Love and War in the Apennines (13 page)

The other news was not good but it was less tragic. At the same time as all this was going on, the Germans had requisitioned the
castello
, in which Wanda had succeeded in arranging that I should be taken on as the gardener’s boy, in order to turn it into a military headquarters, it was said, for Field-Marshal Kesselring who seemed to dog my footsteps. I was lucky to have got out of the
ospedale
when I did. Once the castle became a headquarters for someone as important as Kesselring, all the roads for miles around would have blocks on them.

‘Pity you didn’t go there before,’ Wanda said. ‘No one would think the gardener’s boy in a German headquarters could be English.’ It would certainly have been a joke if I had already been installed in the
castello
and had been taken over by the Germans, with the rest of the staff, to help look after the Field-Marshal.

The last piece of information she brought concerned the
carabinieri
at the hospital. They had been saved from severe punishment by an extraordinary circumstance. On the night that I escaped from it another British prisoner had been brought to it suffering from some serious complaint and they had simply substituted him for me.

There was now no question of my remaining in this house or any other for a moment, let alone in a
castello
, and as soon as it grew sufficiently dark Giovanni and his father, who was an older facsimile of himself, set off with a hand-cart loaded with planks and other materials to construct an underground hiding place for me until arrangements could be made to get me out of the area altogether, leaving me alone with Wanda in the middle of a big plantation of maize which grew at some distance from the house.

‘I know you never wanted to, but you won’t be able to go to Switzerland now, perhaps you never will,’ she said. She spoke in Italian. ‘And none of us may be able to help you anymore. We may not be here to do so. No one, except the people who have got it now, know how many names that stupid wrote down in his little book. The doctor could be in it and so could my father.’

And so could she. My blood ran cold at the thought of it.

‘Look,’ I said in English. This was no time for language lessons. ‘You must give up trying to help me, all of you. If I’m caught all that will happen is that I’ll be sent to Germany and be put in another camp; but if any of you are caught helping me you’re quite likely to be shot. It just isn’t worth it. I’m protected by the Geneva Convention. They won’t shoot me. And my ankle’s fine now. I can look after myself.’

‘I don’t know anything about your Geneva Convention,’ she said, ‘but I know more about Fascists than you do and if they take you and send you to Germany, you may be there for years and years the way things are going and you may never come back. What we’re going to try and do is get you to the mountains tomorrow, and when things have quietened down a bit I’ll try and take you down closer to the line myself.’

I tried to argue with her and for the first time since I had known her she became very angry.

‘You’re a stupid young man,’ she said, ‘almost as stupid as the one who kept a little book with all his stupid thoughts in it and all those names, and if we’d known he was doing that he would have been killed I can tell you. It’s a pity we didn’t know. Do you really think the doctor and my father are helping you just because they like the colour of your eyes? It’s because this is the only way at the moment in which they can do anything against the Fascists. They really hate them, those two old men. Much more than I do.’

‘And what about you?’ I said. ‘Is that the only reason why you’ve done what you have?’

She took my hands in the darkness and held them. ‘Oh, Hurruck,’ she said, ‘when I said that you were stupid I didn’t really meant it. Stupid in Italian,
stupido
, is a very rude word which gives great offence, as I told you when you were in the
ospedale
and a word that you just never use to an Italian; but it is an
expression that I have learned from you who always tell me that to call someone stupid, ‘don’t be so stupid’, is what you always say to one another in England, is just another expression like
‘luk slipi’
; but now you really are being Italian stupid to say such a thing to me.’ By now she was crying with vexation.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It was a silly thing to say.’ She let go of my hands.

‘Sorry! That’s all you English ever are. Sorry to have troubled you! Even,’ she said, ‘if they go through a door in front of you that’s all they say. Sorry! Why do they go through it first if they know they’re going to be sorry afterwards? It’s a word like stupid. It doesn’t mean anything. When you and your friends say “sorry”I feel like hitting you!’ And she began to cry even harder.

