World Battlefronts: Story of a Town

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In one day I saw two figures. One was in the church at Romanoglio. In a crypt in the wall was a plaster-of-Paris body of Christ with splotches of red paint to designate His wounds. The walls of the church were battered but they still stood up. Timbers and bricks covered the altar and from a bomb-hole in the roof light streamed into the crypt. The other figure lay alongside a burned-out and destroyed half-track German carrier. The body was of a German soldier. He was flat on his back, one arm in the cinders of his carrier, the other flung out into the road. The hand had been run over by scout cars and Bren gun carriers and was chewed off to a red stump. A thousand yards on were six Mark IV tanks. Bearded Indian Sikhs and laughing Gurkhas were seeking them out. Overhead was the wail of shells and the eerie snort of German Nebelwerfers, which throw six smoke bombs into the air at once. Somewhere in the story of the body in the crypt and the body on the road there is a moral for Christmas.

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