The Race to Messina: Troina, San Fratello and the End-Runs

U.S. 155mm howitzers fire outside Cerami, summer 1943. U.S. Navy photograph, National Archives.

Operation Husky · Chapter 7 of 9

The Race to Messina: Troina, San Fratello and the End-Runs

In the mountains and along the north coast, Americans fought mule-borne battles and leapfrogged by sea, while their commander’s temper nearly ended his career.

25 July – 16 August 1943Nicosia · Troina · San Fratello · Brolo · Randazzo~25 min read

When Palermo fell on 22 July, the Seventh Army had done the easy part. Western Sicily had been held by Italian coastal and garrison troops, many of them ready to quit, and Patton’s columns had covered more than a hundred miles in three days against roadblocks and white flags. The road east was different. Northeastern Sicily is a wedge of mountains: the Nebrodi and Caronie ranges along the north coast, the bulk of Mount Etna to the south, and between them a handful of roads that climb through stone towns built on ridgetops for exactly this purpose. Four German divisions now stood there, and they had stopped retreating at the pace of the Italians.

On 23 July General Sir Harold Alexander ordered Patton to turn the Seventh Army east toward Messina along two axes: Highway 113 on the north coast and Highway 120 through the interior. Lieutenant General Omar Bradley’s II Corps would make both thrusts. The 45th Infantry Division took the coast road; the 1st Infantry Division took the mountain road through Nicosia and Troina. The 3rd Division and the newly arrived 9th Division would come in behind them. Patton put the stakes plainly to Major General Troy Middleton of the 45th: the drive was, he said, “a horse race in which the prestige of the US Army is at stake.”

This chapter follows that race over its last three and a half weeks: the six-day battle for Troina, the bitterest American fight of the campaign; the mule trains of the 3rd Division in the Caronie Mountains; three amphibious “end-runs” behind the German line, one of which nearly destroyed the battalion that made it; and the two visits to evacuation hospitals that cost George Patton nearly a year out of combat.

The Etna Line

The Allies called the main German defensive position in northeastern Sicily the Etna Line. In the American zone it ran roughly along the road from San Fratello on the north coast, south through the mountains to Troina and Cesarò, then bent around the western and southern slopes of Etna through Adrano to the sea just south of Catania. Garland and Smyth, the U.S. Army’s official historians, describe it as running “roughly along the San Fratello-Cesarò road” in the American sector. Behind it the Germans had already surveyed a shorter line from the Tortorici area to the coast, and behind that, a series of phase lines across the narrowing tip of the island toward Messina.

General der Panzertruppe Hans-Valentin Hube’s XIV Panzer Corps now ran the German defense. The 29th Panzergrenadier Division, commanded by Generalmajor Walter Fries, held the coast road. The 15th Panzergrenadier Division under Generalmajor Eberhard Rodt held the interior around Troina, organized in battle groups named for their commanders, Group Fullriede and Group Ens. The Hermann Göring Division and the 1st Fallschirmjäger Division faced the British Eighth Army on Etna’s southern side. Italian units, including artillery of the Aosta Division and an infantry regiment of the Assietta Division, were mixed into the line.

The Germans had good reason to fight hard here. On 26 July, the day after Mussolini’s arrest, the German high command ordered preparations for a possible evacuation of Sicily. Every day the Etna Line held was a day for the ferries in the Strait of Messina to carry men and guns to the mainland. The fighting in this chapter and the evacuation described in Chapter 9 are two halves of the same German plan.

The terrain favored the defender at every turn. The roads followed narrow valleys or clung to hillsides, and bridges and culverts could be blown in minutes. Every hill town looked down on its approaches. The Americans had come ashore as a motorized army on flat beaches; they would finish the campaign moving supplies on mules, man-packing ammunition up slopes too steep for jeeps, and calling in naval gunfire from cruisers lying offshore.

Nicosia and “Bloody Ridge”

The first fights of the turn east were won quickly enough to breed overconfidence. On the interior road, Major General Terry Allen’s 1st Division pushed through the hill country west of Nicosia against German rear guards and, with the Canadians pressing Leonforte and Agira to the south (told in Chapter 6), took Nicosia on 28 July. On the coast, the 45th Division ground forward through cultivated terraces and ravines toward Santo Stefano di Camastra and took it on 30 July after a hard fight on the high ground the men called “Bloody Ridge.” It was the Thunderbirds’ last big fight of the campaign. On 31 July the 3rd Division relieved them on the coast road.

