"Naples '44"

Hemingway (and movies based on his novels) quite put me off World War II accounts, but now I know that I should have been reading Norman Lewis.

The war and its aftermath:

• Throughout the afternoon the noise of the bombardment strengthened and drowned the happy chorus of the Italians trudging by incessantly down the railway track on their way home.
• In one case the trapped crew had been broiled in such a way that a puddle of fat had spread from under the tank, and this was quilted with brilliant flies of all descriptions and colours.
• The only visible damage to most villages had been the inevitable sack of the post office by the vanguard of the advancing troops, who seem to have been philatelists to a man.
• (On the German's remarkable bureaucratic rectitude:) One's imagination reels at the thought of the paperwork involved in dealing with thousands of such epistles from the toadies of occupied Europe.

• It is astonishing to witness the struggles of this city so shattered, so starved, so deprived of all those things that justify a city's existence, to adapt itself to a collapse into conditions which must resemble life in the Dark Ages... Inexplicably no boats are allowed out, but nothing is said in the proclamation about rafts. Everyone improvises and adapts.
• ... the spectacle of a damaged tank abandoned at the Porta Capuana, which, although one never saw a finger laid on it, shrank away day by day, as if its armour-plating had been made of ice, until nothing whatever remained.
• A railway engine, stranded in open country owing to the looting of rails and sleepers, was driven off when these rails and sleepers were quite incredibly relaid, to a place more discreetly located for its demolition.
• Another example of culinary enterprise was provided by the consumption of all the tropical fish in Naples's celebrated aquarium in the days preceding the liberation, no fish being spared however strange and specialised in its appearance and habits.
• On my way back I was stopped and drawn into a corner by a priest, white-lipped and smiling. He opened a bag full of umbrella handles, candlesticks and small ornaments of all kinds carved out of the bones of the saints, from bones filched from one of the catacombs. He, too, had to live.
• (black market:) ... now on blatant display, tastefully arranged with coloured ribbon, a vase of flowers, neatly-written showcards advertising the quality of the looted goods.