excited about any answer I was liable to get.

Your appeal said you wanted to work out who was to blame for it being bombed, didn’t it? she answered.

And who does Miss Hampton think that was?

Her.

Her?

That’s what she believed.

Not the Germans, the British, the French, the Poles, the New Zealanders the Americans, or anyone else that was in the vicinity at the time, just her? I asked.

Not just her alone maybe, but to a considerable extent her.

And why did she manage to conclude that?

The butterfly effect.

Isn’t that something about little flapping wings in the Amazon causing meteorological chaos somewhere else?

More scientifically put, it concerns the extent to which small changes in one part of a closed system can subsequently create massively larger instability much farther away.

And this massive instability was an abbey being obliterated?

Yes.

And this Patricia Hampton was the butterfly whose wings caused it?

Because of something she did one evening some years before.

What kind of something?

Her memoir explains that far better than I can.

And how did you come by it, this memoir of hers? I asked, not because I was really interested in that either, because frankly the whole thing was already sounding more than a little bizarre. No, it was more because that seemed like the nice thing to say to a woman of clearly advanced years, who in her own way might only be trying to be helpful.

I found it in a musette bag Patricia used to own, Elyse answered.

A U.S. military officer’s backpack?

In the home of my Aunt Margaret, after she died in the early 1980’s.

Patricia died or Aunt Margaret did?

Aunt Margaret did. She was Patricia’s older sister. I was too upset about her death to do any more than just flip through the bag’s contents at the time, so I locked it away without really reading any of it. I was very close to Aunt Margaret, you see.

I’m sorry, I responded lamely, while still admiring her deft playing of the sympathy card, and wondering if that could possibly be a clue to why she’d called in the first place.

She was very instrumental in bringing me up after my mother died, she continued.

Very deft playing of that card indeed, I mused. You were an orphan? I said, preparatory to announcing I had just remembered an appointment I had to leave for.

I don’t really care for that word. It seems awfully self-pitying, doesn’t it?

Okay, so maybe she was a little less crass than I’d given her credit for. Not when it’s the truth, I answered with sufficient feigned empathy to salve my momentarily fragile conscience.

Aunt Margaret had never married, and had no children of her own. She always wanted one, you see, a child I mean. Patricia was right about that at least.

A sad story indeed I thought, maybe true, maybe contrived, who knows? But just in case it was true, better to frame any response in as suitably charitable a way as that truth would warrant. After all, it wasn’t impossible that this memoir could somehow prove more relevant than right now it was appearing to. She sounds like quite a woman, your aunt, I said as I still looked at my wall clock and wondered how long this heart-wrenching prologue was going to drag on before getting to its point, always assuming it had one.

In their different ways they both were, she and Patricia, even though they both had a different mother.

For the moment I decided not to pursue, that familial complication, and instead stick to the main issue, again supposing there was one. But if you haven’t properly read it, this memoir from inside this musette bag, how do you know it’s even about the destruction of the monastery?

"When I heard about your appeal, I remembered its title, Winter at Monte Cassino. So I dug it back out and did read it, properly this time. And you ought to as well."

I should, I suppose, admit right up front that being little more open-minded than any average white, self-enshrined, progressive male, I had already about decided I didn’t want to read it. For while fully willing to accept that in this day and age there are correctly far fewer subjects that should not be as much the province of women’s opinions as men’s, that didn’t mean there weren’t any. And just like the complexities of baseball’s infield fly rule, the inscrutabilities of military history were something the fairer sex might still care to leave to us boys. That’s what I thought anyway, but Elyse’s voice was an intriguingly insistent one, so I resisted cutting her short and sighed, Why don’t you tell me something about how Patricia came to write this memoir of hers.

She and Margaret began it on a hospital ship that left Italy for London on June 6, 1944, just after Patricia had been discharged from Fifth Army Command there.

You realize what happened on June 6, 1944?

I’m not an idiot, you know. It was the date of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France. D-Day we usually call it.

And when was this memoir finished?

It was redrafted in London, where Aunt Margaret worked as a lawyer at the U.S. Army Judge Advocate’s Office.

And what was Patricia doing at Fifth Army Command in Italy in the first place? I enquired.

She was a lieutenant in the historical section there, a photographer actually.

Hardly a position that puts one close to where decisions were made, particularly decisions to flatten the most beloved abbey in Europe.