East of Nicosia the 16th Infantry ran into the real Etna Line. On 29 July its pursuit of the 15th Panzergrenadier Division ended about four miles beyond the town, and the regiment dug in short of Cerami. II Corps intelligence that day judged the next objective weakly defended. “Indications are Troina lightly held,” read a II Corps G-2 estimate of 31 July. It was one of the costliest misjudgments of the campaign.

The 45th Division’s own newspaper captured the soldier’s view of these weeks. Its staff included a young sergeant from New Mexico, Bill Mauldin, whose unshaven infantrymen Willie and Joe matured in Sicily before they became famous in Stars and Stripes. The cartoons are still under copyright and are not reproduced here, but their theme was the campaign’s: men too tired to care about horse races, climbing one more hill.

Gagliano: Sergeant Kisters’ Five Wounds

On the 1st Division’s southern flank, the 91st Reconnaissance Squadron of the 2nd Armored Division was probing toward Gagliano, a small town in the hills south of Troina. On 31 July a platoon advancing near Gagliano was stopped by two enemy machine guns covering the road.

Sergeant Gerry H. Kisters and an officer went forward and captured the first gun and its four-man crew. Kisters then went alone after the second. He was hit five times, in both legs and his right arm, and kept crawling forward until he was close enough to kill three of the gun’s crew and drive off the fourth. His Medal of Honor was presented on 18 February 1944, along with a Distinguished Service Cross for an earlier action in Tunisia. Yank magazine later reported him as the first American soldier of the war to hold both decorations, a claim that has been repeated widely but that we have not been able to confirm independently.

A troop of the 91st entered Gagliano on 1 August after heavy supporting fire. Its capture mattered: from the south, Gagliano gave the Americans a second approach to the Troina massif and a link with the Canadians, who were fighting toward Regalbuto at the same time.

Troina: Six Days on the Hill Town

Troina sits on a ridge more than 3,600 feet high, one of the highest towns in Sicily. Before the battle about 12,000 people lived there. To its north rose Monte Acuto, almost a mile high, which dominated the whole front and could be attacked only from the north. To its east, overlooking the highway toward Cesarò, lay Monte Basilio (Hill 1035), whose two faces were open to fire from either side. Rodt’s 15th Panzergrenadier Division held the town and the surrounding heights with Group Fullriede to the north and Group Ens to the south, supported by Italian guns of the Aosta Division.

31 July – 1 August: the attack that was too light

Believing the town lightly held, Allen sent in the 39th Infantry, a 9th Division regiment attached to the 1st, under Colonel Harry A. “Paddy” Flint. On 31 July a battalion of the 39th entered Cerami at about 0900 and pushed on to Monte Timponivoli, while the 4th Tabor of Moroccan goums under Captain Guido Verlet took Capizzi on the northern flank. The next morning the 3rd Battalion, 39th, jumped off at 0500 toward Troina and was halted and pulled back by mid-morning. The 1st Battalion took Hill 1034 west of the town, was counterattacked at nightfall, and was down to about 300 men by midnight.

2–4 August: the whole division

Allen now committed the entire 1st Division with the 39th attached. On 2 August the 26th Infantry gained more than half a mile to Rocca di Mania, while the goums could not get across the Troina River. On 3 August the 16th Infantry’s attack stalled under fire, Group Fullriede counterattacked Monte Basilio and was beaten back, and at about noon Group Ens struck the 16th Infantry. The Germans, Garland and Smyth record, made at least eight documented counterattacks during the battle; the Army’s campaign pamphlet puts it at “no fewer than two dozen.”

To break the town, Brigadier General Clift Andrus, the 1st Division’s artillery commander, gathered 165 guns: the organic battalions of the 1st and 9th Divisions and an almost equal number of II Corps battalions. On 4 August it was joined by air power: two attacks of 36 A-36 Apache dive bombers each, around noon and at 1700, and eight more aircraft assigned to Monte Acuto at 1445. (The pilots could not identify Monte Acuto, and it went untouched.) Ground observers reported, “Air and artillery bombardment lovely,” and, “The enemy is completely unnerved.”

