Love and War in the Apennines. Eric Newby
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the sunshine, to a more modern building in the centre of the city. Here we were subjected to a long, inexpert interrogation by unpleasant men in civilian clothes. We were still very sure of ourselves and Desmond made the kind of rude remarks about the Duce, whose photograph glowered down at us from the wall, which only Guards officers are really capable of making, and to such an extent that we were in danger of being badly beaten up, as we certainly would have been if we had been Italian prisoners insulting a portrait of Churchill.
The Italians were angry enough without being taunted. We had penetrated their coast defences and the Germans, whose aircraft had been in some danger, had already pointed this out to them. That we had failed completely to do what we had set out to do did nothing to appease them. It was now that we made a rather feeble attempt to escape from the window of a lavatory to which the guards had, rather stupidly, taken us en masse. What we would have all done in the middle of Catania with hardly any clothes on, none of us had stopped to think; we were too bemused.
We were given nothing to eat or drink, and all that morning we sat shivering in our damp underwear and shirts in a northfacing room; and George, who had not recovered from his immersion, became ill. Finally an Italian colonel arrived and cursed our hosts for keeping us in such a condition and we were issued with cotton trousers and shirts and cotton socks and canvas boots made from old rucksacks, which were very comfortable, and we were also given food. Later in the afternoon we were put in a lorry and taken to a fort with a moat round it in which the conducting officer told us, we were to be shot at dawn the following morning as saboteurs because we had not been wearing any sort of recognisable uniform when we were captured. Looking out of the window into the dry moat in which the firing party was going to operate, I remembered the innumerable books about first war spies that I had read at school which invariably ended with ghastly descriptions of their executions. Mostly they were cowardly spies whose legs gave way under them, so that they had to be carried, shrieking, to the place of execution and tied to stakes to prevent them sinking to the ground, and although I hoped that I wouldn’t be like this, I wondered if I would be.
By this time George was very ill. He had a high temperature and lay on one of the grubby cots, semi-delirious. We hammered on the door and shouted to the sentries to bring a doctor, but of course none came.
Finally, sometime in the middle of the night (our watches had been taken away from us so we no longer knew what time it was), a young priest arrived, escorted by two soldiers, as we imagined to prepare us for the ordeal ahead; but, instead, he dismissed the sentries and knelt down by the side of George’s bed and prayed for him.
The priest spoke a little English and before he left he told us that the Germans were even more angry about the Italians’ decision to execute us without consulting them first, than they had been about the attack on the airfield, and that they had given orders that we were on no account to be shot but sent to Rome at once for further interrogation. Perhaps they never meant to shoot us but, all the same, we thought ourselves lucky.
The next day George was better, although still very weak, and later that day we left for Rome by train with a heavy escort of infantry under the command of an elderly maggiore who had with him an insufferably conceited and bloodthirsty sotto-tenente who had obviously been recently commissioned.
By now we were all very depressed but Desmond, who had a positively royal eye for the minutiae of military dress, had the pleasure of pointing out to the sotto-tenente that he had his spurs on the wrong feet.
‘He is quite right,’ said the maggiore who was not enjoying his escort duty and appeared to dislike the sotto-tenente as much as we did. ‘Go, instantly and change them. You are a disgrace to your regiment.’
At Rome station while being marched down the platform to the exit, we were able to pick up some of the ruinous and extensive baggage belonging to some very pretty peasant girls who had travelled up from the south on the same train. Happy to be given this assistance, for there were no porters even if they had known how to hire one, they trotted up the platform beside us between the escorting lines of soldiers who had been given orders only to shoot or bayonet us if we tried to escape, with the residue of their possessions balanced on their noddles, while the sotto-tenente screeched at us to put their bags down and the maggiore, not wishing to make an exhibition of himself, disembarked from the carriage in a leisurely fashion. These were the last girls any of us spoke to for a long time.
In the city we were housed in barracks occupied by the Cavalleria di Genova, a regiment in Italy of similar status at that time to one or other of the regiments of the Household Cavalry in Britain. They still had their horses and the few officers and men who were about looked like ardent royalists. They certainly all knew about which was the right boot for the right spur, which was more than I did and, although they were not allowed to speak to us, their demeanour was friendly. They sent us magazines and newspapers and the food, which was provided by the officers’ mess and brought to us by a white-jacketed mess waiter who had the air of a family retainer, was of an excellence to which none of us were accustomed in our own regiments, although there was not much of it.
After the first day we were all separated from one another and we began a period of unarduous solitary confinement in the course of which we contrived to communicate with one another by way of the mess waiter who carried our innocuous written messages from one room to another among the dishes. At intervals we were all interrogated, but never really expertly, by people from military intelligence. As we had been taught never to answer any questions whatsoever, however fatuous they might seem, we learned more from our interrogators than they did from us. It was interesting to find out how much they knew about our organisation. About some parts of it they knew more than I imagined they would; about others they seemed to know much less.
Once a day, but never together, we were let out to exercise on the pathway which surrounded the manège. Here ‘by chance’, we met other ‘prisoners’, an extraordinarily sleazy collection of renegades and traitors, most of them South African or Irish, dressed in various British uniforms, some in civilian clothes, who called us ‘old boy’ and offered to fix us up with nights on the town and escape routes into the Vatican in exchange for information.
I enjoyed being alone. It was so long since I had been. From my room, high up under the eaves of the barracks, I used to watch a solitary, elegant officer taking a succession of chargers around the tan. He was a wonderful horseman, even I could tell this without knowing anything about horses. The days were poignantly beautiful. The leaves on the plane trees were golden. Here, in Rome, in late August, it was already autumn. I was nearly twenty-three and this was my first visit to Europe. Locked up, isolated in the centre of the city, I felt like the traitor Baillie-Stewart, ‘the Officer in the Tower’, or, even less romantically, someone awaiting court martial for conduct scandalous and unbecoming, looking out across the Park in the years before the war.
After a few days we were dispersed, the officers to one camp, the men to another. We all survived the war and so did Socks, the dachshund. Pat, in accordance with Desmond’s last wishes, took her to Beirut where she took up residence with Princess Aly Khan. And George recovered sufficiently within a few days to make one of the most cold-bloodedly successful escape attempts from the camp to which we were sent when he, in company with a number of others, marched out through the main gate disguised as Italian soldiers. Unfortunately, they were all re-captured soon afterwards.
A year later, on the seventh of September, 1943, the day before Italy went out of the war, I was taken to the prison hospital with a broken ankle, the result of an absurd accident in which I had fallen down an entire flight of the marble staircase which extended from the top of the building to the basement while wearing a pair of nailed boots which my parents had managed to send me by way of the Red Cross. The prison camp was on the outskirts of a large village in the Pianura Padana, the great plain through which the river Po flows on its way from the Cottian Alps to the sea. The nearest city was Parma on the Via Emilia, the Roman road which runs through the plain in an almost straight line from Milan to the Adriatic.