Love and War in the Apennines (31 page)

On the first Saturday morning after James appeared, we both received an invitation from Signor Zanoni to spend that night and Sunday at his house, and we went. By now I really knew the way to the
carbonari
’s hut where I had met Wanda and we raced the whole way down to the house, through the forest and over the mud and rock from the cave, in just over an hour, although it was raining hard, and there, after a wonderful, unforgettable welcome, and after they had got over their initial astonishment at James’s height and size, we sat in the kitchen, wrapped in blankets, eating a special
gnocchi
of potatoes which the signora had made because she knew how much I liked it, while the old aunt sat among flickering shadows in her niche by the fire.

‘Eat to the bottom,’ the signora said, giving everybody more from the big pot, ‘and you will find a
sterlina
d’oro,’ but we never succeeded, either this time or on the other occasions on which we visited the house. Our stomachs had shrunk and the infective jaundice which had swept the camp we had been in during the winter of 1942 had not completely gone out of our systems and, occasionally, we were both overcome by a feeling of nausea when we least expected it; but in the case of the signora’s
gnocchi
it was not nausea but simply that there was so much of it.

‘I’ll never forget these people and what they are doing for us,’ James said, when we left the following night to climb up back to the cave, ‘as long as I live.’

And one night Scamperdale gave a dinner, or rather his wife did, with a lace cloth on the table and real wine glasses with stems. It was rather a taxing evening as the conversation turned on
religion and I had to explain the attitude of the Church of England to Transubstantiation; but it was as a result of going to this party in my inadequate ‘best clothes’, the thin striped trousers and black jacket that Wanda’s father had given me, that one of his female relatives made me a marvellous pair of thick trousers, out of my Italian Army blanket. James was a little better off for clothes. He didn’t think very much of Italian clothes, describing them as
brutta roba
, bad stuff, and he wore the kind of semi-civilian clothes of English origin that the ‘old’ prisoners had affected in the
orfanotrofio
because, as he quite rightly said, ‘Doesn’t matter what I wear. I’ll never look like an Italian, I look more like a Goon,’ which was a current word for a German.

In addition to these invitations we received one of a much more unpleasant kind, which was more of a command than an invitation, and one that we felt unable to refuse, when we were visited by one of the young men who had been at the dance and two others from another village whom I had never seen before. We were not pleased at being visited in this way, because they had not come to us under the auspices of either of the two families who were looking after us and this implied that the secrecy of our cave, like most secrets in Italy, was already threadbare.

The spokesman was one of the two strangers. According to what he told us he had been a corporal in the Alpini and he looked comparatively dependable. I was much less sure of the other two. To my mind they were much too heroic and bloodthirsty. All three were armed. The two blood-thirsty ones with rather rusty 9 m.m. pistols, the corporal with a carbine which could also have done with some attention – what Sergeant-Major Clegg would have called ‘an idul riful’, and he would have described the owner as ‘idul’, too. Why they needed to carry weapons at all was a mystery.

The corporal, who told us that his battle name, whatever that
meant, was
Il Corvo
, the Crow, said that the three of them, together with another two who had remained hidden, were proposing to attack a German petrol dump on the Via Emilia, about ten kilometres to the west of Parma and blow it up, and having heard that we were both officers they felt that our military knowledge might be of help to them, and they wanted us to go with them. ‘We are the nucleus of a
banda
that will grow in numbers every day as the Allies make their victorious advance,’ Il Corvo said.

As he outlined the scheme all the thoroughly ridiculous defects in it became apparent. The dump was quite small, really nothing more than a staging post on the road, so that even if we succeeded in setting fire to it, its destruction could have no possible effect on the war. His ideas of how it was to be set on fire were absurd. The petrol was all stored in German army jerricans and in order to save themselves the trouble of cutting the wire and getting into the compound, a sentiment which I sympathised with, he proposed that we should dispose ourselves at various parts of the perimeter and at some given signal, although how it was to be given was not clear, we would hurl some Italian hand grenades, of which he had a small store, into the compound and then retire.

The casing of an Italian hand grenade looked as if it was made of some kind of plastic and the explosive charge was so weak that I was almost sure that it would not be enough to make a hole in a German jerrican. It was so feeble that there had been quite large numbers of people in the
orfanotrofio
who had survived the explosion of one or more of them at close quarters, whereas I had never met anyone who had come through the explosion of a German stick grenade nearby without suffering grave injury and my first impulse had been to tell Il Corvo to lay in a stock of German stick grenades; but it was obviously as difficult for him to do this as it was going to be to blow up the dump.

I told him, after having discussed the whole business with James,
that he ought to try and get some proper explosives from one of the big marble quarries on the other side of the Apennines which could be brought over by one of the salt carriers but he said that this was very difficult, which was probably true (it is always easy to make suggestions, the nasty part is having to implement them).

Then we asked him if the dump was efficiently guarded and if the Germans employed dogs; but, of course, he didn’t know and neither would I have done in his position; the only difference was that, in his position, I wouldn’t have been thinking of carrying out such a raid at all.

We then discussed the possibility of using Molotov Cocktails and he was very keen on the idea but when I told him that we needed petrol he said that the only place we could get any was in the dump and I had a vision of us all crouching inside it and drawing off petrol from the jerricans in order to make Molotov Cocktails with which to destroy it. What was needed was some kind of delayed-action fuse which would enable us to get clear of the place before the fire started, but although I thought very hard no inspiration came to me. It was no good asking James, it had not been his business before he was captured. I was supposed to know about such things. It was all rather shaming.

