Publisher's Synopsis
The title, which hints at the poetry that breathes life into this true story of the Allied invasion of the beach at Anzio, Italy, in 1944, comes from a passage within the book told by a man assigned burial duty: "Quickly, the mound of earth disappears. A friend has gone. He has drunk his vessel of sadness. His battle is stilled."
Woodruff's technique is to show that bloody struggle through the eyes of sol-diers, statesmen, and civilians involved. Privileged viewers from afar, we see officers shooting pool before a major conference; we come close, peer into the thoughts of a corporal just before a bul-let takes the top off his head; as if we were walking past, we stop for a mo-ment to watch a poker game among enlisted men; we see an ambassador fretting over artifacts and men riding headlong into a German machine-gun nest.
In Woodruff's war there are no hu-man villains, only madness, an abstract insanity, a waste of such huge propor-tions as to sober even a giddy man. A war.