If she’d just been any old photographer, you might be right. But she wasn’t. She was brought over there specially, to do a very particular job for someone. Someone she was very close to.

And who was that someone?

Fifth Army’s commanding general.

And the job he brought her over to do?

Her memoir explains that better than I can.

Can you at least tell me why she was discharged, or do I have to read the memoir to find that out too?

For conduct unbecoming an officer, Elyse replied.

And what aspect of her conduct qualified as that?

That’s in the memoir as well.

Look Ms. Ryan, I should tell you I’m familiar with all of the secondary sources written about the Italian Campaign and none reference any memoir by any Lieutenant Patricia Hampton.

Because it was never published.

Why not, if it’s the eye-opener you seem to think it is?

There was something else in the musette bag too, Elyse whispered, Something which explains that.

By now a more reliable image was developing in my mind’s eye of the woman at the other end of the phone, one that evoked distinctly less empathy. Widowed, retired, lonely and bored, and probably on a heavy diet of sedatives, she would have grey hair done up in a ball, wear glasses and a faded print dress, and be sitting in a rocking chair in some nursing home with a cocktail of her daily pills lying at the ready beside her, and maybe a strong gin and tonic too. She might even have had her knitting in her lap, and have read a few too many police procedurals for her own good; maybe too many torrid Harlequin romances as well. In between she liked nothing better than idling away her empty hours by playing with other people’s minds, people who were not retired, and did not need pills or gin and tonics, and had a lot better things to do than be on the other end of her call. Maybe she also made a hobby of pretending she had information about lots of the world’s imponderables. I’ll bet she’d even seen a few flying saucers in her time, maybe had even been abducted by one, knew who D.B. Cooper really was, and heaven forbid who carved all those strange statues on Easter Island.

But then again maybe if she was so very lonely this kind of conversation was all she really had to look forward to, so she was deserving of at least a little… distraction. And what was that something else in the bag that explains why it was never published? I’d said before I could help myself.

A letter.

To who?

To whom, she responded pointedly, considerably too pointedly for my taste, and my attempts at sympathy notwithstanding, my imagined portrait of her all of a sudden took on more detail, increasingly pejorative detail. Here wasn’t just any old retiree at all. Here was for sure a former English teacher.

Alright, to whom? I said trying to keep any defensiveness out my voice, especially as I realized she was correct.

To me obviously.

And who wrote this letter?

Aunt Margaret of course.

Aunt Margaret who was Patricia’s older sister?

Don’t be condescending. It’s a very unattractive trait too.

I didn’t mean to be. I just-

I didn’t notice the letter when I first flipped through the bag. There were quite a lot of other odds and ends in it. But I sure noticed it this time.

I looked at my watch, shook my head, depressed the speaker button, placed the phone on its cradle, put my feet up on my desk, started going through some other papers, and said absently, So what did this letter say? But alas I apparently said it a little too absently for my own good.

It’s not considered polite to do that either, you know.

Do what?

Put someone on a telephone speaker without asking their permission. It gives the impression you’ve better things to do than listen properly to them.

I sighed yet again, took my feet off the desk, dutifully picked the phone back up and muttered, I was just getting a refill of coffee.

And pigs can fly, she said.

Okay, so maybe she wasn’t just any old retired English teacher either. Odds were fast shortening she was also of the especially virulent spinster variety, the pushy sort who’d never married and lived only for their work. Worse still, she was probably an ex-nun, Irish maybe, who made unsuspecting young men carry her luggage through airports whether they wanted to or not. And deep down she yearned for the good old days when the air was clean and sex was dirty and corporal punishment wasn’t illegal. Because equally deep down she loved nothing better than whacking around young communicants in short skirts and long white socks when they messed up reciting their catechism, or whatever else it was the private Catholic school where she worked believed they should be able to recite.

Margaret’s letter to me said that the final version of the memoir was submitted to the U.S. War Department for approval, just before Patricia returned to France in fall of 1944 as a civilian war correspondent. And then was never seen or heard of again.

Patricia was?

The final version of the memoir was.

And how come your Aunt Margaret even knew there was a final version?

She helped type it.

I don’t want to seem rude but-

That’s called apophasis, you know.

What is?

What you’re about to do.

And what’s that?

