December 1943. I was brushing plaster off my sleeve when Major Vance looked at the hole in the living-room wall and asked, “Are you people completely out of your minds?”

I was twenty-two, a Canadian infantryman on the second floor of an Italian house that had been built for a family, not a platoon. The room still had a table and a few plates on it. I remember one plate had a blue rim, chipped near the edge.

The wall between that room and the house next door was gone. The major had arrived just in time to see us make it that way.

Sergeant Mac stood beside me with the charge bag at his feet. He had plaster in his eyebrows and no interest in explaining himself twice. Major Vance had a clean map case tucked under one arm. I thought he looked cold, but I can’t say whether he was. I was cold enough for both of us.

“That’s a civilian’s house,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Mac said.

“You’re making a road through it.”

“We’re making a way forward.”

That was the whole argument, as far as I remember. It didn’t settle anything. The major looked at the broken wall like he’d found us wrecking a house for sport. I understood why it looked that way. I just couldn’t see another way to stay alive.

Before Ortona, I had thought of a street as a street. You crossed it, found cover, and kept going. The town taught me better. The German paratroopers had machine guns watching the narrow roads and intersections, with positions that covered one another. A man could step out for a few seconds and be shot from somewhere he couldn’t even see.

We had tried the streets. The first time, I heard the bullets strike stone before I knew where they were coming from. The next time, we got a little farther, but we paid for it. I won’t pretend I remember every name now. I remember a fellow trying to drag another man by the straps of his pack, and how both of them were stuck in the open while the rest of us had to stay down.

After that, we stopped saying the street was the way through.

The houses joined together in ways that weren’t obvious from outside. Many had shared walls or rooms close enough that, if we could get through one wall, we could enter the next building without stepping into the German guns’ line of sight.

That was the idea, anyway. It sounds simple when I write it down. It wasn’t simple when a man had to crawl through a hole into a room he hadn’t seen.

Mac showed us how to make the openings. He was careful with the charges. The point wasn’t to bring the whole house down. We put a small charge against an interior partition, chose a spot away from the thick outside stone, and backed off as much as the room allowed. Sometimes a pickaxe did the work. Sometimes explosives did. The wall came down in a cloud of plaster and dust, and somebody had to go through first.

“Don’t lean on the outside wall,” Mac told us. “That’s what keeps the roof up.”

He said it like he was reminding us not to leave our boots in the rain. That was his way. He didn’t make speeches. He showed us where to put our feet, where a charge might go wrong, and how to keep a second man close enough to pull us back if the room beyond wasn’t empty.

I was the one who volunteered to go through the first hole after the blast. I don’t know if I was brave. I was sick of waiting for someone else to do it, and I didn’t want Mac thinking I was dead weight. Those aren’t the same thing, though I told myself they were.

The charge went off with a hard thump. Dust filled my mouth. My ears rang, and for a few seconds I couldn’t see much past the ragged edge of the opening. I put my rifle through first, then pushed my shoulders through. There was a bedroom on the other side. A blanket was folded at the foot of the bed. A small pair of shoes sat near the wall.

No Germans in that room. No family, either.

I heard a boot scrape somewhere beyond the next wall. I raised my rifle and tried to breathe through my mouth. Mac came through behind me, low and steady. We moved to the next room, then stopped and listened. The house had all the small sounds of an ordinary place, except we were the ones making them now.

We found a dining table with cold porcelain still laid out. One cup had tipped on its side. I had to step around a chair to get to the next wall. I remember feeling ashamed of that. Not enough to turn back. Enough that I noticed.

The next breach brought us into a house with a German soldier in it.

I saw the movement first, close and quick, at the far end of a room. I shouted. Mac shoved me down behind a low cabinet as the German fired. The round hit wood. The room smelled like dust and burned powder. One of our men fired back, and the German ducked away through a doorway.

We didn’t know whether there were more men in the house. We didn’t know which room led to which street. We only knew that waiting for the German to come back gave him time to find our angle.

“Left room,” Mac said.

I followed him. I kept my rifle up, but my hands were shaking enough that I had to grip it tighter. At the doorway, I stopped. I could hear breathing, or maybe it was my own. Mac tapped the side of my boot once. I went in.

The room was empty. A washbasin stood on a little stand. There was a cracked mirror above it. The German had slipped out through another door, and we couldn’t see where he’d gone. We cleared the house one room at a time and found no one else. Still, after that, I didn’t push through a fresh opening without thinking about the room beyond it.

Major Vance kept coming around the sector. He wasn’t a fool, and he wasn’t cruel. He had rules because rules were meant to keep men from being wasted. From his side, watching Canadians blow through house walls must have looked like we were ignoring every lesson he’d learned. From mine, the approved street crossing looked like a way to hand the Germans another target.

He asked Mac whether we knew how unstable some of the buildings were.

“We know enough to be careful,” Mac said.

“Careful isn’t the same as safe.”

“No, sir.”

I liked Mac for not arguing just to win. I also liked that he kept making holes.