The whole scheme was mad anyway. We worked out that it was fifty kilometres in a straight line from where we were to the dump – with the initiator of the scheme saddled with such an absurd nickname we found it unseemly to use the expression ‘as the crow flies’. To reach it we would have to cross two mountains, similar to the one on which we were living, and one large river which might be in flood. II Corvo estimated that it would take three days to reach the target which I thought was much less than the minimal possible time, and he had arranged that we would all be housed in the barn of a sympathiser, about seven kilometres away in the foothills, on the night before the operation and again on
the actual evening on which it took place, after we had successfully done our work.

We managed to persuade him that it would be impossible to remain in the area after the attempt, whether it was successful or not, and that it would have to be made as soon as it grew dark so that the whole of the rest of the night could be used for the retreat to the mountains which would have to be undertaken by each man separately and each using a separate route; although he seemed to think this a very craven way of going about it.

Finally it was agreed that only one person would actually get through the wire and he would lash a grenade to a jerrican, attach a long piece of cord to the pin, run the cord out beyond the wire and then pull it out. Il Corvo liked the idea of this, but it was impossible to get him to see that two people would accomplish this mad act better than seven and with far more chance of getting away afterwards. To him it was the idea that was everything. I couldn’t remember if Italian grenades had pins.

If we succeeded in carrying out this operation the Germans would lose a few thousand gallons of petrol. They would burn some villages, shoot a number of hostages, and, almost certainly, begin a series of
rastrellamenti
which would bring a number of embryonic
bande
, of which I hoped that this was not a typical example, to their knees. The time to start this sort of operation was when the Allies showed some definite sign that they were on the move. It was too early to make such an attack. At this time it was as pointless as the Charge of the Light Brigade.

But in spite of all this we decided to go with them. As James said, we had no choice. Men, women and children were risking their lives every day to keep us alive and if, when the first opportunity to strike some kind of blow, however feeble, against the enemy presented itself, we simply skulked in our cave and let Italians do it, we would be disgraced. II Corvo was an idiot; but
he was a brave one and if there were more people like him the war in Italy might have already been over.

The operation was timed to begin the following night. We had been sworn to secrecy so we could not even tell our own people about it. We fabricated a story about making another visit to the
crinale
which we were quite sure that no one believed, and the two people who heard it said that they would return the next day to make sure that we really had gone away.

We spent an awful day. To me this was much worse than
Whynot
, because it was absolutely pointless. James wrote a letter to his people and then tore it up. I didn’t even begin one. It had been arranged that the rest of the
banda
would meet us at the Colle del Santo at five o’clock the following evening and there we waited in the rain growing wetter and wetter for four hours. No one came; we never saw the corporal of the Alpini with the battle name II Corvo again, we never saw the other two, with rusty pistols either, and no one else ever referred to the operation again. We had had a very lucky escape.

In my counting of the days it rained on between sixteen and nineteen days in November and December was even worse. As James had prophesied our morale began to go down and there was one awful day when he woke to find that he had impetigo, which made him very depressed. Now he was unable to shave and he became a sorry sight, his face covered with loathsome brown crusts which I picked off for him using tweezers made from matchsticks. At the same time I developed a ghastly, dry cough, whether it was due to nerves, the wood smoke or tuberculosis I had no way of knowing. Whatever its origin it was terrible for James to have to sit all day listening to it.

‘You should control yourself,’ he said severely, one day when he was thoroughly exasperated.

‘I do try,’ I said. ‘Do you think I enjoy it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, and I felt like striking him; but the more I tried not to the more I coughed.

To escape from the realities of our situation we talked a lot about England and what we would do after the war. James’s plans were already made. He was more than half-way to becoming a farmer. Mine were absolutely crazy. I was going to live in a little house at the end of an avenue of trees where the grass grew up to the front door, and I was going to write. I was also going to have a secondhand bookshop, like the one I had seen in Salisbury before the war. How all this was to come about without money I never explained either to myself or to James.

Then we played a game called ‘Lives’, using the paper which I had acquired in order to write poetry (I had written one poem but it was so gloomy and defeatist that I decided to give up). ‘Lives’ was fun. We each wrote a day in one another’s lives after the war as we imagined it ought to be. We had already played this game with others more adept at it than we were, while we were locked up. Of James one of them had written:

‘Three p.m. Dropped into the House. Heard the first reading of the Oakwoods (Planting and Preservation) Bill; the Pig Production Bill and the Compulsory Land Ownership Bill. Consider that the latter should be modified, so that, of all fortunes of more than ten thousand a year, at least half, and not a third, as at present, should be in land. Had a little trouble with McGovern: he asked what would become of him, as member of an industrial section of Glasgow, when that section was expunged under the Heavy Industries (Annihilation Act). I made a good, short, straight-from-the-shoulder speech, pointing out that, under the Act, he would be annihilated too. The House heard me very kindly. Felt I deserved Tea at five p.m., which I took at the House (Earl Grey, buttered toast, Patum Peperium, Tiptree Strawberry jam, Dundee Cake and Devonshire cream).’ And so on.

It was a lot of nonsense, but it helped to pass the time which hung heavily now: I having come to the melancholy conclusion of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and not feeling sufficiently full of fight to start it again, James having finished
Mr Sponge
for the fourth or fifth time. Very rarely we saw a newspaper but it seldom had any interesting news in it, although we did learn of the meeting of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at Teheran, which seemed a long way from our cave. The Allies seemed bogged down in Italy. With such weather it was not surprising. And there were sinister advertisements, inserted by the Todt Organisation, which invited Italian workers to go to Germany where they would find a guarantee of work (there was no doubt about that), good conditions and equal social rights with German workers; and there were the usual threats and exhortations to soldiers who had been hiding since the Armistice to give themselves up. If they did, they were told, they would be sent on leave. None of them believed it. All the time I worried about Wanda. There was never any news from her.