Out of the ruins a symbol of peace

By MICHELE HEWITSON in Italy

In the basilica at Monte Cassino, somewhere in the rows and rows of old soldiers, are Bill Marsh and Ev Otto.

Of these two, room-mates on this return to Cassino, one, Otto is a devout Catholic; Marsh doesn't have much time for religion.

Regardless of whether the men are believers or not, they regard the fact that they are sitting in this place, high above the town of Cassino, as some sort of small miracle.

The last time the New Zealanders were at Monte Cassino, the monastery above the town, they walked through a ruin.

Today is the ecumenical service for the New Zealand vets, and they sit in the straight-as-soldiers' rows of chairs looking about at the painted ceilings, the marble, the gilt, the carved angels blowing their golden trumpets.

You might not personally admire high baroque. That's hardly the point. The interior is supposed to shout, in triumph: out of the ruins we built again.

That the New Zealand vets are here at all is a good enough, and final enough metaphor for this trip which has been about returning in a spirit of reconciliation.

It was, after all, the Allies who bombed the sacred place. The last shots of a war 60 years ago are still fired in the pages of the history books about who was most to blame for making the decision.

No one's arguing that particular toss today. They sit side by side inside the church, listening to a sermon of reconciliation in Italian. "War, destruction, death have gone," the vets hear through an interpreter, "they belong to the past."

Above the gated doors to the abbey, PAX is inscribed in large red letters.

Marsh's last memory of the monastery, before it was bombed, was of looking up from the hill below where he was stationed and seeing "the sky all lit up at night with German gunfire like it was daylight, and it was a great sight. As long as you could miss the bullets".

After the bombing, what had been the monastery looked like the smoking crater of a volcano. Up here it smelled like all battlefields do: of the dead and the mud and the smoke.

Inside the basilica today the priests swing the incense burners.

This smoke is fragrant.

The present has a souvenir shop. The last time the New Zealanders were here they took home a few souvenirs.

They picked them out of the rubble and today they are returned home. A vet, with obvious relief, gives back a chalice cup. The Prime Minister, Helen Clark, hands over a brass etching, pieces of a 16th century Roman frieze, a priest's stole. And two dinner plates with the monastery crest. How some soldier got those home intact really does beggar belief.

Bill Marsh took home a different kind of souvenir from the war, although not from Italy.

In Cairo he got a tattoo on his forearm. It's pretty much faded now but you can just make out that it reads: "Good luck, Mother." A "cobber of mine" was supposed to bring him back a German pistol "but anyway the boat went down and so did the gun". He wasn't much fussed, not after the war, about having such a thing.

His room-mate in Cassino, Ev Otto, never bothered with mementoes: "What would you want them for?" he wonders. Those who ended up with these particular spoils of war have decided they no longer do.

Otto will take home something from this trip: a St Christopher medallion which has been taken to Rome and blessed by the Pope during the Prime Minister's visit to see him at the Vatican.

So they should be all right, these two, Otto and Marsh, on the long journey home.

They live 3km from each other and have travelled, for the second time, a very long way from home - and back in time 60 years.

They've given each other a fair bit of stick, had a few beers and a lot of laughs. They march for the last time together, with the vets from other countries, and the people of Cassino line the streets and clap. Then they go back to their shared room and start packing their bags.

They'll likely have a few last beers.

Says Lloyd Cross, the cheeky one: "Did you get drunk and disorderly last night?"

Certainly not. Did he? "No, I'm saving it for the 75th [commemoration.]"

Bill Marsh looks at Cross and laughs at that one. Then he looks at me and says: "We'll be back. Well, maybe you will."