Taken from a Monte Cassino Remembrance - Where there's now tranquillity, there was once a terrible blood-letting, a monstrous raging of man-made forces that seared and ravaged the towns and laid waste the valleys and the mountain slopes. Here, many many men came to kill each other, and every day they carried away their dead, wherever and whenever possible, and buried them in temporary graves nearby. Here men were brutalized to a point beyond comprehension. Four long and agonizing months it was that the killing, the maiming and the destruction went on. Nowhere could a soldier hide without tasting, hearing, and smelling the hot fetid breath of bursting shells and mortars. Nor could he shut out from sight and ears the fearsome slash of the murderous MG 42. Everywhere around him Death was present in the bloated remains of long dead men and mules. The suffocating stink of their rotting flesh permeated everything it came into contact with, and after a short time spent in this ploughed-up graveyard, this horrible garden of cadavers, a man soaked up enough of the stink till he smelled as though he too came from the grave. That a man's mind somehow could remain rational and his nerves not collapse under the extremes of physical conditions and the daily confrontations with violent death was in every way a miracle of the human spirit.