Love and War in the Apennines

On the whole they weren’t great readers, although we had a large library made up of books brought from other camps which had originally been sent out by the Red Cross, books from the British library in Rome and books sent by next-of-kin which were handled by the Bodleian. Books even continued to arrive, minus their covers, after an extremely inept attempt by a then highly secretive section of the War Office (M.I.9), interested in encouraging us to escape, to send us money and maps hidden inside the boards, after which every book had its covers ripped off and had to be re-bound with cardboard from Red Cross parcel boxes before it could be read.

But although not great ones for a book, few coterie men would have dared to express themselves publicly as one late arrival did, as soon as he arrived at the camp.

‘Since I’ve been captured I’ve been locked up alone for a bit and I’ve been thinkin’,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided to take up readin’ and I’ve written to Mummy askin’ her to send me the Tatler and the Book of the Month.’

In all the time I was in the orfanotrofio I can scarcely remember a moment, except when we were eating or we were being counted, or the lights were out and we were supposed to be asleep, when the rattle of dice and the shuffling of pieces on a backgammon board could not be heard. Down below in the cellars where we ate our meals, those temporarily expatriate members of White’s Club in captivity, who themselves formed a unique inner coterie, had a big table for baccarat, at which they played after the plates had been cleared away, for the kind of stakes to which they had been accustomed in St James’s Street before the war, using the letter cards which were intended to be sent to their next-of-kin as cheques which they sent to one another’s bankers on settlement days. And later in the summer, when the exercise field, from which we all admired the girls of Fontanellato on their way to the cemetery, was opened some of them used to race corks, also for big stakes, down a minute rivulet which rose mysteriously from the earth at the top end of the field, flowed briskly for a while, and as mysteriously died away. Or else they would make a book on the running races which some lunatic organised between members of the various armies which were represented in the camp.

I ran the mile for the Eighth Army, because I needed the exercise and loathed football and basket ball. And because of the form I displayed, by the day of the meeting there was a lot of money on me, mostly placed by White’s men who had been watching me during my early morning ‘gallops’.

At the beginning of the last lap I knew that I would win. I put in a tremendous spurt and romped home. Unfortunately, I had miscounted the number of laps and there was one more to go. I finished third. I was disappointed, but not nearly so much as the little group of White’s men, shoulder to shoulder, not as I have so often seen them on race courses since the war, dressed according to season or the grandeur of the event in morning coats and top hats or flannel-suited with squashy brown felt hats pulled down over their noses and always with big race glasses, philosophically marking their race cards before setting out once more for the paddock, but still shoulder to shoulder.

‘You didn’t pull it, Eric, did you?’ one of them said as I went in to change.

At the time, only having been to a couple of trotting races, I wondered what on earth he meant.

The orfanotrofio was more like a public school than any other prison camp I was ever in. If anybody can be said to have suffered in this place it was those people who had never been subjected to the hell of English preparatory and public school life; because although there was no bullying in the physical sense – canes had been taken away for the duration, and the twisting of arms was forbidden by the Geneva Convention – there was still plenty of scope for mental torment; and although the senior officer thought he ran the camp it was really run by people elected by the coteries, just like Pop at Eton, where so many of them had been.

This state of affairs continued until a very regular full colonel arrived who had not been at Eton but at Wellington and was so horrified by the lackadaisical, demilitarised state in which he found us all, that he immediately organised the camp on the lines of an infantry battalion, in companies with company commanders. Under him the orfanotrofio began to resemble the prison camp in Renoir’s Grande Illusion. It had a commandant who was a regular colonello of the ancien régime who found himself in sympathy with our colonel, who came from the same sort of background as he did.

When one of the prisoners was found to be stealing food, a most awful crime in a prison camp where everyone started off with exactly the same amount however much more they managed to acquire by exchanging tobacco and cigarettes for it, and the problem arose of punishing him without the added and unthinkable indignity of handing him over to the Italians to keep in their cells, the colonello offered our colonel a small Italian infantry bivouac tent and a piece of parched ground in what was normally a zone that was out of bounds to us on which the sun shone all day, so that the offender could expiate his crime in solitary confinement and on a diet of bread and water provided by the British, from their rations, not by the Italians.

Some of the prisoners were very old prisoners indeed, not in age or seniority but because of the number of years they had been locked up. Most of the ‘old’ prisoners had wonderful clothes which no one who had been captured later in the war could possibly emulate, things that had been sent to them before the Italians had instituted rigid sumptuary laws for prisoners of war in order to prevent anyone having anything which vaguely resembled civilian clothes. By some technicality those who already had these clothes were allowed to keep them, providing that the larger items bore the large red patches which were sewn on to everything we wore. They had pig’s-whisker pullovers, scarves and stocks from the Burlington Arcade secured with gold pins, make-to-measure Viyella shirts, and corduroy trousers, and those who were members of the Cherry-Pickers wore cherry-red trousers. Some of this gear had reached them by way of the Red Cross and neutral embassies, but not all of it. One officer had an elegant hacking coat which had been made for him while he was a prisoner, out of a horse blanket which he had rescued from his armoured car when it went up in flames near Sollum, and which he paid the Italian tailor for with cigarettes.

