Story of a Town

As the Eighth Army continued its town-by-town, hill-by-hill advance up the Adriatic coast toward Ortona, TIME Correspondent Fillmore Calhoun sent this story:

Romanoglio was another hilltop town, not much different from a hundred others on the Adriatic coast. It had its Fascists who ran the monopolies and made money, its church with its superstitions and its grasp of human weaknesses. Its people went barefoot along its clay roads and never washed their children's faces. On the sides of a few houses were slogans from Mussolini, who committed the great obscenity of urging women to have even more children, and the great blunder of thinking, he could make eight million bayonets out of weeds. Poverty was in Romanoglio before the war came. Now Famine, Pestilence and Death are there, too.

The Frightened Men.

The men of Romanoglio went off to war when Mussolini gave the order. They were poor, illiterate, confused and greedy. Those who still live and have made their way home are working on the roads, which, like pruning their olive trees and trimming their cabbage, is work they understand. The price they paid can be totted up in the piles of rubble that once were their homes. For there is nothing left of Romanoglio but the power of the peasantry to live.

The Germans looted Romanoglio of its few farm machines, its clocks and its vino. Then the Eighth Army, advancing beyond the Sangro River in its mile-a-day advance to the north, finished the town. Shells splintered its olive groves, bashed in its shaky, brick-and-mortar houses, pitted its scrofulous, winding streets. After the shelling came the British tanks. After the tanks came the Gurkhas from India. They left their guns behind and moved like a scythe through the village with their curved steel kukris drawn. They came out with only one pris oner, a German officer. They had never seen a German officer and wanted to save him for a better view in the daylight.

There is scarcely any food now and disease hovers on the brink of their other disasters. Some of Romanoglio's people have gone; they went to the safer south, trudging along the roads, carrying their mattresses on their heads, pushing baby carriages, cringing into the roadsides as great motor convoys passed. They were part of the 25,000 women and children who were directed by AMG to evacuate from towns in the path of war. Those of Romanoglio's people who remained are putting bricks into the shell holes of their homes, burying their dead, squealing and screaming like frightened animals when the barrages go off at night. It will be a month or so before the town will have patched itself up.

The Quiet Men.

In one day I saw two figures. One was in the church at Romanoglio. In a crypt in the wall was a plaster-of-Paris body of Christ with splotches of red paint to designate His wounds. The walls of the church were battered but they still stood up. Timbers and bricks covered the altar and from a bomb-hole in the roof light streamed into the crypt. The other figure lay alongside a burned-out and destroyed half-track German carrier. The body was of a German soldier. He was flat on his back, one arm in the cinders of his carrier, the other flung out into the road. The hand had been run over by scout cars and Bren gun carriers and was chewed off to a red stump. A thousand yards on were six Mark IV tanks. Bearded Indian Sikhs and laughing Gurkhas were seeking them out. Overhead was the wail of shells and the eerie snort of German Nebelwerfers, which throw six smoke bombs into the air at once. Somewhere in the story of the body in the crypt and the body on the road there is a moral for Christmas.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.