An Abbey for The Fallen

Flames from tall, slender white candles flickered nervously in the pale light of the evening shadows and glanced piercingly from the glittering gilt.  Genuflecting, fervent prayer and carefully enunciated Latin mingled together to envelop the throng in the outstretched arms of love.  Here the dying come to receive the last rites and here the sick pray for healing and here the sinners ask for forgiveness.  Here there was peace and here there had been peace for over a thousand years.  But on 11th May 1944 – is it always the 11th of some month? – there was no singing in the choir only the deafening crescendo of sixteen hundred artillery guns and the booming thunder of American bombs as the peace of this place was utterly destroyed.

On this night – this unholy night – the Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino was obliterated.  Before the bombardment, the last remaining sick nuns and monks were evacuated in a rickety wooden cart, borrowed from a farmer, by a German Lutheran officer, Eugen Schmid of Stuttgart, who had asked permission of his Commanding Officer to do so.  If you save one life you have saved mankind.

Why was this Abbey destroyed?  Although Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had told the Allies in December 1943 that the Monastery would not be used as a defensive position by his troops, the Allies claimed it was occupied by Germans – air reconnaissance had revealed troops moving about the Abbey – and since it stood between the Allies and their advance to relieve Rome, it had to be removed.  The US government’s official position on the bombing of Monte Cassino underwent remarkable changes over a quarter of a century.  The certainty of ‘irrefutable evidence’ of German use of the Abbey was removed from the record in 1961 by the Office of the Chief of Military History.  A congressional inquiry to the same office in the 20th anniversary year of the bombing produced the statement: ‘It appears that no German troops, except a small military police detachment, were actually inside the Abbey’ before the bombing.  The final correction to the US Army’s official record was made in 1969 and concluded that ‘the Abbey was actually unoccupied by German troops’.  Where have we heard similar arguments to this before and since?

In 1953 Monte Cassino was finally restored to its former 18th century glory.  It is now a monument to reconciliation, to peace, to respect and to love – and to man’s inhumanity to man and the futility of war.  From its Cloister of Bramante you can gaze on another monument – far below you, in a different world, lie the graves of the fallen, beautifully kept, neatly manicured, and they stop you short, for the only question you ask is: ‘Why?’  And there is no reply! ‘Earth could not answer, nor the seas that mourn in flowing purple of their Lord forlorn, nor rolling heaven with all his signs revealed and hidden by the sleeve of night and morn.’