by Norman Lewis
September 1
A single night in the stifling communal dormitory of the Hotel Vesuvio, under the attack of its very special breed of house mosquito, has been enough to break some Canadian spirits, and this morning the two officers, a sergeant-major and four sergeants decided to move on to Avellino where conditions were reported better. I was therefore left with the other sergeant-major and four sergeants. They are friendly and cooperative – and in spite of their amorality, hard to dislike. They have absolutely nothing whatever to do with their time, and hardly know what the war is about. As was to be expected, not one of them speaks a word of Italian. Today has been spent in getting to know the town. They give candy to every child in sight, shove all male Italians off the pavement, and make an instant sexual advance to every woman of child-bearing age they encounter. These routine approaches are endured by the girls with great dignity, and some go to the lengths of making polite and even apologetic speeches explaining just why they feel unable to agree to have sexual intercourse on the spot.
The Canadians object very much to flies, which I have learned to live with, as there is nothing that can be done about them. These flies of Benevento are constantly in search of moisture, and when one lands on a Canadian lip or eyelid and begins to suck, it usually provokes a whinny of disgust. This afternoon we saw a man lying in the street, probably at death’s door, being carefully avoided by passers-by, all with their handkerchiefs pressed over their noses. Jason, the youngest, wildest and most likeable of the Canadians, suggested ringing up the hospital and having an ambulance sent, and was surprised to be told that the phones do not work, the hospital has no ambulance, that one nurse who goes home at night looks after a hundred patients, and that there is not room to cram one single patient more into the floor space between the beds.
Gloom deepened at the Vesuvio tonight at the news that Don Ubaldo is not expected to live, and that people are beginning to leave the town in panic.
The services of the maid-of-all-work having been reserved in advance for tonight by one of her regulars, I suggested to two of the Canadians in a romantic frame of mind that they might care to see what the local brothel had to offer. They went off, but were soon back complaining that the only girl available had a glass eye.
September 3
Don Ubaldo died of typhoid this morning.
In response to urgent requests from the Canadians that we move out of town I saw the principal citizen, who was clearly delighted to perform a service he might be able to cash in on at some later date, and also, no doubt, to see the back of us. He immediately found an empty farmhouse in the village of Sagranella, up in the hills, and within a couple of hours of seeing him we had installed ourselves there. The farmhouse is vast, clean and archaic – giving the sensation of living in a cave above ground, and it has magnificent views over the bare hills which, when we arrived, glittered like copper under the midday sun. This village seems hardly to have moved out of the Bronze Age. I am told it has a fox-cult, and every year a fox is captured and burned to death, and its tail is hung, like a banner, from a pole at the village’s entrance. There is an enormous Easter Island-style head in a field nearby, which spares a sardonic smile for the passer-by, and which probably dates from Samnite times – or before. It is said that the droit du seigneur is practised as a matter of course on the neighbouring big estate, which seems to be cultivated almost entirely by women. They leave the village to go to work just before dawn, and return shortly after dark – a sixteen-hour day. The steward is said to feel a woman’s muscles before employing her.
The great and extraordinary attraction of this place is the presence of myriads of fireflies in the bushy slopes beneath us, and tonight, with the darkness, every bush carried its own soft, bluish illumination, and every leaf and branch was separately and glowingly lit up. This delighted the Canadians, who show a childlike wonderment for such new experiences. One of the few buildings of note spared by the American bombing was the Strega factory, where one can buy a bottle of amber-coloured, aromatic liqueur for the reasonable sum of 100 lire, plus one pound of sugar. It turned out that the Canadians carried even a supply of sugar in their Dodge, so earlier in the day we had gone over to the factory and bought a dozen bottles. With these a housewarming took place at the farmhouse tonight, and the Canadians, instantly drunk on the strong, sticky liquor, stripped off their clothes and went dancing and singing out of the house and down the hillside among the bushes and the fireflies – an unearthly and even poetic sight.