We got better at it, though “better” meant we learned how to make the same ugly choice with fewer mistakes. We watched the roofline. We checked whether a partition was load-bearing before we put a charge to it. We cleared upper floors when we could, then worked downward, using the house itself to get behind positions that were meant to stop us in the street.

The Germans had set up their strongpoints to cover the roads. They expected us to come along those roads. So we went through kitchens, bedrooms, and upstairs rooms, one wall at a time. The plan wasn’t clever in some grand way. It was what the town gave us.

At night, I could still smell plaster in my clothes. I had a habit of rubbing the dust off my sleeves even when there was no point. I did it before a charge went off, and I did it after. I had grown up going to church, and in those days I would say a quiet “Lord help us” before we moved. I didn’t say it out loud. I wasn’t sure I believed anyone was listening. I said it anyway.

Then came the block near the piazza.

The Germans had a machine gun position there that covered the street approach and the open ground around it. We had already tried to move on the position from below. It had stopped us. The gun fired in short bursts, each one neat and controlled. We could hear it through the buildings, and every time it started, the men who had been talking went quiet.

The plan was to clear the adjoining houses, get above the position, then open a wall behind the gun crew. The Germans had their weapon pointed toward the street. They couldn’t swing it around fast enough if we came in from the back. That was the theory. If we were wrong, we would be in a room with a machine gun and nowhere to hide.

Mac told us the job in a low voice. He didn’t promise we’d be all right. He said where each man was going and what each man had to watch.

Major Vance was there, too. He looked at the buildings, then at Mac.

“You’re going through the wall behind it?”

“That’s the plan, sir.”

“And if the floor gives way?”

“We’ll find out before the whole section is on it.”

The major glanced at me. I had plaster in my hair again. “You know what’s on the other side?”

“No, sir.”

He held my eyes for a second. “Then don’t go in blind.”

I wanted to tell him that blind was what we had been for days. I didn’t. He wasn’t wrong. He was trying to keep us alive, same as Mac. The difference was that Mac had started using the houses as part of the fight, and the major was still looking at them as places we had to protect.

We moved through the building above the street. My boots creaked once on a board, and I stopped until Mac gave me a nod. We got into the upper room and waited. The machine gun kept firing toward the road. Dust sifted down from the ceiling with each burst. I counted the pauses between them, the way I had once counted verses in a hymn when I was a boy and wanted the service to end.

Mac placed the charge at the interior wall. He checked it, then checked it again. The rest of us backed away as far as we could. There was no real room to back away.

The blast hit us in the chest. The wall split open. The room filled with dust. I could hear shouting from the other side, but I couldn’t make out the words. Mac went down low. I went after him.

I was through first.

The German gun crew was turning toward us. One man grabbed for the weapon. Another was trying to get to a doorway. I fired at the movement by the gun, then dropped flat as rounds came back through the hole. Mac and the others came in behind me, firing and shouting. The fight was close enough that there wasn’t time to think in full sentences.

A Canadian beside me went down. He was hit in the leg and was trying to pull himself behind a cabinet. I had two choices, though it didn’t feel like choices at the time. I could keep moving toward the gun, or I could get him out of the open.

I grabbed his webbing. The machine gun started again. I pulled him hard toward the broken wall, and the two of us struck the floor on the other side. Mac and another man went past us. I heard Mac shout, then the gun stopped.

It stopped.

The room stayed full of dust. Someone called out that the position was clear. I stayed beside the wounded man until I was sure he was still breathing. His hand had locked around my sleeve. I told him to keep hold of it. I don’t know why. It was all I could think to say.

The rest of the section cleared the rooms around the gun position. We found the German defenders who hadn’t made it out, then searched the adjoining spaces for anyone else. The block was ours. We had taken it from above and behind, where the gun couldn’t cover us. We lost fewer men than we had on the street approaches, though one wounded man was still too many for me.

Major Vance came into the room after the firing stopped. He looked at the gun, at the hole in the wall, then at the men moving through the building. He didn’t make a speech. He just gave Mac a short nod.

“That worked,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Mac said.

There was no apology. There didn’t need to be. The major had seen what the map hadn’t shown him. The wall wasn’t a road because we wanted to ruin somebody’s home. It was the only route that let us reach the gun without walking into its sights.

After that, the method spread through the sector. More men started using charges and pickaxes to move house to house instead of crossing the open streets. Command took notice. The tactic became part of how we fought through the remaining blocks. I heard the name “mouse-holing” often enough that it stopped sounding strange.

Ortona didn’t become easy. No tactic made it easy. We still went through rooms that had belonged to families. We still found a cup on a table or a coat left behind and had to step around it. Sometimes I wondered if the people who lived there had gotten out. Sometimes I didn’t let myself wonder because we had another wall to clear.

Near the end of the block, I passed back through the living room where Major Vance had first seen us. The hole we had made had rough edges, and plaster lay across the floor. I saw a family portrait on the mantel. It had stayed upright through the blast. The glass wasn’t broken. I stopped for a moment, then wiped dust from my sleeve again.

The house had become a way forward. The portrait was still there. I couldn’t make those two facts fit together, so I left them both where they were.