For King and Country

Maybe Corrigan and Imrie would find a way of crossing the river or scaling the cliffs, but their map hadn’t suggested any. If it had, they would have made the initial approach from that direction.

He put the problem to the back of his mind and concentrated on adjusting his step to the evenly spaced wooden sleepers. Rafferty was about ten yards in front of him, Tobin about ten to his rear, McCaigh a similar number behind the Welshman. Their training was showing, Farnham thought, and about time too, because so far this operation had hardly covered the SAS with glory. Two dead men, the unit split up, one radio broken and another left behind, an over-hasty retreat from the scene of the action.

But at least the bridge was down.

They walked on, ears alert for the sounds of a train or motor traffic on the nearby road, but in half an hour only one motorcycle dispatch rider, also heading east, disturbed the dark silence. They had, by Rafferty’s estimate, walked about three miles when the mouth of the tunnel suddenly emerged out of the gloom, and a few yards more when the rain started to fall. By the time they had reached the shelter of the portal it was coming down with a vengeance.

According to their map the tunnel was about three-quarters of a mile long.

‘It’ll keep us dry,’ Rafferty argued.

‘We’re already wet through,’ Tobin protested. Nor did he like the idea of a walk in the pitch dark. ‘And we’d be like rats in a trap,’ he added.

Farnham wasn’t sure why, but he agreed with him. Taking the tunnel felt a bit too much like walking into the spider’s parlour. He looked at his watch. It was almost three o’clock and they were probably about three miles from San Giuseppe. ‘We’ll go over the top,’ he announced.

The next two hours were among the most miserable any of the four men could remember. In the teeth of a near-gale, with the cold rain whipping into their faces, they stumbled across two ranges of hills and climbed in and out of one deep valley. Wet through and freezing cold, their only consolation lay in their complete invisibility to the enemy. But then again, if the Germans were out searching for them in this weather, more than just Hitler needed his head examined.

At around five Farnham called a halt. They were crossing a small valley similar to the one they had camped in two nights before, and the low branches of the trees, once they were hung with groundsheets, could offer a temporary bivouac and the prospect of cooking up some soup to warm the blood. If they just pushed on, Farnham decided, there was every chance they’d blunder past San Giuseppe in the dark. They couldn’t be far from the village, and if this weather kept up they wouldn’t have much to fear from spotter planes, especially in the first hour of half-light.

It took McCaigh only a few minutes to get the hexamine stove set up and a couple of cans heating. ‘I wonder where the stupid bastards have got to?’ he muttered to no one in particular.

‘What went wrong, do you think?’ Tobin asked.

‘Must have been a faulty time pencil,’ Rafferty said. ‘I can’t see Morrie making a mistake.’

‘Yeah,’ McCaigh agreed. ‘He was good.’ He gave the soup a final stir. ‘At least it was quick. The miserable bastard wouldn’t have known what hit him.’

The others murmured agreement.

‘He had a wife though, didn’t he?’ Tobin asked.

Rafferty frowned at him. ‘Yeah,’ he said curtly. The thought of getting killed wasn’t so bad, but he found it hard to think about leaving Beth with no one to look after her and the baby.

Bending over the soup, McCaigh remembered his dad’s line about 1918 – ‘All those women in black, and not enough men left to satisfy half of them.’ There was no woman praying for his return – well, maybe a few here and there were offering up the odd wishful thought – but his sixteen-year-old brother Patrick would probably go right off the rails if someone wasn’t there to keep an eye on him.

Half an hour later, Farnham’s claim that he could detect a lightening in the eastern sky was received with some scepticism, but a few minutes more and even McCaigh was willing to admit that the shade of darkness had slightly changed. Now the swirls of mist and rain were being painted in charcoal grey rather than black; the difference, he said, was ‘like night and night’.

They pulled down their groundsheet roofing and started off once more. San Giuseppe turned out to be only a few hundred yards away, and they were almost on top of the village when the first cluster of buildings loomed alarmingly out of the gloom.

‘Nice navigating, Neil,’ Farnham murmured. He checked his compass, and pointed them north.