Air support had a cost. On 3 August a half-dozen Spitfires bombing the north slopes of Monte Castagna and Monte Acuto strafed the goums by mistake. On 5 August eighteen A-36s bombed both sides of Troina; when Flint asked what they were, the division’s operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Gibb, could only answer, “Bombing unscheduled.” Coordination between air and ground forces in Sicily remained, at best, improvised.

5 August: Monte Basilio and Private Reese

The decisive fighting on 5 August came on Monte Basilio, which the 26th Infantry had seized and was trying to hold against counterattack after counterattack while cut off from easy supply. Private James W. Reese of the 26th Infantry, acting leader of a 60mm mortar squad, moved his squad to a position where its fire helped break a counterattack. When enemy fire made the spot untenable he sent his squad to safety, carried the mortar and its last three rounds forward alone, destroyed a German machine-gun nest with his last round, and kept fighting with a rifle until he was killed. His citation names the hill “Mount Vassillio,” a wartime spelling of Basilio. His Medal of Honor was presented to his family at Fort Dupont, Delaware, in December 1943.

By evening on 5 August the battle had worn both sides down. Company I of the 26th Infantry could locate only 17 of its men. But patrols reported that the Germans had begun to pull back, and late that night Rodt’s men left. The 15th Panzergrenadier Division had lost at least 1,600 men in the battle. Hube’s corps was by now falling back by design to the next line.

6 August: what the patrols found

Patrols of the 16th Infantry entered Troina soon after 0800 on 6 August and met only scattered fire. What they found was a ruin. The main street had been blown away, water mains were broken, and a 200-pound unexploded bomb lay inside the church. Of a prewar population of about 12,000, only several hundred people remained. About 150 dead, civilians and German and Italian soldiers, lay in the town. Chapter 8 returns to what battles like this cost the people of Sicily.

Allen and Roosevelt Relieved

On the afternoon of 6 August, the day Troina fell, Allen handed his zone to Major General Manton Eddy’s 9th Division, and Allen and his assistant division commander, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., turned the 1st Division over to Major General Clarence R. Huebner and Colonel Willard G. Wyman. (Some accounts date the change to 7 August.) Allen was sent home to train the 104th Infantry Division. Roosevelt became Fifth Army liaison officer with the French in Italy.

The official history does not give a reason. Bradley later wrote that he had settled on the change before the battle began, and he explained it in personal terms: in his view the 1st Division had grown too proud, too careless of discipline behind the line and too attached to its commander, and Allen to it. Allen’s division had carried the hardest American fighting since Tunisia, from El Guettar (told in our Kasserine series) to Gela and Troina, and its men took the change hard. Eisenhower later wrote that it would be “a terrible injustice” to treat it as a relief for inefficiency.

Both men did important service later. Allen made the 104th “Timberwolf” Division one of the best night-fighting divisions in the U.S. Army. Roosevelt went ashore with the first wave at Utah Beach on 6 June 1944 as assistant commander of the 4th Infantry Division, the only general to land in the first wave there, and received the Medal of Honor; he died of a heart attack on 12 July 1944. Huebner led the 1st Division ashore at Omaha Beach. The Sicily relief is a reminder that the Army that landed in Normandy was shaped by decisions taken in these hills.

San Fratello: Mules Against Mountains

On the north coast, Major General Lucian K. Truscott Jr.’s 3rd Division took over from the 45th at Santo Stefano di Camastra on 31 July. Ahead lay the strongest position the division faced in Sicily. The San Fratello ridge, about a mile and a half long on its seaward face, rises to Monte San Fratello at about 2,200 feet. In front of it, the Furiano River ran down to the sea through a valley the Germans had mined and covered with fire. Fries’s 29th Panzergrenadier Division held the ridge, reinforced by an Italian regiment of the Assietta Division on the heights south of the town. Garland and Smyth judged the terrain “scarcely less formidable than Rodt had at Troina.”

Truscott planned to make his main effort through the Caronie Mountains, inland, while the units on Highway 113 kept up pressure along the coast. Mountains meant animals. The division formed a Provisional Pack Train and a Provisional Mounted Troop under Major Robert W. Crandall, buying, requisitioning and capturing mules and horses as it went. Before the division reached Messina it used more than 400 mules and over 100 horses to carry ammunition, rations, water and wounded where no truck could go.

