The Hastings & Prince Edward Regiment—a Canadian unit known as the Hasty Ps—were ordered to relieve the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers—the Faughs—on the afternoon of December 5, 1943. As part of the British Eighth Army under Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, the two units had been fighting their way up Italy since crossing over from Sicily in September and were now approaching the Adriatic coast somewhat less than halfway up the Italian boot.
Lieutenant Farley Mowat, the Hasty Ps’ intelligence officer, had gone forward with the intelligence officer from the Faughs. Rain pelted down. Files of Faughs were coming out of the line. “Their faces were as colourless as paper pulp,” noted Mowat with mounting dread, “and they were so exhausted they hardly seemed to notice the intense shelling the coastal road was getting as they straggled down it.”
The Faughs might not have been noticing, but Mowat was. He had been leading a platoon when the Hasty Ps landed in Sicily in July and he felt like the ensuing months of combat had brought him near the breaking point. As he watched the Faughs, the pervading and rancid smell of cordite hung in the air. His heart pounded and jolted in his chest without rhythm. He began to shiver, although he was not cold. Everything told him to stop, turn round, and run. Pulling out a cigarette, he offered one to the Irish lieutenant, who lit a match in cupped hands. But Mowat turned away. “For in that instant,” he wrote, “I realised what was happening to me. I was sickening with the most virulent and deadly of all apprehensions…the fear of fear itself.”
They walked on, reached a ridge, and lay on their stomachs among some sodden bushes. Low cloud obliterated the view. This was a strange landscape: a series of plateaus, gently undulating but rather flat, on which stood villages, farmsteads, and endless vineyards, olive groves, and meadows. Scoring these plateaus, one after the other, was a series of gullies, most quite narrow and verdant—covered with acacia, baby oaks, and low-growing bushes. Mowat could see little but ahead lay the Moro Valley,
