Robyn Hughes in front of Nightingales, on show at Old Government House. Photo / Chris Gorman
Auckland artist Robyn Hughes' father Cecil fought in the Allied troops' nightmarish six-month battle in 1944 to win the Cassino sector in Italy during World War II.
The extended assault claimed the lives of 54,000 Allied and 20,000 German soldiers. But, like so many of his peers, Hughes' father, a New Zealand Army major in the campaign, never spoke about it. Hughes, who was born several years after Cecil's return to post-war New Zealand, says she knew the word "Cassino" but her father's death, when she was aged 18, put paid to deeper exploration.
That all changed two years ago when her former teacher at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Professor Michael Dunn, and the Italy Star Association in Auckland mooted the idea of a series of paintings on the Cassino campaign to mark its 70th anniversary this year.
Cassino is situated in the middle of the Gustav Line (also known as the Winter Line), constructed by the Germans to stretch coast-to-coast across the Apennine Mountains. It was a crucial conquest because Cassino dominated the entrance to the Liri Valley, the main route to Rome.
The Germans had every advantage, with heavily armed and manned fortifications running through the extremely rugged terrain. As Hughes was to discover, by reading books and official records, as well as notebooks and letters written by the Allied and German soldiers involved in the combat, "an army that could call on 600 tanks, 800 artillery pieces, 500 planes and 60,000 or 70,000 vehicles of all shapes and sizes, found itself dependent on the humble pack-mule ... In the mountains of Cassino, a mule was worth a dozen tanks".
"When I started I thought it would be interesting," says Hughes, who was honoured in Parliament's Great Hall in 2010 with a Big "A" Award from Arts Access Aoteroa for her 17 years of tutoring at Paremoremo Prison.
"But then I realised I had bitten into something I didn't have a clue about. I had to start from scratch. I started with my father very briefly and got his records, which I never had before." (Major Cecil Hughes served in the 19th Armoured Regiment, the 4th New Zealand Brigade, the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force).
"Then I took quotes from everybody there - Germans, French, British, New Zealanders, Americans, the Gurkhas, the Polish and so on ... The individual voices opened out the work."
Hughes first visited Cassino a decade ago with her partner, "who knows a lot about military stuff". She has since returned as part of her research.
"I was so gobsmacked by the steepness ... My impression was, how could you possibly survive here? There is no cover, it is completely open. When you stand at the abbey on the top, you can see for miles. The Germans were high and had the view for miles. You can imagine in the winter when you have this presence above and all the troops down below, what the scenario was."
Into Cassino, which comprises 14 massive acrylic works and some smaller pieces, do not depict the soldiers in a literal sense but their voices speak in texts reproduced in sections across the canvases.
A huge red-and-black work covered in dense lettering marks the day Cassino's monastery fell: May 18, 1944. The title says: The slopes were covered in red poppies.
"This is the only piece where I have referred to a commander," she says. "The Polish commander described in his letters what he saw when the monastery fell, and I have kind of tumbled it and piled it over and over, layering the horror of what he described in front of him. "And then I picked out one of the lines: 'The slopes where the fire had been less intense were covered in red poppies, their red flowers appropriate to the scene.' He was using words in his letter like 'overturned tanks', 'dumps of unused ammunition', 'crater after crater', 'rotting bodies'."
Hughes has created three large works that conjure the tension of the terrain as the pack-mules struggled along the tiny tracks. Unsurprisingly, the animals, which were used to take food and water to the soldiers and carry down the wounded and dead, paid a heavy price.
One work's title is taken from a letter by a British soldier: The Trek Narrowed To 18 Inches. "I googled 'tank' because my father had been in a tank, so I found their specs," Hughes explains. "So I did the mule like that, as a piece of equipment: their intelligence, how much they can carry - which was a dead weight of up to 20 per cent of their body weight. The American instructions commanded that 'if the animal's vocal chords have not been cut, keep them quiet by maintaining a relaxed atmosphere'. How do you do that in a terrible situation like that?"
Because the battle took place in mid-winter, the steep rocks were icy and slippery. According to one soldier's account, when the tracks narrowed to 18 inches wide, with a sheer drop of 1000 feet on one side, the heavily laden mules started to lose their footing and toppled over the edge.
"Nearly one-third were lost and that was each journey, so they were just ploughing through animal transport and the enemy used to target the supply lines."
Another large work is called Nightingales. "The key to this one is that Cassino was a vision of an inferno, hideous. We are immersed right into the mountain, with no skyline. I have used a New Zealand quote, 'There was no day, only two kinds of night', but the quote that kicked it off was from a Polish soldier: 'The very ground we clung to was trembling under the artillery barrage yet at the night-time when the guns stopped firing we could occasionally hear the nightingales.' You have this bizarre contrast between beauty and horrible stuff."
Hughes says she has met a lot of people on the way during her research - such as children whose dads were at the battle.
"When I was in Cassino I met another New Zealander who lives there, and I went on a walk with a Kiwi girl whose dad was there. I got all the information on Snakeshead Ridge and Castle Hill [key ridgelines during the battle] and it was amazing to be on-site.
"I have had really generous sharing of information. People have lent me their keepsakes, like boxes of 'this is my father's stuff'. The other weekend I was down in Whakatane and a girl told me a German soldier had traded 'this watch' with her father. It is all a little tiny bit of a big story."
The paintings now on show at Old Government House are just part of the whole exhibition, because of space constraints. Into Cassino will show in its entirety in Whakatane, partly because of family connections.
"When I was talking about doing this a couple of years ago, it led from that area because a huge number of soldiers went from the Bay of Plenty. The Maori Battalion paintings in this show aren't at Government House as they are too big and they need to be acknowledged correctly first."
Hughes says she would love to show Into Cassino elsewhere after Whakatane. "They need to be shown as a body of work. Will I sell them? I don't know. They need to be kept together.
"They are moments in time and voices from different moments of the action, which often happened all at once. These voices waft across like a puff of smoke. It is like direct reportage, the content comes from those who were there. I have just taken bits of the moments ... to see the bits put together is like a narrative disjointed, with lots of gaps."
Exhibition
What: Into Cassino - A Preview by Robyn Hughes.
Where and when: Old Government House, Princes St, to March 15
And: The full series of Into Cassino will be shown at Whakatane Library & Exhibition Centre, March 29 to May 25
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