The one thing which united the prisoners in the orfanotrofio and which gave them, as it were, a ‘team spirit’, was their attitude towards the ‘Itis’. ‘Itis’ in the abstract, because it was difficult for any but the most hidebound to actively dislike our ‘Itis’, apart from one or two horrors who would have been horrors whatever their nationality, and we all loved the ‘Iti’ girls – soldiers always make an exception for the women of the enemy, for otherwise they would feel themselves completely alone.

The colonello was generally conceded to be ‘all right’, a ‘good chap’ in spite of being an ‘Iti’; and most people liked one of the Italian officers because he smoked a pipe and was more English than many of the English. For most of the others and the wretched soldiery who guarded us, the privates and the N.C.O.s, with their miserable uniforms, ersatz boots, unmilitary behaviour and stupid bugle calls, we felt nothing but derision. What boobs they were, we thought. We used to talk about how we could have turned them into decent soldiers if only we were given the opportunity.

How arrogant we were. Most of us were in the orfanotrofio because we were military failures who had chosen not to hold out to the last round and the last man, or, at the last gasp, had been thankful to grasp the hand of a Sicilian fisherman and be hauled from the sea, as I had been. We were arrogant because this was the only way we could vent our spleen at being captured and, at the same time, keep up our spirits which were really very low. Deep down in all of us, prisoners isolated from the outside world and Italian soldati, far from home, subjected to a twentieth-century Temptation of St Anthony and without the money to gratify it, firing volleys at us in fury because we laughed at them in front of girls who by rights should have been their girls, tormenting us all, reminding us constantly of something for which we felt that we would give up everything we had for one more chance to experience, something we ourselves talked about all the time, was the passionate desire to be free; but what did we mean by freedom? I thought I knew, and so did everyone else; but it meant so many different things to so many of us.

We were, in fact, as near to being really free as anyone can be. We were relieved of almost every sort of mundane pre-occupation that had afflicted us in the outside world. We had no money and were relieved of the necessity of making any. We had no decisions to make about anything, even about what we ate. We were certainly much more free than many of us would ever be again, either during the war or after it. And as prisoners we did not even suffer the disapprobation of society as we would have done if we had been locked up in our own country. To our own people we appeared as objects worthy of sympathy.

(#ulink_c503ecf5-3d83-59ef-a479-1fd3fd6844b8) One of them was Captain Anthony, later Major-General, Dean Drummond, CB, DSO, MC and Bar, captured in North Africa in 1941 and escaped in 1942.

(#ulink_fdc26eab-f97e-5d0b-bab5-db95d513fc27) For a remarkable book on this subject, set in the orfanotrofio, see The Cage, by Billany and Dowie, Longmans, 1949.

CHAPTER THREE Armistizio (#ulink_0f4fbd95-f6d1-55e9-967b-82a4df1e1778)

The evening of the eighth of September was hot and sultry. The hospital was a room on the piano nobile immediately opposite the wooden huts in which the Italian guards lived and in which they kept the radio going full-blast.

At about a quarter to seven, while Michael and I were lying on our beds sweating, he on his stomach because of his boil, a programme of music was interrupted and someone began reading a message in a gloomy, subdued voice. It was to the effect that the Italian Government, recognising the impossibility of continuing the unequal struggle against overwhelming superior enemy forces, and in order to avoid further grave calamities to the nation, had requested an armistice of General Eisenhower and that the request had been granted. As a result, all hostilities between the Italian and Anglo-American forces would cease forthwith. Italian forces, however, would resist attacks from any other quarter, which could only mean Germans.

The voice we had been listening to was that of Marshal Badoglio who had been head of the Italian government since the fall of Mussolini on July the twenty-fifth. Although neither Michael nor I could speak Italian we both understood what was said because, like a lot of other prisoners, we had become quite proficient in the kind of clichés which the Italian Supreme Command employed in its bulletins, and this announcement was in the same idiom. What the Marshal didn’t say in his speech was that what had been arranged was not an armistice but an unconditional surrender signed under an olive tree five days previously in Sicily, and that he had been forced to make the announcement this evening very much against his will, because Eisenhower had already done so an hour and a quarter earlier, and the B.B.C. forty-five minutes before that, in what was to prove one of the most lamentable scoops of the war (lamentable, because it gave the Germans valuable extra time in which to disarm the Italian forces before any Allied landings began).

