I've done many drawings of wrecked buildings. Shattered towns and bomb-blasted houses are constant reminders of the war, long after the dead are buried.
There's something very ghostlike about a wall standing in the moonlight in the midst of a pile of broken rubble and staring at you with its single unblinking eye, where a window used to be. There's an awful lot of that in Italy, and it is going to haunt those people for years.
You can usually tell what kind of fighting went on in a town, and how much was necessary to take it, by the wreckage that remains. If the buildings are fairly intact, with only broken windows, doors, and pocked walls, it was a quick, hand-to-hand street fight with small arms and grenades and perhaps a mortar or two.
If most of the walls are still standing, but the roofs have gaping holes, and many rooms are shattered, then the entry was preceded by an artillery barrage. If some of the holes are in the slopes of the roofs facing the retreating enemy, then he gave the town a plastering after he left.
But if there isn't much town left at all, then planes have been around. Bombs sort of lift things up in the air and drop them in a heap. Even the enormous sheet-metal doors with which shop-owners shutter their establishments buckle and balloon out into grotesque swollen shapes.
Bill Mauldin, Up Front (1945)
For several cartoonists' tribute to Mauldin (who died in 2003, after a difficult and often lonely bout with Alzheimer's), go here.
1 comment:
This reminded me of another account of bombing.
A Lebanese friend of mine shared how different the damage to Beirut in this summer's war was from the (still very visible) damage from the civil war:
"We were already at the beginning of the Green Line of the preceding wars. We passed a building that has a tire shop at street level while the two floors above were destroyed some decades ago and were never rebuilt. The walls were pocked. Plants growing inside some holes here and there. An old beaten up building that had seen fighting. A totally different sight from what we had just seen. No flattening. Marks of fighting. One could imagine the men shooting at the building with different kinds of weapons. Obviously the inhabitants would have run away as happened on my parents' street.
"The destruction of this recent war doesn't seem human made. It feels as if the bombs were dropped by demi-gods, flying the skies with no human challenge. Pilots believing themselves to be Haddad, the Zeus of this part of the world. Stupid men. Criminals. A friend told me today that another friend went to the suburbs to check on her house. She was with her husband. They started arguing about which mound was their home. Several buildings had collapsed and the view of the rubbles confused them. Flattened buildings. Flattened homes. Flattened as if someone had pushed with a mighty hand and all became a pile of concrete. Nothing to be salvaged."
Much more if you are interested.
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