The fighting at the Furiano was costly from the start. On 3 August the 15th Infantry reached the river, found it heavily mined, and halted after suffering 103 casualties without gaining ground. On 4 August a planned thirty-minute barrage never came, because the artillery had not registered its guns, and the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 15th Infantry were stopped again. On 6 August, after Truscott shifted his main effort into the mountains, the 30th Infantry’s attack from the south became a set of separate battalion thrusts, and the 15th Infantry lost 30 killed and 70 wounded for no gain. The regiment, an Army training study later said, had learned to stay “with the damn fight till it’s over.”

The break came on 7 August. A morning attack on Hill 673 failed, but a coordinated evening assault by the 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry, and the 3rd Battalion, 30th Infantry, starting at 1930, took the crest by midnight. At about 0200 on 8 August the Germans pulled off the hill and withdrew toward the coast. Fries had already begun thinning his line on 5 August. By the morning of 8 August the 30th Infantry held San Fratello and Monte San Fratello, and Italian resistance collapsed: almost 1,000 men of the Assietta Division surrendered to one battalion that day.

The Sant’Agata End-Run, 8 August

Sicily’s north coast offered the Seventh Army something the mountain road did not: an open flank on the sea. On 30 July Patton and Bradley had considered a landing to help the 45th Division; the German withdrawal made it unnecessary. By 2 August Patton had decided to use Rear Admiral Lyal A. Davidson’s Task Force 88 to land troops behind the San Fratello line. Davidson had landing craft for only one reinforced battalion. At Bradley’s request, II Corps would choose the timing and control the force so that the 3rd Division could reach it quickly.

The battalion chosen was the 2nd Battalion, 30th Infantry, under Lieutenant Colonel Lyle A. Bernard, reinforced with Batteries A and B of the 58th Armored Field Artillery Battalion, a platoon of medium tanks and a platoon of combat engineers. Two LSTs would carry the first waves, an LCI would carry Company E, and sixteen DUKWs would be launched offshore. Two cruisers and six destroyers would cover the landing.

The first attempt, on 7 August, ended before it started. German aircraft bombed and strafed the loading area at Santo Stefano; two attackers were shot down but one LST was badly damaged, and Truscott postponed the landing for 24 hours. Loading began again at 1700 the next evening, and the craft left the beaches at 1940. The Luftwaffe came back and missed. The force hove to at 0150 on 8 August; Companies F and G touched down at 0315, and all troops and vehicles were ashore by 0415.

They had landed in the wrong place. The beach lay west of the Rosmarino River near Sant’Agata di Militello, not east of it near Terranova as planned. Bernard adjusted, seizing high ground on both sides of the river, but Company E lost its way and dug in on a ridge it mistook for Monte Barbuzzo, the objective that was supposed to cut the coast highway. A German counterattack with two Italian Renault tanks and two German Mark IVs ran into American artillery and tanks, lost both Renaults and one Mark IV, and pulled back. At 1230 patrols of the 7th Infantry reached Company G east of Sant’Agata.

The hook did not close. Fries’s division had mostly left San Fratello already, and its rear guard, the 2nd Battalion, 71st Panzergrenadier Regiment, escaped except for about one company and a few vehicles. The landing may have hurried the Germans out a few hours early. The Army’s campaign pamphlet credits it with “over 1,000 prisoners,” most of them the Italians who surrendered that day.

Brolo: Monte Cipolla, 11–12 August

Patton liked the end-run and wanted another, at once. The next German position ran along the Naso ridge, east of Capo d’Orlando, and Bernard’s battalion was to land at Brolo, behind it, on the morning of 11 August, while the 7th and 15th Infantry and the 3rd Ranger Battalion attacked the ridge from the front.

Truscott wanted to postpone the landing 24 hours. He doubted his infantry could break through the Naso ridge fast enough to reach Bernard’s small force before the Germans turned on it. Major General Geoffrey Keyes told him Patton would not want to tell the correspondents traveling with the force that the landing was delayed again. Bradley agreed with Truscott and tried to change Patton’s mind. When Truscott himself came to the telephone, Patton’s answer was short.