There was nothing I could say and if I did say anything it would be all wrong. I put my arms round her and held her close to me among the tall maize for a long time until Giovanni and his father came back to take me to my hiding place.

‘I must go now,’ she said, ‘because of the curfew; but wherever you go, whatever happens, I’ll see you again. Never forget it.’

The hole they had dug for me was in a small plantation of poplars far enough from their farm for them to be able to deny any knowledge of it if it was discovered. In fact, the land in which they had dug it was the property of an enthusiastic Fascist, as both Giovanni and his father told me with relish.

The hole was the size and shape of a grave, although slightly shallower, and I wondered how they had managed to dig it in such a short time. It was too dark to see much of their handiwork, but Giovanni told me that they had taken all the soil from the excavation away in their cart and put it elsewhere and that before digging the hole they had carefully dug under the grass and rolled it back like a carpet so that they could use it to cover the planks when I was inside.

‘You had better ease yourself before you get in,’ the father said. ‘You will not be able to come out until we fetch you and we don’t know when that will be.’

I did not much fancy being entombed in this fashion but this was not the moment to say so and after I had ‘eased myself’, as he put it, I lowered myself into the trench, the bottom of which they had lined with sacks and they handed me down my sack, a blanket, a bottle of wine and one of water, some bread and cheese, a watch and some matches so that I could tell the time, and a large tin can for future easements.

Just as they finished doing this it began to rain. Then they covered the hole with the planks, which were stout enough not to give under the weight of anyone who stood on them, and I could hear some earth which they had kept back for the purpose thudding down on top of them and then the sound of the turf being replaced. It was like being buried alive. I sat up while they were doing this. Lying down I would have felt too much like a corpse. I wondered if I could get the lid off unaided if I had to.

‘The airhole’s here,’ I heard Giovanni say just above my head when they had finished. ‘You won’t lack for air. We’ll be back tomorrow, but if anything happens so that we can’t come, don’t leave until tomorrow night when it’s dark. You should be able to lift one of the boards off if you have to. Then make for the foothills. They begin about twenty-five kilometres to the south across the Via Emilia. There are two poplar trees standing in the middle of the field you came across from the house; get them in line and that’s south. You have the map the signorina gave you!’ (Wanda had given me the only map of the area she had been able to lay her hands on, one that she had torn out of a bus timetable. It was little more than a diagram, but it was better than nothing.)

‘Keep well to the east of Fidenza,’ he went on. ‘Only travel at
night, and across country. You should be able to make the hills before dawn. Try and cross the Ceno near Serravalle. By the third night you should be well into the mountains and then you can try travelling by day. Good luck!’

Then they both went away and I could hear the rain on the roof of my shelter but infinitely remote, as a worm might, and I felt water trickling down the airhole and down my neck, but then it stopped and it was as silent as the tomb and as dark.

Nevertheless I slept well for most of the night but the next morning was intolerably long and I began to be very uncomfortable. The hole was deep enough for me to lie in or sit up in, but it was very narrow and the only way I could move my arms was to raise them above my head so I must have looked like Lazarus, and easements were very difficult; but finally, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, I heard voices overhead and the sound of spades being used, and then the planks were taken off and I received a shower of earth on my head, and although I was dazzled by the light, I could just make out Giovanni and his father looking down at me.

‘Time to go,’ Giovanni said. I handed up my belongings to him, everything with the exception of the sacks and the bottles and the tin which he told me to leave where they were, and then he knelt down and gave me a hand and hauled me out because I was too stiff to get out by myself. It was a pale, colourless day, with a horrible glare in the sky, stronger to me because I had been underground.

‘You had a good long rest,’ he said. ‘The doctor’s waiting over there just beyond the trees. We’ll fill this in and clear up – I’d like to leave it open so that that bastard would have to explain it to his friends, but it’s too risky. Now get going!’

