Word: johnstons
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Five Hundred Prayers. Across the Tiber, the fourth river, Johnston recorded the welcome of liberated Rome. Pope Pius gave an audience to the Allied press, but what impressed Johnston were the shouts of the cameramen: "Hold it, Pope, we gotcha ..." A Scottish pipe band marched into St. Peter's Square, bent-in the words of the pipe major-on "gieing Popie a blaw." The Pope was delighted, says Orangeman Johnston, but "all the same, they might have picked on a more suitable tune than Lillibulero...
Landing on the Riviera, Johnston lugged his recording gear through Savoy to the link-up with Patton's army, advancing through the dragon's teeth of the Siegfried Line. The Seine was his fifth river, but the only experience Johnston records in Paris is of an unsuccessful brothel crawl. Soon he was back with Patton, blasting a path towards the Americans encircled in Bastogne. That Christmas, General Patton issued greeting cards with a prayer for good weather so that his fighter-bombers could strafe the Nazi armor. When the skies began clearing slowly, old Blood and Guts ordered...
Napoleon & Me. The sixth river was the Liffey, in Dublin. There Johnston was married during a brief furlough. Soon he was back at the front, bridging the seventh river, the Rhine, and pushing on into Germany. With the hard-driving U.S. tankmen he felt at home. But he also felt sorry for the Germans, until one day when he came upon the Buchenwald death camp and choked as he recorded the story...
...eighth river was the Danube, and the ninth the Inn. Johnston went all the way-through Bavaria into Austria and over the Brenner Pass to meet the U.S. Fifth Army, stumbling up from Italy. "Do you gentlemen realize," said the wiry American colonel who led the last advance, "that only three soldiers in history have ever forced the Brenner? Hannibal, Napoleon...
...Johnston ends his book with sheer fantasy: a description of his own death in the Brenner Pass. At first sight, this appears to be a crude and contrived gag, but Johnston insists that he is serious. His moral is that he has crossed the nine rivers of experience and reached his long-sought goal: an understanding of war, which is too terrible for a man to live with. Such fatalism-and conceit-seems out of character with the life-lusty Irishman revealed in the book's earlier pages...