Among the noble Hidalgo
The great colonel Gonzalès de Linarès (familiarly baptized:the noble Hidalgo) is rightly considered, since the operations of Acquafondata and Vallerotonda, for one of the best maneuvers in the French army.
I settled down for the night at the headquarters of his regiment, on the slope of the Belvedere.
Darkness has just suddenly fallen. You can see this at the first light of the arrival of shells on the abbey of Monte Cassino.
Minutes earlier, each explosion spawned a plume of smoke that rolled slowly across a gray sky. There is no more smoke, but a series of blinding flashes, each of which, for a tenth of a second, cuts out in black, at my height, the ruined outline of the Benedictine walls, illuminates the stones of the path under my feet and, above my head, the snowy face of Monte Cairo.
Then the stars, erased for a moment, reappear and the explosions reach me in turn, echoing through all the ravines of the mountain.
In the early hours of the morning, the fog was so dense and the sector so calm that the stretcher-bearers were able to pick up, on the badly exposed slopes of Hill 700, the last corpses of the Tunisian 4th Infantrymen fallen in the fierce fighting from the end of January. Slipping in the mud of the opposite slope, they carefully carry these pale models to the road, washed with their blood from a month of rain. From the pockets formed by the blankets, faces of green wax emerge, stiffened hands and motionless legs, all alike in American gaiters and shoes.
The Algerians of the mortars and those of the signals, sitting in the rain in front of their burrows, among the boxes of ammunition and the rolls of wire, stand up to see and nod their heads.