September 6
The Canadians are generous and open-handed in every way. Bred in the freedom of limitless spaces, property, possessions and territorial rights of any kind seem to mean less to them than those things do to us. Anything they have is yours for the asking: their transport, their booze, or even a personally autographed picture of Rita. Unhesitatingly, and as a matter of course, a share is offered in the two dazed peasant girls picked up on one of their forays, whom they treat like pet monkeys, and feed with biscuits and scraps of bacon at odd times all through the day. They have run out of whisky, and I have some misgivings about the sweet and ensnaring Strega. This they drink by the tumblerful, even for breakfast, after which, buckling on their guns, they go staggering off in search of adventure.
To my surprise, definite occupation was found for me on my last visit to HQ: to investigate the motives of a clandestine political party operating in this area. Some sixty-five political parties have now been inscribed with our blessing and will take part in the wild democratic free-for-all to be expected when elections are held. In addition there are many unrecognised movements aspiring to lead the nation back to greatness. Most of these are freakish, like Lattarullo’s Separatists who want to dress people in Roman tunics, enforce a legal minimum of ten children per family, and reintroduce serfdom in one guise or another. Some are regarded as more purposeful and sinister including the one to be investigated, called Forza Italia!, which is suspected of Neo-Fascist leanings. My contacts in Benevento dismiss it with scorn as just another maniac right-wing movement backed by the landlords and the rural Mafia, run in this case by a half-demented latifundista who proclaims himself a reincarnation of Garibaldi. However, a report has been ordered, so, learning that a public meeting was to be held today in San Marco di Cavali, a hill village in the Monti del Sannio about thirty miles away, I asked the Canadians for the loan of their Dodge, and went up there, leaving at about six before any of my friends were astir, and arrived at about eight.
Political meetings in the far South are held early to avoid the worst heat, and they often provide the excuse for the organisation of an impromptu fair. In this case people who had come to hear the speeches had also taken the opportunity to bring a few sheep with them for sale, and a stall selling toys made out of plaited straw, maize-flour cakes, and tin panpipes, had been set up, and a three-man band waited to play. San Marco seemed to have been carved out of the bone of the mountain, a human corral, where the fight against misery left nothing much over for anybody in the way of a life. It was a village of shepherds with totem-pole faces, solemn and silent men born into a life hardly distinguishable from slavery. In some cases it may have been real slavery, because it was commonly said that in this and many other districts in the South young boys were secretly sold by their parents to the owners of large flocks. These taciturn men were bigger and tougher-looking than Southern Italian peasants, with whom I suspect they have little in common.
All the political speeches of these days seem to be interchangeable, platitudinous stuff. Italian audiences enjoy oratory unrelated to argument, and are attracted to a display of verbal fireworks normally used to conceal absence of original thought. Although the speaker in this case was nominally a subversive, he had nothing whatever new to say, and certainly nothing likely in any way to endanger the security of the Allied forces. He ranted and raved on interminably, and a few of the shepherd audience broke their habit of silence to grunt their approval. I stood there for a while, and took a few notes to bas
e a report on. My feeling was one of extreme isolation. I was also highly conspicuous – and therefore the object of some curiosity – in a village where it was possible that no British soldier had set foot before.
After about an hour I felt that I knew all I wanted to know about the Forza Italia! movement, and going back to where I had left the Dodge in a patch of shade, I was surprised to find it surrounded by about fifty men, who turned to face me as I walked towards them. Their appearance was hostile. Two men had been looking into the back of the lorry over the tailboard, and going to see what it was all about, I found perhaps half the floor covered with sticky, not quite dried-out blood, which I realised must have been there when I left Sagranella. The implacable neolithic faces were closing in, and I had the feeling that at any moment I might be rushed. I forced my way through the crowd, climbed into the cabin and started up. Edging forward through the rampart of bodies, as the shouts started and fists were raised, the possibility occurred to me that these shepherds had had some encounter with one of the killer squads of the German army, had watched me taking notes, and assumed me to be the equivalent of a Gestapo executioner. Then, seeing the blood in the lorry, they had concluded it had been used to remove the victims of summary killings. I left San Marco followed by howls of execration and a few flying stones.
