The Golden Keel

He needed no encouraging so I ordered another couple of drinks. ‘So that’s how you got away,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘That’s how it was. God, it was cold those two nights on that bloody mountain. If it hadn’t been for Donato I’d have cashed in my chips.’

I said, ‘So you were safe – but where were you?’

‘In a partisan camp up in the hills. The partigiani were just getting organized then; they only really got going when the Germans began to consolidate their hold on Italy. The Jerries ran true to form – they’re arrogant bastards, you know – and the Italians didn’t like it. So everything was set for the partisans; they got the support of the people and they could begin to operate on a really large scale.

‘They weren’t all alike, of course; there was every shade of political opinion from pale blue to bright red. The Communists hated the Monarchists’ guts and vice versa and so on. The crowd I dropped in on were Monarchist. That’s where I met the Count.’

Count Ugo Montepescali di Todi was over fifty years old at that time, but young-looking and energetic. He was a swarthy man with an aquiline nose and a short greying beard which was split at the end and forked aggressively. He came of a line which was old during the Renaissance and he was an aristocrat to his fingertips.

Because of this he hated Fascism – hated the pretensions of the parvenu rulers of Italy with all their corrupt ways and their money-sticky fingers. To him Mussolini always remained a mediocre journalist who had succeeded in demagoguery and had practically imprisoned his King.

Walker met the Count the first day he arrived at the hill camp. He had just woken up and seen the solemn face of the little girl. She smiled at him and silently left the room, and a few minutes later a short stocky man with a bristling beard stepped through the doorway and said in English, ‘Ah, you are awake. You are quite safe now.’

Walker was conscious of saying something inane. ‘But where am I?’

‘Does that really matter?’ the Count asked quizzically. ‘You are still in Italy – but safe from the Tedesci. You must stay in bed until you recover your strength. You need some blood putting back – you lost a lot – so you must rest and eat and rest again.’

Walker was too weak to do more than accept this, so he lay back on the pillow. Five minutes later Coertze came in; with him was a young man with a thin face.

‘I’ve brought the quack,’ said Coertze. ‘Or at least that’s what he says he is – if I’ve got it straight. My guess is that he’s only a medical student.’

The doctor – or student – examined Walker and professed satisfaction at his condition. ‘You will walk within the week,’ he said, and packed his little kit and left the room.

Coertze rubbed the back of his head. ‘I’ll have to learn this slippery taal,’ he said. ‘It looks as though we’ll be here for a long time.’

‘No chance of getting through to the south?’ asked Walker.

‘No chance at all,’ said Coertze flatly. ‘The Count – that’s the little man with the bokbaardjie – says that the Germans down south are thicker on the ground than stalks in a mealie field. He reckons they’re going to make a defence line south of Rome.’

Walker sighed. ‘Then we’re stuck here.’

Coertze grinned. ‘It is not too bad. At least we’ll get better food than we had in camp. The Count wants us to join his little lot – it seems he has some kind of skietkommando which holds quite a bit of territory and he’s collected men and weapons while he can. We might as well fight here as with the army – I’ve always fancied fighting a war my way.’

A plump woman brought in a steaming bowl of broth for Walker, and Coertze said, ‘Get outside of that and you’ll feel better. I’m going to scout around a bit.’

Walker ate the broth and slept, then woke and ate again. After a while a small figure came in bearing a basin and rolled bandages. It was the little girl he had seen when he had first opened his eyes. He thought she was about twelve years old.

‘My father said I had to change your bandages,’ she said in a clear young voice. She spoke in English.

Walker propped himself up on his elbows and watched her as she came closer. She was neatly dressed and wore a white, starched apron. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

She bent to cut the splint loose from his leg and then she carefully loosened the bandage round the wound. He looked down at her and said, ‘What is your name?’

‘Francesca.’

‘Is your father the doctor?’ Her hands were cool and soft on his leg.

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said briefly.