Dammit, the operation will go on.— Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. to Maj. Gen. Lucian Truscott, 10 August 1943 (Garland & Smyth, ch. 20)

Bernard’s force this time was one LST, two LCIs and six LCTs carrying his four companies, a tank platoon, an engineer platoon, the two field artillery batteries, 81mm mortars, a naval gunfire liaison officer and a fifteen-mule ammunition train, covered by the cruiser USS Philadelphia and six destroyers. It sailed from near Caronia at 1800 on 10 August. Company E touched down at 0243 on 11 August, thirteen minutes late and unopposed, and by 0400 the whole force was ashore without loss.

The hill

By 0530 Companies F and G were on top of Monte Cipolla, a 750-foot hill overlooking the coast highway and the Brolo River, and were dug in within half an hour. For a few hours everything went right. At 0700 Company G destroyed two German reconnaissance vehicles coming down the road from Ficarra. A 30-man German party moving down the Brolo riverbed was cut up. A company of about 100 men of the 15th Panzergrenadier Regiment attacking down the Naso riverbed was broken by Company H’s mortars and machine guns. At 0900 Philadelphia‘s guns scattered a German truck column.

But the German commander on the coast, Colonel Fritz Polack, gathered two infantry companies on personnel carriers with tanks, and Lieutenant Colonel Walter Krueger’s 71st Panzergrenadier Regiment was ordered to reopen the highway east at any cost. Around midday three German tanks crossed the Brolo River, destroyed two of Battery B’s guns and two ammunition half-tracks, and knocked out a third howitzer before one tank was set on fire and the others withdrew. Bernard’s radio log captured the pressure:

Friendly bombs

From 1400 Philadelphia was back on station firing at Polack’s troops. Twelve A-36s bombed Brolo and the ground east of it, and twelve more strafed the German assembly area half an hour later. Then the support began to fail. At 1505 Davidson withdrew his ships a second time because the radio link with the shore fire-control party had broken down. At about 1600 seven A-36s, mistaking it for the enemy, bombed Bernard’s own command post, killing or wounding 19 men and wrecking the last four of his artillery pieces. At about 1700 eight German aircraft attacked the warships; Philadelphia claimed five shot down, and Davidson withdrew to Palermo. Over the day the cruiser fired 1,062 six-inch rounds.

Through the afternoon and evening the Germans closed on the hill. The mules were killed or scattered; 13 of the 15 were lost. That night Krueger began pulling his units east past the hill. At 0730 on 12 August Bernard’s men made contact with a patrol of the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry, and came down from Monte Cipolla. They had lost 177 men killed, wounded or missing.

Garland and Smyth’s verdict is balanced. The landing forced Fries off the Naso ridge a day early and nearly trapped the 29th Panzergrenadier Division, which suffered about as many casualties as the 3rd Division in the fighting. It failed because the landing force was too small and because continuous air and naval support could not be kept over it. A regimental landing with sustained support, they suggest, might have closed the road. Instead Fries withdrew most of his heavy equipment to Hube’s first phase line east of Piraino, about three miles away.

The Slaps: 3 and 10 August

In the same days that his divisions were fighting for Troina and San Fratello, Patton twice lost control of himself in the receiving tents of evacuation hospitals. The incidents did more to shape his career than anything his army did in Sicily.

On 3 August, visiting the 15th Evacuation Hospital near Nicosia, Patton came upon Private Charles H. Kuhl, 27, of Company L, 26th Infantry. Kuhl had been diagnosed three times with “exhaustion”; his chart described an anxiety state. According to the medical reports, Patton asked what was wrong; when Kuhl said he guessed he could not take it, Patton slapped him across the chin with his gloves, dragged him to the tent entrance and pushed him out, shouting that he was going back to the front. A later test found Kuhl had malarial parasites and a temperature of 102.2 degrees.

On 10 August, at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital, Patton confronted Private Paul G. Bennett, 21, of Battery C, 17th Field Artillery, who was being treated for combat exhaustion. Patton slapped him twice, knocking off his helmet liner, threatened him with a firing squad and drew his pistol. The hospital commander, Colonel Donald E. Currier, stepped between them.

