US Army

In front to a “marana”

Italian Campaign, Anzio Front, April 1944: a group of American soldier and their holes, covert by sand bags and by a clot and branch, in front to a “marana”, one of the little rivulets at this time a normal spectacle of the campaign around Rome: everywhere grey sky, mud, stagnant and dirty water, skimpy plants… a very rough location for a forced stop of the combats. Another picture exemplifying psycho-physical conditions of a men in the war: one soldier reading (letters from home?), another has stopped his lecture and observing the little group of three comrades in background (one seem with a Red Cross band). But look to the soldier in foreground: how alien from the surrounding circumstances playing with a shrub’s branch and a broken crate in the muddy water, perhaps a way for abstract itself from the tragic reality of the war. Victor Sierra