Veterans Day in a mountaintop Italian village

On Veterans Day, I found myself in a tiny Italian mountaintop village called Tremensuoli. The village square offered a panoramic view of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Apennine mountains. The bells of a 1,000-year-old church peeled every 15 minutes.

In the center of the piazza was a monument to those who endured suffering and the loss of freedom in World War II. The life-size statue of a woman, with arms spread wide, stood below a sculpture of a dove of peace flying through the rays of the sun. One of the woman’s hands reached up toward the dove while the other reached down, touching barbed wire.

That wasn’t the only sign of the war’s impact.

In 1944, American soldiers fought their way through, pushing the Germans back and providing relief to this remote village. One of them left behind a simple memento.

Marshall A. Webb carved his name on a wall (M.A. Webb), that he was from Campbellsville, Ky., (C-ville, KY), and the date (1944 March).

Villagers researched Marshall, discovering he fought with the 339th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Battalion, Company E. On March 15, 2015, they enshrined his graffiti behind plexiglass, along with his U.S. Army photo and a poem he had written about his march through Italy.

The owner of the sole restaurant in Tremensuoli quickly offered to take my family and me to see the enshrined graffiti.

It was heartening to realize that people across the ocean still cherish the American GI.

The following is Webb’s poem, titled "One more river to cross":

Spring is coming to Italy

The grass is turning green

Christmas has come and winter is gone

Ten years to us it has seemed

We now in defense in Italy

But the time will come again

To fight our way into the Po

And bring this thing to an end

We all remember Treminsola

And the days we fought for Rome

The rivers we crossed and hills we took

But yet we farther from home

We can always remember Salerno

Where our buddies fought and fell

As well as the beach head at Anzio

Where lots of our buddies still dwell.

Bob Stronach of New York is a member of The American Legion and the National American Legion Press Association.