Later that night, without having done anything to organise the resistance to the Germans which he had called on his soldiers to make, Badoglio departed from Rome for the Adriatic coast, together with the King, from where they were taken by warship to Brindisi, leaving an apathetic and utterly disorganised nation in the lurch, a state in which the Italian people had long been accustomed to be left by their rulers and so-called allies. They were now left in an even deeper mess by the Anglo-Americans who had been stupid enough to inform the Germans of their intentions.

Badoglio’s announcement provoked some mild cheers from various parts of the building and a more extravagant display of joy by the Italian guards outside our window which we watched a little sourly. We had seen and heard it all forty-five days before when Mussolini had been deposed. Then the Italians had hurled his picture out of the window, torn down Fascist insignia, defaced the notices on the gable-ends of their huts with their injunctions Credere, Combattere … and other similar nonsense, and shouted to us in Italian simplified for our benefit, ‘BENITO FINITO!’ Now they shouted ‘ARMISTIZIO!’

The only difference Mussolini’s departure had made to us was that the sentries no longer fired at the windows of the bar when we looked out of them, and our walks were cancelled. If anything, we had suffered a reduction rather than an increase in our amenities. What now roused us from our lethargy was the thought that when the Germans retreated northwards, as none of us doubted they would have to, they might carry us off with them over the Alpine Passes. ‘Like a lot of concubines,’ someone said on one of the innumerable occasions on which we had discussed the possibility.

Our friends gave us all the latest news when they came to see us later in the evening.

‘The colonel called a parade in the hall,’ one said. ‘There’s to be no fraternisation with the Itis and we’ve mounted our own sentries on the gate. A party’s just gone off to recce the country round about in case the Germans come and we have to break out. If they do the colonello says he will fight, but there doesn’t seem much chance of his having to. Airborne landings are expected at Rome and Milan, and sea landings at Genoa and Rimini. It’s really a matter of holding out for twenty-four hours at the most until our people arrive. Anyway, we’re getting your gear together and we’ve got two of the biggest parachutists in the camp organised to help Eric if we do have to get out.’

‘I wish the M.O. would hurry up and get some plaster of paris for my ankle,’ I said. ‘Then all I’d need would be a stick instead of a couple of bloody great parachutists.’

‘Pity you’re both stuck here,’ said another. ‘Someone’s done a big deal with the Itis, and the bar’s doing terrific business. The ration’s been abolished; but we’ve brought your mugs. You can have some more when you’ve finished.’

Our drinking mugs were made from big tins which had originally contained powdered milk sent to us by the Canadian Red Cross, whose food parcels, together with those from Scotland, were easily the best. Each of these receptacles held more than a pint and they were now filled with a dark brownish liquid of a sort which neither Michael nor myself had ever seen before.

‘I say, this is rather strong,’ Michael said after tasting it. ‘What do you think it is?’

‘It’s supposed to be Marsala, but the wine merchants in the camp say they’ve never tasted Marsala like this. And I’ve just met someone on the way here who was drinking it out of an enamelled jug and the enamel’s coming off.’

‘Could you remember to put all my socks in my pack and my pullover and The Tour of the Hebrides,’ I said. ‘Otherwise, I mightn’t finish it before we go home.’

What we did not know, how could we, was that the Allies’ dispositions were already made, and that none of their plans included the liberation of the occupants of the orfanotrofio. The assault convoys bound for Salerno were at sea and had already been sighted south of Capri. The Sixteenth Panzer Division which was in the area had already ordered a state of alarm, and its members were now engaged in disarming all Italian troops and taking over the coastal batteries. The only airborne operations which had been planned, a drop on Rome by the United States Eighty-Sixth Airborne Division, had already been cancelled after its deputy commander, who had arrived in the capital on the afternoon of the seventh on a secret visit, had found on the morning of the eighth that all the airfields were in German hands. It was he who told Badoglio that the main Allied landings were due to begin the following morning, the first that the Marshal or any of his staff had heard of it. They had been led to believe that no landings would take place until the twelfth. What difference it would have made no one will ever know, or care.

For the rest, the greater part of the British Eighth Army was committed in Southern Italy where it was fighting its way up through Calabria in order to link up with the troops which were to be landed at Salerno. There were not going to be any airborne landings at Milan or anywhere else and no seaborne ones at Rimini or Genoa either.

