FINAL RESTING PLACE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25801, 23 March 1945, Page 5

FINAL RESTING PLACE

EMPIRE’S WAR DEAD CEMETERIES AT CASSINO (N.Z.E.F. Official War Correspondent) MONTE CASSINO, (Rec. 7 p.m.) Mar. 20. The greatest change in Cassino — which died just a year ago in a blast of high explosives—is in the spreading war cemeteries, planned on a grand scale of necessity as the final resting place for many thousand dead. Little lonely graves which dotted the countryside for miles around are becoming fewer as the great British and dominions cemetery near the hummocks expands. Already over 1800 lie here, and before the work of the graves collection units is ended there will be 4600 graves in this cemetery alone, including about 450 New Zealand ones. The smaller cemetery which grew dav by day on the roadside between San Pietro and Monte Rotondo is now no more, but the one beside the crypt still exists. All the American dead lie at Vairano, and the Poles beneath the shadow of a tall pillar surmounted by a cross which stands already on a high feature immediately behind the monastery. It carries the inscription, “For your liberty and ours, we Polish soldiers gave our souls to God, our bodies to the soil of Italy, and our hearts to Poland.” The incredible fact now becomes apparent that, in spirt of formidable defences, the German losses were considerably higher than those of the attackers. The total combined figure of dead in the battles at the gates of Liri must approach 20,000. Since the armies moved on hundreds of Italians have been killed and maimed by mines and booby traps beneath broken buildings. Hospitals in the area are filled with men, women, and children who came back because they had nowhere else to go. One may look at hastily fabricated barrack buildings which line Highway Six near Baron’s Palace, at the new structures of ancient stone which are rising opposite. the crypt and in the centre of the town, and at Italian contractors signs which hang over well-remem-bered piles of rubble, but they seem like an attempt to put new flesh on an old skeleton. It is true that plague spots are being removed, mines lifted, and roads reopened, and there is a milling, noisy Italian market at the entrance to Station road, but, in spite of these things, the scene looks .the same as it did when the Twenty-sixth Battalion passed through. Fernleaf still shows on the rusty hulls of two Nineteenth tanks lying on the road, the shell-torn wreck of £ Sherman of the Twentieth dominate? the station yard, and the. Continenta, Hotel still conceals its Mark IV behind a wall of rubble thrown up by the first bulldozers. A year has made no difference to the distinctive piles of stone that were once the Baron s Palace and the Colosseum.

As far as I know, that network of legendary tunnels-through which thousands of Germans were alleged to circulate has not yet been discovered. Apart from pitiful beaten tracks which wander through it, the centre of the town is the same as it was when the Maoris and the Twenty-fourth were battling there a year ago to-day. Castle Hill is still no place for sightseers. Here unburied dead still lie about. The black mood of Cassino returns at sunset —a mood that a century of reconstruction will fail to break.