In August 1943, Sergeant Craddock leads his battle-weary platoon down Via Garibaldi in Catania, Sicily. Struck by the oppressive heat and the alien new surroundings, the men soon settle into this lull in their combat experience. The next few weeks take on a dreamlike quality as newfound relationships flourish and the war itself – let alone homelife in Britain – recedes into the distance. Against this backdrop, There’s No Home, the second book of Alexander Baron’s War Trilogy meditates upon friendship, loyalty and love.
Based on Baron’s own experiences with the Eighth Army in Italy, this new edition of a 1950 classic includes an introduction from the Imperial War Museum.
Here is an extract taken from this book:
THIS IS NOT a story of war but of one of those brief interludes in war when the almost-
forgotten rhythms of normal living are permitted to emerge again; and when it seeps
back into the consciousness of human beings – painfully, sometimes heartbreakingly –
that they are, after all, human.
Which war? It might have been any war; the war we knew, the war our fathers knew; or it
might be a glimpse, foreseen, of tomorrow’s war. It makes little di&erence.
But since most people like to know when a thing happened, and where, let it be recorded
that this story takes place on the island of Sicily, in the town of Catania, and that it
begins on the )fth day of August in the year 1943.
All the morning the British soldiers had been streaming into the town. They came
clattering in through the Garibaldi Gate, down the steep and narrow Via Garibaldi, always
in straggling single )le. Their boots and gaiters were white with dust. Their dark denim
trousers were )lthy, shapeless and torn. Their khaki drill jackets showed black patches of
sweat and their faces, scarlet or glistening brown with the heat, were ugly with stubble
and sores. They were bowed and weary beneath their packs and weapons. The rays of
the sun fell upon them like hammer blows from above and bounced back at them from
walls and pavements in dry gusts of furnace- like heat. The saving shadow had been
banished; every corner of creation was 2ooded with a blinding white glare that hurt their
eyes and made their heads ache; so that it was only occasionally, and with little interest,
that men glanced about them, at the town which they had fought so long and su&ered so
bitterly to capture. The obsession of battle – that strange sense of trance in which all the
super2uous faculties and emotions are anaesthetised – was still upon them. At the
moment, only their soldier’s senses functioned, keeping their tortured bodies in motion,
guiding them over the hillocks of rubble which spilled across the streets, searching the
ground before their feet for mines, watching roofs and windows for ambush, recording
through their ears the sharp, distant sounds of battle from the foothills north of the town
which told them that the German rearguards were still in action, falling reluctantly back
along the coast towards Messina.
At the foot of the Via Garibaldi they struck left along what appeared to be the town’s
main thoroughfare, a broad street in which )ne buildings, shops and tree-lined squares
alternated with enormous mounds of ruin. High above the street hung the sun, a splash
of unbearable incandescence that )lled half the sky. At the street’s end, appearing
deceptively near, rose the blue immensity of Etna, mocking them with its cool
tranquillity, as it had done throughout the days of slaughter they had endured on the
parched plains which now lay behind them peopled only by the dead. All the morning
they came; armoured cars, moving without haste along the street as if their crews were
sightseeing, gathering speed noisily as they approached the far side of the town; tanks,
lorries, water-trucks, motor cycles; and the bobbing )les of infantry, with their
indefatigable, spring-heeled walk. The sun rose ever higher above their heads. The last
breaths of wind died, murdered. The air became so charged with heat that it seemed that
it must ignite and shrivel them all in a great 2ash. The daylight disintegrated before the
men’s eyes, its radiance shimmering with curtains of darkness and coloured )re, so that
the white walls and the bleached pavements seemed to waver.
Echoes In An Empty Room 