There was no time to thank them properly. I just remembered to give Giovanni back his pocket watch. They had the cartload of
earth and they were already shovelling it back into the hole and I never saw them again.
²

I stumbled away to where the Fiat was standing beyond the trees on a rough track.

‘Get in!’ the doctor said as soon as I reached it, which were about the only words he ever seemed to address to me. ‘We can talk later!’

‘I don’t think you ought to be …’ I began to say, but he cut me short.

‘IN THE NAME OF GOD, GET IN!’ he said. ‘This place is swarming with Germans. It’s like Potsdam.’ I got in. There was nothing else to do.

I was not the only passenger. In the back seat of the little car there was a very small, toothless old man, wrapped in a motheaten cloak, a garment which is called a
tabar
in this part of the world, and with an equally moth-eaten hat to match. Both had once been black, now they were green with age. What he was, guide, someone whom the doctor had recruited to lend verisimilitude to the outing, or simply an old man of the mountains on the way back to them from a black-market expedition I was unable to discover because, during the entire journey, he never uttered a word. He simply sat there in the back with a heavily laden rucksack on his knees, either completely ignoring the doctor when he addressed some remark to him in his dialect, or else uttering what was either a mindless chuckle or something provoked by the workings of a powerful and possibly diabolical intelligence. Whatever he was, the old man was certainly less conspicuous than I was, bolt-upright in the front seat in which I had been put in case, as the doctor said, I had to get out and run for it, absurdly English-looking in spite of my civilian clothes.

Eventually we arrived at the junction of the minor road, on which we had been travelling, with the Via Emilia. Blocking the entrance to it there was a German soldier, probably a military policeman, on a motor cycle. He had his back to us and was watching the main road on which a convoy was moving south towards the front. Knowing what sort of man the doctor was, I was afraid that he might hoot imperiously at him to get out of the way but fortunately he simply switched off the engine and waited for the man to go, which presently he did when a gap occurred in the interminable procession of vehicles, roaring away on his machine in pursuit of them, and we followed him.

Soon we overtook the front part of the convoy and the doctor drove boldly past it on the wrong side of the road, the only part of it available to him, the Via Emilia being narrow and some of the armoured vehicles, the tanks particularly, being enormous. It was a good thing that there were no vehicles coming in the other direction. They must have been halted because of the convoy, because all the time we were on the road we did not meet anything coming in the other direction.

‘Sixteenth Panzer Division,’ the doctor said. ‘Reinforcements.’ How he could know this I could not imagine. There were no insignia on the vehicles to proclaim that they were part of Sixteenth Panzer Division, but he said it with such authority that I wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning what he said. He was not a man given to making idle remarks.

I was paralysed by the thought of what would happen if he was stopped, if only for having the impertinence to pass part of a German Panzer Division on the move when all other civilian vehicles had been halted in order to allow it to monopolise the road; and I was temporarily hypnotised by the sheer proximity of the enemy in such strength and numbers. I had only to stretch out my right hand through the open window as we went sedately
past them to touch their tanks, which were of a sort and size that I had not even seen in diagrams; their self-propelled guns which I recognised; their half-tracked vehicles with anti-aircraft guns at the ready which looked a little like great chariots; and the lorries full of tough-looking Panzer Grenadiers, all ready to peel out of them if the convoy was attacked from the air, who looked down at our tiny vehicle with the red crosses painted on the sides and on the roof, which were making this journey possible, with a complete lack of curiosity, just as our own soldiers would have done in similar circumstances, which I found extremely comforting. Less disinterested were a lot of grumpy-looking officers up in front in a large, open Mercedes, one of them wearing the red tabs of a general on the lapels of his leather coat, who all glared at us as they probably would have done if we had passed them in a Fiat 500, a Mercedes-load of important businessmen, on the autobahn between Ulm and Stuttgart in the years before the war, and, just as I would have then, I had an insane temptation to thumb my nose at them.