Show BOYlE S NOTEBOOK Spring Comes to Cc Cassino o Where On Only y Ruins Rema Remain in By HAL BOYLE The road CASSINO Italy back to war Is strange and new All the ingredients of battle are arc missing except the ruins Only by such odd and haphazard monuments a few roadside graves an oC occasional rU rusted ted I tank some somo small forgotten stacks of ammunition can ammunition can an you read the story of the siege of ot Cassino Thc These e small l memorabilia of battle can only hint at the long heartache and dull misery this mountain village symbolized for thousands of ot allied soldiers in inthe inthe inthe the early months of 1944 1914 Nature which heals or kills has taken care of the rest The road to Cassino was once a dreary trail of mud and blood and weary tears It was tedious as a dull dun football game in which no one scored Lives were lost for yards It was waI the endless agony and crash of sound and ind it broke mens men's hearts and minds and bodies It was rain and damp wind and crippling c old cold o 1 d for tor bleak weeks when sunny Italy hibernates hiber hiber- nate nates in its cocoon of winter promise Life Death and antI Hell Hen HellIt hellIt It wasn't hell heIl because hell is heated It wasn't life liCe because life has moments of ot of rest And it wasn't death because you still could move move any any direction but forward It wasn't anything but Cassino Cas- Cas sino sino and and Cassino was life and death and hell in one bitter draught Riding back along that road today you feel like some doomed ghost foreordained to revisit scenes of ot ancient disaster and you will live Jive again that old agony which still sUll stirs many veterans in fruitful dreams of that vanished frustration that hill hm of ot heartache heartache heartache-Ca heartache cino Cassino was only one major sign post on the road to Rome It n was preceded by several miniature miniature min miniature min min- Cassin Cassinos os Among them was the Million Dollar hill so named by combat troops who figured it took that much costly artillery fire tire to soften it its defenses defenses de de- for the doughboy attack Spring Veils Scene In those days it was a bare rockbound slope Now like other way stops on the road of hate that led to the Italian capital its forbidding features are veiled by early verdure Sheep graze where once American and German German German Ger Ger- man troops played deadly hide and seek The green of spring 1 hA ened this brown brawn area of scrimmage tl low bloom wildly y and co con ui visitor to the battlefield h S Sonly only knew Italy before fore fa in ft 14 i skeleton months month il 1 Drought has all but dried narrow river turbid prelude to the wrestle for far Cu eu sino where American America 1 unIties were suffered in Jn one lne onS i the costliest battles of the S. S Wilt Cassino sacked or d dent more than once before in jr I ih long history is rising anew f frS from its Us gray nibble rubble It is h flan flanked kid Df bj British and Polish graveyards Americans who died there is Pr ies buried farther away Itch luu civilians civilian arc busy nS erecting erectly h ne stone homes on sites where fathers dwelt before them i I The noise and the armies gone and only the hills re |