CHAPTER FOUR The Ninth of September (#ulink_2be338e6-2475-5273-b5c1-6a43155f42fb)

Late on the following morning an Italian bugler sounded three ‘g’s’, the alarm call which meant that the Germans were on their way to take over the orfanotrofio, and everyone began to move out of the building into the exercise field at the back. From the window of the hospital, of which I was now the only occupant, Michael’s boil having burst during the night, brought to a head, perhaps, by the events of the previous day, there was no one to be seen on the road; only Italian soldiers setting up machine-guns and scurrying into slit trenches, reluctantly preparing to carry out the colonello’s order to defend the camp to the last round and the last man.

Looking at them I knew that they would not do so. By this, the fourth year of the war, too many personages too far from the scenes of the battles which they were trying to control, without themselves being under the necessity of firing a shot or of laying down their lives, had issued too many such orders to too many troops who invariably ended up by having to lay down their arms ignominiously, in order to save their skins. These Italian soldiers would have been mad to die in defence of an empty building, and they didn’t.

With my pack on my shoulder I hopped through the deserted corridors towards the back door. On the way, amongst the debris on the floor, I found a little book with the Italian tricolore on the cover, entitled ‘Say it in Italian’, or something similar, and I picked it up. By the time I reached the corner of the field where the rest of my company were, they were just beginning to move off through one of the several gaps which had been cut in the wire.

There, the two parachutists were waiting for me. They looked enormous in their camouflaged smocks, in which they must have been roasting, but without which any parachutist feels naked. They had been relieved of their packs so that they could help me.

They told me to take it easy and we went out through one of the gaps in the wire in the sweltering midday heat, and as soon as we were beyond it one of the British orderlies in the camp, a small, nut-brown man, a trooper in some cavalry regiment, came up and said, ‘It’s all right. You got a horse! Name of Mora, quiet as a lamb.’ And there she was, standing with a stolid-looking Italian soldier in the shade of some vines, taking mouthfuls of grass, swishing her tail at the flies, looking contented and well-fed. She was a little horse.

The parachutists were delighted to have my weight off their shoulders. They hoisted me into the saddle, half-strangled by my pack strap which was twisted round my neck, and then the soldier led Mora forward, chewing a straw, happy to be seconded for this easy duty, free of the obligation to sell his life to no purpose, while the rest of the people in our company moved on ahead in the shade of the vines, picking great bunches of grapes and churning the earth into dust.

For me the journey was a nightmare. Although the country was dead flat it was intersected by irrigation ditches (the same ditches that the escapers who had had themselves buried in the field had spoken of with revulsion after they were re-captured). The last thing one wanted in such country was a horse. The last thing I wanted anywhere was a horse. All I knew about horses was derived from a couple of ruinous visits to some trotting races at Heliopolis. I had never been on a horse in my life and I was terrified of them. And every horse I met knew it too.

At the first ditch Mora stopped dead on the edge of it and refused to move backwards or forwards, more like a mule than a horse. Perhaps she was a mule. She took no notice of the blows which the Italian soldier was raining on her behind with a cudgel; and I was no help at all. Every time my damaged foot touched her it was agony.

We seemed destined to remain there for ever, but something happened to make her utter a terrific snorting, whinnying noise, rear up on her hind legs and come down with her front ones in the slime in the bottom of the ditch with a resounding splosh, which catapulted me over her head on to the far bank and hurt my ankle dreadfully.

‘Bloody funny, that Iti must have struck a lighted cigarette up her chuff,’ someone said.

‘One way of crossing the Rubicon,’ someone else said who had had a different sort of education. Everyone who witnessed it was cheered by this spectacular happening.

Then the parachutists picked me up and lugged me over a whole series of similar ditches while Mora, who had crossed them unencumbered, waited for me to catch up.

Finally, we emerged on to a narrow lane. In a field to one side of it men and women wearing wide-brimmed straw hats were harvesting wheat with sickles. They stopped work as the head of the column approached and looked alarmed, but when they realised that we were unarmed prisoners from the camp they smiled and waved to us.

Then a man in a striped city suit with square shoulders appeared and spoke to one of the Italian interpreters who was with us, and we halted in the shade of a grove of tall poplars. No one spoke and it was very cool and quiet. The only sound was the humming of bees and insects and the wind stirring the tops of the trees. High above them in a dark blue sky, small puffs of cloud floated, as if of a cannon that had been discharged at regular intervals. After some minutes we moved on again. None of us, except the interpreter and the more senior officers at the head of the column, knew what the man in the striped suit had said. None of us really cared. We were not yet used to the idea of freedom. Although we each one of us still felt that we were individuals, we were really a herd lacking any power to make useful decisions, and although we were in theory a battalion organised in companies of a hundred or so, any one of these companies could probably have been re-captured in this moment by two or three resolute Germans armed with Schmeissers. We were rather like one of those outings of lunatics which I had so often encountered in the Surrey pine woods when we had been training in the first summer of the war. And like many of them we were irrationally happy. Even I on my horse, or mule, of which I was terrified.