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Stick speaks up “Sir, even if we take and hold the beach and the valley, isn’t it mountains and rivers all the way from there to Rome?”

Lieutenant Stone aieant, but Morales nods “Yes, it is, Sergeant There’s so Napoleon said to the effect that Italy is a boot, you have to enter it from the top Unfortunately, that option is not open to us”

“We’ll get it done,” Stone says

There isto do with logistics, and optimistic talk of Day One objectives, Day Two, and so on None of the combat veterans, from Cole down to Rio, believes any of it The sand table, unlike reality, does not co down

Almost teeks later, weary, footsore, and jaded, Rio is convinced of the physical accuracy of the sand table and painfully aware of the irrelevance of the timetable She and the 119th were spared the worst of the landing, not being first wave, or even second wave, for once The earlier arrivals ran into a wall of Gerun fire, and air attack, but by the time the 119th joined the battle, the Ger

That had been rough, but it was fighting from foxholes and prepared positions In the end it was the unfire and planes from Sicily that hammered the German tanks and broke up their thrust

But now the job is to expand the beachhead and begin the push north toward Naples and Ro dozens of spoints held by a deteruard

Rio lies wedged between sharp stones that had once been soun bullets chipping away at the stone like so she’d first heard from Stick: No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy

Naples was the Day Three objective They are beginning Week Three, and they are still some distance from Naples How far, Rio does not know What she does know is that she is facedown on the ground wishing she could dig a hole through the cobblestones beneath her

Rio’s squad landed on the beach below Salerno at full strength, twelve , Jillion, Beebee, Sergeant Cole, and a replaceed no more than a feords with the replacement, a woman named Karen Scalzi Scalzi had stepped on a mine on her first day ashore She hadn’t died, but she would no longer be able to count to ten on her toes

Now they are eleven, and Cat has co behind whatever cover she can find She should have been sent back, but she kept saying, “I’ look at me!”

“No one’s looking at you,” Tilo had wised off “We’re just trying not to smell you”

The heat does not approach the Sicilian heat, Septeht some moderation in teh the heap of rubble that was once a town The town has been worked over by naval gunfire, tank fire, and P-38 and P-47 ground attack planes It was home to not quite a thousand people, but now every roof is bloay or collapsed Scarcely a wall stands without ending in ragged crenellations at the top, here and there splintered wooden beams stick out or up, doorways have all been kicked in, s have all been blown out, and if any civilian is left alive it is a miracle

The full platoon is spread down both sides of what had almost certainly been the main street of town, now a tumbled, almost impassable jumble of fallen stone, all of it painful to lie on

A Sherman tank burns behind them, burns too fiercely for anyone even to think about extricating the dead tanker whose charcoal body lies draped across its forward deck