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they flowed like a ceaseless current. Pessimism was general, but it was of an informed character and bolstered by fact. General Clark, still out of sight on the Ancona, was fighting his first battle command, which was considered a bad start for those who served under him. The soldiers knew that Clark was at loggerheads with his subordinate generals, Dawlish and Walker, and that was a bad thing, too. Among the many rumours, most damaging was the one that Clark was already contemplating withdrawal and would approach the British Navy for their support. Attempting to trace the source of such rumours, it became evident that high-ranking officers on the Ancona talked with extraordinary freedom in the presence of the staff who served them in the mess. The Commander-in-Chief, a showman with a propensity for bullying his inferiors in public, was deeply unpopular with the troops. The sergeants expressing their views freely in the chow-line were of the opinion that Clark had done whatever he could to postpone ‘Operation Avalanche’ until Montgomery’s Eighth Army, coming up from Sicily, was in the vicinity, and preferred even now to defer an advance.
    Minor probes into hilly country by infantry unprotected by tanks and without air-cover came to nothing when they ran into opposition, although Altavilla, devastated by the naval guns, was found to be empty. Clark and his staff now left the Ancona in search of ample accommodation for his headquarters ashore. It was inevitable that he should be shown the grandiose abandoned mansion known as the Villa Rossa, a folly full of statuary and old masters—inevitable, too, that he should have decided to move in. Thus, after the huge effort to bring a mountain of HQ equipment ashore and stack it, protected from the weather in a safe position, it now had to be humped by office staff and off-duty soldiers up to the villa, which was only accessible by narrow tracks.
    In the old days aristocratic visitors to the Villa Rossa from Rome would have been dropped off at Albanella, within walking distance of our farmhouse. At the time of our arrival the village had been abandoned, with the exception of a shop selling sour white wine and an aphrodisiac cheese famous throughout southern Italy, made from the milk of local buffaloes mixed, it was said, with dried and ground-up flies.
    The woman who ran the shop was outside whitewashing her doorstep and seven Sherman tanks were lined up across the road in the shade of a hedge. This was the morning of Day Four, and these were the tanks sent to the wrong beach on Day Three and which, escorted by destroyers, had finally been brought ashore at the point originally intended. The day was fine and the atmosphere calm, although in the distance there was a sound of thumping, like a fist on a heavy door. Having finished her task, the woman went inside and came out with several tiny glasses of wine, which she presented to the soldiers about to carry out the first armoured attack. The soldiers threw away their cigarettes, gulped down their wine, waved to the onlookers and climbed into the tanks. Moments later the engines started and the tanks rumbled away. At the end of the street they turned into the mountain road, and one of the bystanders said, ‘They are going to take Altavilla from the Germans.’ The ruins of the village had now been occupied by enemy troops.
    After about an hour had passed, two of the tanks returned, driven in a way that suggested they were almost out of control. One charged past, climbed a bank and crashed through a hedge into a field. The other slewed right round and stopped, and the crew came through the door to fall weeping into each other’s arms. Thus ended, with the loss of five tanks, the Allied attack on Altavilla, and with this the curtain rose at last on the long-awaited battle.
    In the evening chow-line back in Paestum the details of the sad happenings of that day were common knowledge. The sound of artillery fire was now clearly