Create the effect of saying something exceptionally critical by announcing you’re not going to mention it. It’s a favorite device of cheap T.V. interviewers who’re not interested in what you really think but only what they can get you to say.

Is that right.

Courtroom lawyers love using it too, especially the ambulance-chasing variety.

Look. I know you mean well but-

That’s not polite either. You don’t know what I mean yet, well or otherwise.

So what else did Aunt Margaret’s letter say?

That she was pretty sure our military still preferred there be no public record of the things Patricia saw, so I should on no account let them know about the bag’s contents.

And why would the military prefer that?

Because of how embarrassing it would have been if everyone understood what really happened.

And what did really happen?

Her memoir explains that.

I sighed for the umpteenth time and this sigh she just had to have heard. Whoever or whatever nice Elyse was, she was also a master of bait and switch, and the catch she was currently baiting and switching, me, was about to be reeled in whether I cared for it or not. And Margaret never kept a copy of the final version of this memoir?

Patricia took it back to France with her. But when she disappeared it did too.

Disappeared where?

In occupied Berlin in late 1945.

You’re not suggesting the two events were connected, the potentially embarrassing nature of the memoir and Patricia’s disappearance?

That’s what Aunt Margaret wondered.

Isn’t it possible Aunt Margaret was being just a little paranoid?

That’s the problem with people who think mental illness can’t ever happen to them.

What is?

You assume being followed can’t either.

I remember being silent for a moment, while I thumbed through some copies of the many letters I’d written to those normally cooperative military archives, seeking this document or that, and the many answers I’d received all saying there never was any such document. Even I began to wonder whether some sort of historical dissembling, intentional or otherwise, could have been going on.

You know every U.S. field army we had in the Second World War had a historical section? Elyse interrupted.

It was there to chronicle the events surrounding that army’s activities. For posterity as they say.

Did you know Fifth Army’s reported to its head of Public Relations?

That would have been very unusual.

But a good way to ensure no document ever leaked out that might describe something unsavory.

What kind of unsavory?

Like why Monte Cassino came to be bombed at all.

For the first time I found myself wondering if maybe it wasn’t just my good luck that no-one else had ever got a program on this subject off the ground before. Maybe it was because they couldn’t, and I was in the process of finding out why not.

At least look at Patricia’s photographs. Then maybe that’ll persuade you to read the memoir. Some of them are very… illuminating.

And supposing I do find them… illuminating?

Maybe you could reconstruct the final version of Patricia’s memoir.

What final version?

It needs a little editing.

What makes you think I know the first thing about memoir editing?

You’ve edited a number of diaries of Second World War soldiers. I checked.

Did you, indeed?

And did a very good job of it.

Thank you.

So will you or won’t you read it?

Exactly what kind of shape is this memoir in?

It’s an incomplete draft, and a lot of what Patricia says in it is not always properly explained. But her journal was also in the bag, and all her notes and some books she referred to. She gave them all to Margaret when she went to France, and Margaret brought them to Washington when she came back here. It should be easier for someone who knows a lot about that period of history to recreate it. And you do know a lot about that period, don’t you?

Right now I’m not sure if anyone does.

And if you can recreate it, maybe now we can get it published.

Is that what this is all about? Getting this memoir published?

Do you know how many schoolteachers still believe the United States declared war on Italy straight after Pearl Harbor?

Actually they declared war on us. Same as Germany did.

Well it’s high time America learned a little more about that War, about the things that really happened in it, like they should about the rest of our history.

Look I don’t want to sound Victorian but… I stopped myself in mid sentence and laughed. I guess that was about to be more apophasis, eh?

Maybe you should become a lawyer too.

Is that what you were?

You were mentioning something about not wanting to sound Victorian?

What makes you think the recollections of a non-combatant female is likely to shed any reliable light on this campaign? Even if she was a well-connected one?

What makes you think she was a non-combatant?

It was illegal in those days to put women anywhere near the firing line.

How’d you know she didn’t just go there anyway? Same as Dorothy Lawrence did.

Who’s Dorothy Lawrence?

That’s in her memoir too. And anyway, what difference does it make whether she did or didn’t? You’ve never been in combat either.

You’ve checked that as well?

And that fact didn’t seem to stop you thinking you could shed reliable light on Monte Cassino’s truths.