‘Let’s hope there’s a Lyons Corner House where X marks the spot,’ said McCaigh.

At first there seemed to be only a bare hillside, and that hardly seemed the ideal place to wait for their comrades, rain or no rain. But then fortune smiled on the four men, lifting a swirl of mist like a curtain to reveal a small chapel set amid a grove of oak trees. From the outside it looked ruined, but inside they found a simple altar set on a stone plinth in an otherwise bare chamber.

This was as good a place as anywhere to sit out the day, Farnham decided. There were no roads nearby, and the other two would have a good chance of finding them. Best of all, it was dry.

‘Cup of tea for breakfast?’ McCaigh suggested.

He was just pouring the first cup when the door opened and the two Italians walked in.

The newcomers looked almost reproachfully at the Sten gun that Rafferty was pointing in their direction. ‘Friend,’ the older of the two said economically, in Italian. He was probably in his forties, with greying hair, a weathered face and eyes that even at this moment seemed full of amusement. His companion was a young man barely out of his teens, still apparently struggling to grow a full moustache.

‘Enzio,’ the older man said, tapping himself on the chest. ‘Giancarlo,’ he added, pointing at the other. ‘American?’ he asked, offering two open palms to the four SAS men.

‘We are English,’ Farnham told him in reasonably adequate Italian. He’d been learning the language on and off since 1941, partly to fill in the periods of boredom endemic to army life, partly to maximize his chances of being selected for exactly this sort of mission. And he had to admit that during the last six months in Italy he had developed a definite hankering to return here when the war was over.

Enzio beamed at his linguistic proficiency, though Giancarlo seemed a bit disappointed that they were not Americans.

‘You are the men who blew up the bridge in San Severino,’ the older man half stated, half asked.

There didn’t seem much point in denying it. ‘We did,’ Farnham agreed, wondering how the news had reached the middle of nowhere so fast.

‘We are partisans,’ Enzio said, as if in explanation. ‘We have people in the town.’

‘How did you find us here?’ Farnham asked.

Enzio smiled. ‘You were seen at San Giuseppe, and followed here,’ he explained. ‘By a six-year-old,’ he added, his eyes almost dancing with amusement.

Farnham had the grace to laugh.

‘But you cannot stay here,’ Enzio went on. ‘This is a holy place, and some people will not understand. You must come to the village, dry your clothes, have something good to eat, and then we can talk about your plans. You will be safe there,’ he added, seeing the look of doubt on Farnham’s face. ‘The Germans are not likely to come, but if they do there will be warning. They cannot surprise us.’

Farnham smiled. ‘This is very generous of you,’ he told the Italian, ‘but first I must talk to my men.’

‘Of course,’ Enzio said.

Farnham turned to the others. ‘They say they’re partisans. They’re offering us shelter, food and somewhere to dry out. If they’re who they say they are then they’ll be able to help us get to the sea. And if the others don’t turn up they’ll probably have ways of finding out what’s happened to them. What do you reckon?’

‘Do you think they’re the genuine article?’ Rafferty asked.

‘Yes,’ Farnham said without hesitation.

‘Then why not?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ McCaigh said. ‘Especially the bit about drying out.’

‘We shall be honoured,’ Farnham told Enzio.

The two Italians escorted them back across the rainswept hillside to the village, and as they walked down the only street the doorways seemed full of curious eyes. Their destination was a large barn that had obviously been built to withstand the winter weather, for inside it was dry and relatively warm. Enzio left them for a few minutes, and then returned with a pile of dry clothes in varying sizes. Not long after that two oldish women arrived with a pot of steaming noodle soup and two loaves of freshly baked bread, all of which left the four men feeling truly warm for the first time since their departure from Salerno three nights before.

Every now and then the door would inch open to reveal one or more children staring in at them. One young girl, probably no more than six years old, with dark, saucer-like eyes seemed unable to drag herself away.

‘But where are they keeping the older sisters?’ McCaigh wondered out loud.

‘They’ve probably been locked up for the duration of your visit,’ Rafferty told him.

‘Ah, fame,’ McCaigh said dreamily.