Behind the Lines

SILENCE ON MONTE SOLE by Jack Olsen. 374 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

By the summer of 1944, the Allied armies had advanced nearly to the hip of the Italian boot. But the going was slow. Through a series of intelligent and tenacious rear-guard actions, German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring exacted a high price in blood and patience for each rocky mile. In addition to the Allies, Kesselring had to deal with ferocious Italian partisans. One group, armed with parachuted weapons, carried on by blasting freight trains and ambushing German patrols in and around Monte Sole, the most prominent peak of a collection of modest Apennines 15 miles south of Bologna. Because Monte Sole lay directly in the "path of Kesselring's retreat route, its partisans represented a serious threat to orderly German withdrawal.

Reprisals against the partisans were stepped up. Farms and crops were burned, hostages were selected and shot. Yet partisan activity increased, and with it atrocities on both sides. By fall, the Germans' military front was deteriorating rapidly and their escape route was still threatened. Kesselring's frustration turned into a cold fury, which vented itself on the 4,000 residents of Monte Sole. From Sept. 29 through Oct. 1, SS death squads visited Monte Sole's villages and rounded up, shot down, grenaded and then burned more than 1,800 inhabitants. Most of them were women and children.

Jack Olsen, a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED writer and author of The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story, has reconstructed the events on Monte Sole from records and the memories of the survivors. The result is one of those feats of reporting and literary journalism in which massive amounts of detail are given dramatic structure.

Olsen devotes more than the first third of Silence on Monte Sole to designing the set and lining up the cast for the tragedy to follow. In the balance of the book, the incidents of the massacre unfold with numbing predictability. Time and again Olsen describes how people escaped bullets by burrowing under the corpses of their families or playing dead. Once more he indirectly states one of the irreducible lessons of war: that the human body loses its integrity when struck by pieces of metal moving at high velocity.

In an effort to dramatize the horror,

Olsen often loads his incidents--and his sentences--with more detail than they can support, and a certain awkwardness results: " 'How are your wounds?' Marie Tiviroli, the golden-haired princess of Steccola, said when she awakened in the abandoned charcoal hut between Cadotto and her home." But when the material is treated simply, it embeds itself in the reader's imagination. For example, in Olsen's handling of the postman, who thought the best thing to do under the circumstances was to walk his usual route burdened with letters for the dead. Or his description of the SS man, fresh from shooting a four-year-old girl, who aided a wounded young woman because she reminded him of his fiancee.

As a piece of reporting and dramatic journalistic writing, Silence on Monte Sole is a professional success. Yet after the hundreds of dramatic reconstructions of the inhuman acts of World War II--acts whose memory is kept fresh by the knowledge of continuing inhumanity--the value of the genre itself is in doubt. The past 25 years have conclusively demonstrated that no reconstruction of human suffering, no matter how skillfully or compassionately done, can compare with the unadorned voices of the survivors, who, in autobiography and war-crimes testimony, told of their times in words born of the most painful silences.

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