I was being handled I realized now, not by any old woman in a rocking chair, smiling and sipping mother’s ruin. No, this old girl was something else. And she was doing such a masterful job of it I had difficulty even being mad at her. Can I ask you a personal question, Ms. Ryan?

You can stop calling me Ms. too. I’m not one of those bra-burning types.

Then what type are you?

You’re right. I used to be a lawyer too, like Aunt Margaret.

So if you used to be a lawyer what are you now?

You should really broaden your horizons, you know. You’re spending far too much time buried in your researches.

I’ll read this memoir of yours if you tell me?

We shouldn’t have to make any deal, you know. After all there are only nine of us, so you could at least pay us the complement of remembering our names.

Nine who?

Actually eight at the moment, till they fill the missing seat.

Then it hit me. Good God. You’re Justice Elyse Ryan of the U.S. Supreme Court.

So will I have the musette bag sent to your home?

You really care about this, don’t you? Far more than just teaching America some history lesson?

And so should you.

Care to tell me why?

Lots of reasons.

Explain just one.

There were people murdered in that Abbey, innocent people. And we were willing to murder a lot more to be rid of it forever.

What do you mean murdered?

Deprived of their life without necessary legal sanction, what do you think I mean? That concept does still apply in war you know. No-one has the right to excuse anything they want as unavoidable collateral damage, us included.

Even if I look at this material that doesn’t mean I agree to edit it.

Duly noted.

My house, have it delivered here. No doubt you’ve already got the address.

Of course.

And what did you mean when you said be rid of the place forever?

Just read her memoir, please. And then you’ll understand. Then there was nothing but silence for a few moments from the other end of the phone until, I have to go. Thank you for helping. And keep me in touch, okay?

Tell me one last thing, would you?

What’s that?

You can’t by any chance explain baseball’s infield fly rule too?

She chuckled then responded, My husband has season tickets for the Nationals.

The phone went dead, and the musette bag duly arrived within the hour by courier, with Elyse’s home and cell phone numbers attached. The bag was heavier than I thought it would be, and I sat down on the floor, opened it, and piece by piece pulled out its contents. And as I did I realized this wasn’t just something full of odds and ends at all. This was full of the secrets of the most important event in someone’s life. In fact it was that someone’s life. And I realized too, that this someone wasn’t just one of the nameless thousands of soldiers that we military historians are apt to treat as inanimate statistics as we practice our trade. No, this was an individual with an existence as valuable to her as the most senior general’s in anyone’s army could ever have been to him, an existence that had hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears as strongly felt as my own. And soon it was to become the most important thing in my life to find out who this someone really was, and to understand what it was she had seen, or been told, or felt, or simply feared, that made her write what she had.

I pulled out some of the books first, a Catholic bible, a copy of Homer’s Odyssey, Plutarch’s Life of Julius Caesar, Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, Karl Maria von Clausewitz’ On War, and a well-thumbed treasury of English poetry with ‘Property of F. Anstruther-Darlington’ written on the inside. There were over a dozen books in total, even a German-language copy of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s remarkable Christian devotional Nachfolge. There was also a scrapbook full of neatly glued photos and newspaper clippings, all of the American officer who became the commander of U.S. Fifth Army. There was even a set of lecture notes in what seemed to be the same hand as Patricia’s journal. Further down there was an oversized pink hot water bottle with a rubber duck’s head for a stopper, and a folded-up charcoal drawing of a girl in military fatigues sitting on top of a large German railway gun. Scrawled underneath was a caption that said – ‘They had Anzio Annie but we had Terrifying Trixie!’ It was signed with the name ‘Bill M.’ and under it were of all things a number of boxes of unused condoms. Condoms I thought, side by side with a bible and two such devout contemplations of Catholic faith as Bonhoeffer and Thomas à Kempis? But then it was war-time wasn’t it, world war-time indeed, and even I who had never been near the firing line, could guess that maybe different standards obtained then.

Finally, there were also hundreds upon hundreds of black and white photographs, all carefully tied up with ribbons, and with the date they were taken on the back. There were photographs of soldiers of all uniforms, and of civilians, of buildings, of destruction, of suffering and hardship, and even some of what looked like a volcanic eruption. And every single photo was captured with a sensitivity and feel I had never seen in any other photographer’s work before. Finally, in a little semi-disguised document compartment in the floor of the bag, there was a small, scarred metal grave plate that read – ‘Ansel Hampton September 1, 1885 – May 10, 1939 & Maria Hampton February 6, 1891 – May, 10 1939.’