1. 3 AugustPatton strikes Pvt. Charles Kuhl at the 15th Evacuation Hospital near Nicosia.
2. 10 AugustPatton strikes Pvt. Paul Bennett at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital and draws his pistol.
3. 16 AugustA report sent through medical channels reaches Eisenhower; Bradley had locked his own copy in a safe.
4. 17 AugustEisenhower writes Patton a private letter of rebuke and orders apologies.
5. 19 AugustCorrespondents Demaree Bess, Merrill Mueller and Quentin Reynolds take the story to Eisenhower’s chief of staff; they agree not to file it.
6. 21–23 AugustPatton apologizes to Bennett (21st), the hospital staffs (22nd) and Kuhl (23rd).
7. 24–30 AugustPatton addresses his divisions in a series of apology speeches.
8. 21 NovemberColumnist Drew Pearson breaks the story on his radio program.

The II Corps surgeon reported the Bennett incident up the chain. Bradley locked the report in his safe, but a copy traveling through medical channels reached Eisenhower on 16 August. The next day Eisenhower wrote Patton a private letter. Nothing, he wrote, excused “brutality, abuse of the sick” or the display of “uncontrollable temper,” and he questioned Patton’s “good judgment and your self-discipline.” He ordered Patton to apologize, and he did not open a formal investigation.

Several correspondents knew the story within days. They agreed to sit on it; Eisenhower refused their demand that Patton be relieved. It broke anyway on 21 November 1943, when Drew Pearson told it on the radio in a garbled version that merged the two incidents. By then the consequences were already settled. In September Bradley, not Patton, had been chosen to command the American army that would land in Normandy, though Eisenhower said that decision came before the publicity. Patton did not command troops in combat again for eleven months, until his Third Army became operational in France in August 1944.

Randazzo and the Last Miles

By the second week of August the campaign had become a pursuit of an enemy who was leaving on schedule. On 10 August Hube issued the formal evacuation order, and the first full night of ferrying was 11/12 August. On 8 August, according to Garland and Smyth, the Seventh Army was 75 miles from Messina and the Eighth Army 52.

In the interior, Eddy’s 9th Division pushed past Troina toward Cesarò and Randazzo, the road junction on Etna’s northern slope where the American and British axes converged. Allied air forces had flattened it: in the first thirteen days of August Randazzo took 425 medium-bomber, 249 light-bomber and 72 fighter-bomber sorties. The 39th Infantry crossed the Simeto at 0645 on 11 August. Rodt pulled out on the evening of the 12th, and American and British troops met at Randazzo on 13 August.

On the British side the Eighth Army fought around Etna’s southern and eastern slopes. Catania fell on 5 August and Adrano on 7 August, and the 50th Division pushed up the coast through Acireale on 8 August. Montgomery canceled two commando landings the Royal Navy had prepared for him, preferring to push overland.

On the north coast, the 3rd Division found the road itself had become the enemy. German engineers blew the highway tunnel at Cape Calavà and dropped a 150-foot section of the road into the sea. The division’s 10th Engineer Battalion bridged the gap, work the official history calls a landmark of American engineer support in Sicily. On the morning of 15 August the 7th Infantry entered Barcellona, about twelve miles from Messina, where the coast road turns inland over the mountains.

Patton tried one more end-run. He ordered the 157th Regimental Combat Team of the 45th Division to land at Spadafora on 16 August; Truscott objected because the 7th Infantry was already passing through the area, and the landing was moved back to beaches near Bivio Salica. Colonel Charles Ankcorn’s men came ashore just after midnight and lost eleven men in a landing-craft accident. They landed behind their own lines. The Army’s pamphlet calls the operation simply a failure. A British force of about 400 men, commandos and tanks of the 4th Armoured Brigade, landed near Cape d’Ali the same night, met the tail of the Hermann Göring rear guard and was held up by a blown bridge.

That evening, 16 August, a reinforced platoon of Company L, 7th Infantry, under First Lieutenant Ralph J. Yates, pushed into Messina itself. The race was nearly over, and the enemy was nearly gone.

In three weeks the Americans had learned that mountains swallow armies, artillery decides hill fights, and an open sea flank is an opportunity only if the force landed is big enough to hold and the air and naval support can stay. They had also learned that the Germans were going to leave Sicily on their own timetable. How they did it is the subject of Chapter 9. First, Chapter 8 stops to count the human cost: the prisoners, the murdered, the civilians, the sick and the dead.