She bathed the wound in warm water containing some pungent antiseptic and then shook powder on to it. With great skill she began to rebandage the leg.

‘You are a good nurse,’ said Walker.

It was only then that she looked at him and he saw that she had cool, grey eyes. ‘I’ve had a lot of practice,’ she said, and Walker was abashed at her gaze and cursed a war which made skilled nurses out of twelve-year-olds.

She finished the bandaging and said, ‘There – you must get better soon.’

‘I will,’ promised Walker. ‘As quickly as I can. I’ll do that for you.’

She looked at him with surprise. ‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘For the war. You must get better so that you can go into the hills and kill a lot of Germans.’

She gravely collected the soiled bandages and left the room, with Walker looking after her in astonishment. Thus it was that he met Francesca, the daughter of Count Ugo Montepescali.

In a little over a week he was able to walk with the aid of a stick and to move outside the hospital hut, and Coertze showed him round the camp. Most of the men were Italians, army deserters who didn’t like the Germans. But there were many Allied escapees of different nationalities.

The Count had formed the escapees into a single unit and had put Coertze in command. They called themselves the ‘Foreign Legion’. During the next couple of years many of them were to be killed fighting against the Germans with the partisans. At Coertze’s request, Alberto and Donato were attached to the unit to act as interpreters and guides.

Coertze had a high opinion of the Count. ‘That kêrel knows what he’s doing,’ he said. ‘He’s recruiting from the Italian army as fast as he can – and each man must bring his own gun.’

When the Germans decided to stand and fortified the Winterstellung based on the Sangro and Monte Cassino, the war in Italy was deadlocked and it was then that the partisans got busy attacking the German communications. The Foreign Legion took part in this campaign, specializing in demolition work. Coertze had been a gold miner on the Witwatersrand before the war and knew how to handle dynamite. He and Harrison, a Canadian geologist, instructed the others in the use of explosives.

They blew up road and rail bridges, dynamited mountain passes, derailed trains and occasionally shot up the odd road convoy, always retreating as soon as heavy fire was returned. ‘We must not fight pitched battles,’ said the Count. ‘We must not let the Germans pin us down. We are mosquitoes irritating the German hides – let us hope we give them malaria.’

Walker found this a time of long stretches of relaxation punctuated by moments of fright. Discipline was easy and there was no army spit-and-polish. He became lean and hard and would think nothing of making a day’s march of thirty miles over the mountains burdened with his weapons and a pack of dynamite and detonators.

By the end of 1944 the Foreign Legion had thinned down considerably. Some of the men had been killed and more elected to make a break for the south after the Allies had taken Rome. Coertze said he would stay, so Walker stayed with him. Harrison also stayed, together with an Englishman called Parker. The Foreign Legion was now very small indeed.

‘The Count used us as bloody pack horses,’ said Walker. He had ordered another round of drinks and the brandy was getting at him. His eyes were red-veined and he stumbled over the odd word.

‘Pack horses?’ I queried.

‘The unit was too small to really fight,’ he explained. ‘So he used us to transport guns and food around his territory. That’s how we got the convoy.’

‘Which convoy?’

Walker was beginning to slur his words. ‘It was like this. One of the Italian units had gone to carve up a German post and the job was being done in co-operation with another partisan brigade. But the Count was worried because this other mob were Communists – real treacherous bastards they were. He was scared they might renege on us; they were always doing that because he was a Monarchist and they hated him worse than they did the Germans. They were looking ahead to after the war and they didn’t do much fighting while they were about it. Italian politics, you see.’

I nodded.

‘So he wanted Umberto – the chap in charge of our Italians – to have another couple of machine-guns, just in case, and Coertze said he’d take them.’

He fell silent, looking into his glass.

I said, ‘What about this convoy?’

‘Oh, what the hell,’ he said. There’s not a hope of getting it out. It’ll stay there for ever, unless Coertze does something. I’ll tell you. We were on our way to Umberto when we bumped into this German convoy driving along where no convoy should have been. So we clobbered it.’