But Elyse was right, it was some of those photos that really caught my attention more than anything, particularly one of a German general whom I recognized immediately. How on earth could anyone on our side ever have had the opportunity to take one of him? Sure he was stationed in Italy but he was never captured until almost a year after Patricia had apparently left? Then there were a set of photos of Monte Cassino Abbey from the air prior to its destruction. How could she have ever shot those either?

Finally there were also a number of photographs of Patricia herself. For some reason I didn’t have to look on the back to know who it was. She was around thirty, in a strikingly well-tailored American second lieutenant’s skirt-bottomed ‘pinks and greens’ uniform, with short dark hair. In one photo she was standing in what looked like the ruins of a massive building beside a small portable organ, with of all things a very large brown bear standing happily beside her. In another she was with three men and another woman in a U.S. Colonel’s uniform, all standing on a ruined dockside somewhere. One of the men was in his sixties with long flowing gray hair, a gun round his neck, a rather elegant hunter’s hat, dressed in what looked like a desert shirt and fishing jacket, sporting a rather elegant ascot. One of the other men was younger, dark haired, Slavonic-looking, in sun-glasses with thick, combed-back black hair, and the third was a U.S. Army corporal. On the back of the photo it said ‘Margaret, Karl, Freddie, Sapsovitch, and I, Naples docks, D-Day June 6, 1944.’ In another photo she was standing in the middle of some city with the same Freddie, Karl and Sapsovitch, but this time with a German soldier too. The inscription on its back said ‘Corporal Feuerstak places the safety of Rome in the hands of the Anstruther-Darlingtons, June 4, 1944.’

I pinned all the most interesting photos up on my study notice board, and my curiosity piqued, had no choice but to start reading the memoir itself. By the time I had worked my way through it, I realized that not only was it useful, but if it was to be believed, it explained completely why Monte Cassino Abbey came to be bombed, and why that explanation became as embarrassing to the Allies as apparently it had. Indeed it explained everything about the destruction of Monte Cassino Abbey that I ever hoped my documentary could. And so it came to pass, just as Elyse also predicted, that I sighed for the heaven knows how many times that day, and accepted that I had taken a sabbatical from being a T.V. producer, and become once again a memoir editor.

But a word on what ‘editing’ has meant in this context. The memoir itself, as Elyse warned, was an early draft, typed well before word processors. Over three hundred pages long and often written as a stream of consciousness, it was triple-spaced, full of corrections and suggestions for further thought, and accompanying it were pages upon pages of hand-written notes. Some of the notes were on sheets of paper, some cross-referenced in the journal Patricia kept, some marked and underlined in the books I found. In some cases she had annotated where exactly those notes were to be placed, and I have so positioned them. But in far more she gave no guidance whatsoever, and here my approach has been to incorporate all of them where they appeared to make the most sense. And if ‘sense’ required a change of her paragraph order here or a re-arranging of her sentences there, rightly or wrongly, that is what I did.

Certain other stylistic problems were however less easily resolved, and editing her memoir became a constant balancing act between allowing Patricia’s voice to speak for itself without unnecessary intermediation by me, yet at the same time trying to provide necessary information to the reader that Patricia did not have the time to include, or perhaps failed to realize she should. For even at her somewhat tender age, Patricia was obviously a learned, well-travelled person with a very unique life experience. She also had a predilection for dropping names and historical events, and assuming everyone else would understand her allusions. Putting it more pointedly, her memoir, at least the draft I had, was the work of someone more book than perhaps street smart, who frequently forgot that not all of her readers would be as well informed as she. Thus many of those historical and geographic allusions, and she makes a lot, particularly at the beginning of the memoir, would be confusing to most, and stood badly in need of further clarification. Some sort of annotation was the most obvious device, but footnotes at the bottom of each page, although easily accessible, are often overpowering to any but an academic reader. End notes on the other hand, though certainly less distracting, must still be continually referred back to at some other place in the work. Thus they didn’t seem the best answer either. So I decided to write the clarifications myself in as near a style of writing as Patricia used, and add it straight into the text as if written as an afterthought