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Acton, acton, welcome to We Have Ways to Make You Talk with me James Hollander and I'm now...

Well, I'm in the mountains, I'm in the central mountains, the Brutsi mountains.

I've left the plain of Fodja behind and we're now really properly in the hills.

And you know, it reminds me a little bit of Tuscany really, it's got these very sharp, steep, low hills and then much bigger hills beyond.

And I'm looking now down to, I think it's a river Bifurno.

But since the war, it's turned into a reservoir.

And they've obviously built a dam and it's now a little lake.

Behind that is Monti Miano.

And today I'm very much on the trail of the hasty peas, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, part of the first, the Canadian First Infantry Brigade, part of the Canadian First Infantry Division.

And they've come across in the toe of Italy, into Regio and Calabria, Kat and Zada, where I was a few days ago down on the bottom there,

and they've moved all this way up here, up into the plain of Fodja and then up into the mountains.

By this time, it's October.

And it's just a really tough slog for these guys.

And the thing that's really striking me is just the distance.

I mean, it felt like a massive distance for me, in the last two and a half days.

But you know, you imagine doing that on roads which are mainly, you know, hardly any of them are asphalted.

They're all kind of what we would call straddle Bianca, kind of dirt roads, gravel roads, in those old trucks and whatnot.

And you just start to realise why it takes so long.

And the problem is, is by the time you've got off the plane, you're now in kind of German territory.

This is where the enemy are.

And you just don't know which towns are going to be occupied by the Germans and which aren't.

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