2004 for New Zealanders: Bill Marsh

Bill Marsh

In one year Bill Marsh travelled back 60 years to confront the memories of himself as a soldier in his early 20s. In May, he and 50 other veterans returned to Italy to the scene of the battle of Cassino, a place that, the last time they saw it, was a pile of rubble, a demolished abbey high on a hill.

When they piled out of a bus after four days on an Air Force aircraft, Marsh looked up at the rebuilt monastery and said of the hill: "It looks higher. Maybe I've shrunk."

We followed Marsh to Cassino - and he quipped his way through an often emotional journey.

Before we left, Marsh's wife Rose had persuaded him that he needed to return. She thought it would be a rounding off.

"I think it'll be finishing with everything in his life. I think it's the final chapter."

We wondered whether he felt he'd laid some ghosts to rest. "Well, I suppose so. We had a good idea where all the cemeteries were."

In Cassino we walked with Marsh and looked at the rows of graves in the beautifully kept Cassino War Cemetery and noted the ages of the soldiers. Marsh said: "Stupid, isn't it. They're all young men."

Before Marsh went back he had never talked to anyone about his war, not even Rose or their children. Has he since he came home?

"Oh well, I just talked to the wife and my daughters and they know where I've been. You see, most people read it in the paper. I didn't have to tell them. They read all the news. And then it cut out and they said, 'What happened then'?"

What happened was that Marsh came home and continued his life. This means looking after the few sheep he keeps, keeping up the garden and, at the age of 83 and a half, going up ladders. He fell off a ladder a month ago and hurt his arm and a rib but nothing to write home about. He's a tough one. He had a couple of days of jet lag after the long trip but "after that I was normal". He says falling off the ladder has nothing to do with his age: he put it up wrong.

Marsh would not say that returning to Cassino was life-changing: life is the stuff you did before and after the war, the bit you get on with every day.

But he's glad he went. "It was good to have a look at the country again."

He gave a "bit of a talk" at the Pukekohe RSA when he returned. "I just talked about my trip and when I left here and went to Trentham and Penang and Bahrain and Cassino and Rome. We went a long way in a short time, wasn't it?"

It seems amazing to him that he did go all that long way. It is the places he'd rather talk about; he left his memories in Cassino where he'd deposited them 60 years ago.

"There's a lot of people I meet in the street, oh dozens of them have spoken to me about the trip. "Everywhere I go people seem to talk to me; they've read the stories in the paper." This suits him fine - it means he doesn't have to tell his own story.