Back in Sagranella among the continued feasting and revelry in the farmhouse, the mystery was explained almost cheerfully. Late last night the Canadians had run a civilian down, more or less amputating his legs, and had put him in the back of the Dodge, driven him to Campobasso Hospital, and there left him. No one could possibly have been more sincerely apologetic when they heard about my embarrassment in San Marco.
September 11
While the war’s emergencies continue to absorb the attention, Benevento seems no different from any other ruined town, but in the moments of calm and reflection its atmosphere asserts itself, and one catches a whiff of fear.
A scugnizzio appeared at the office at about eleven o’clock to say that a man he didn’t know had sent him to tell me that someone had just been shot dead by a lupara – the sawn-off shotgun used in ritual killings – and left lying in the street outside the Café Roma. I went there as soon as I could but found nothing – only little rivulets of blood on the cobbles where a body might have lain. People hurried past, heads turned in the other direction. A waiter was clearing a table in the café, and I went and asked him if he had seen or heard anything unusual. He shook his head. The one behind the bar hadn’t either. My friend Alberto in the Vesuvio, a hundred yards away from the Café Roma, had had a completely uneventful morning. So had Don Enrico, the capitalist, who had been drinking coffee substitute in the Vesuvio at about that time. Lina, the maid-of-all-work, thought she might have heard a car backfire but couldn’t be sure. All these people had been bred to silence. They were drugged with caution. They had trained themselves to deal with all such questions with a bland smile, to hear or see nothing. The Marshal said, ‘Someone’s been pulling your leg. If anything had happened I’d be the first to know.’
Being still unsatisfied I went back to the scugnizzi, who don’t seem to be afraid of anything, and remain the major source of unsullied truth. I questioned a couple of them and both agreed that there had been a murder and a number of people had seen it. I, too, was sure now that there had. Why should people want to pull the wool over my eyes? A rather spine-chilling start to the day.
September 16
The news is that Bernard Durham of our section has been wounded in a drive against bandits in Avellino. His attacker, dressed as an American officer, leaped from a car held up at a checkpoint and drilled him through the shoulder at close-range with a 45 automatic. This is the Section’s first casualty. Fortunately Durham was not seriously injured. This could well be the same gang who have been troubling us in Benevento, because Peters, the MP sergeant, reported the presence of an American in the lorry on the occasion when the hand-grenade was thrown into his jeep.
The question is how to deal with this business of the bandits, because the problem instantly arises as to what extent I am personally involved – or should be involved. However vague my function may be in practice, basically I am in Benevento in the interests of the security of British troops. Bandits – so long as the bandits are not bothering us – seem to me a problem for the Italian police. The Canadians don’t agree, and I am supposed to advise them but not give them orders. They are longing for a scrap with anyone, and are a law unto themselves. Sergeant Peters, still angry over the grenade attack, says his orders cover any action he decides to take, and he sides with the Canadians. Marshal Altamura, eyes a-glitter with schemes, pleads for assistance in maintaining law and order. The more I see of him the more unhappy I feel about my enforced alliance with this man. One of my daily crop of anonymous letters has accused him of involvement with one of the bands. Should there be any truth in this, it is on the cards that he is out to arrange for the elimination of a rival organisation – possibly the one said to be controlled by the principal citizen. A labyrinth of intrigue.
A meeting was held today to decide what is to be done. The Marshal said he had received information that bandits will come into the town tomorrow night by the direct road from Foggia, with the intention of picking up arms and equipment. He argued that Field Security must be involved because enemy agents and saboteurs used the travel facilities offered by the bandits to move about the country. It was agreed to set up a checkpoint on the Foggia road, and it was also agreed that FS would limit its interest to problems arising out of unauthorised travel. Any other action would be the responsibility of the Italian police.
September 19
Spent most of the day reconnoitring the outskirts of Benevento and the roads leading into and out of the town, as well as collecting wildly conflicting advice from contacts as to the possible movements of the bandits. It was decided to set up the checkpoint about three miles out of town just across the Ufita river, where the bridge was down. This lonely second-class road was the natural choice of all clandestine traffic from the South, and from the Adriatic coast.
By about ten o’clock we were in position. A brilliant night, with every house and tree clear-cut under a warm, reddish moon. High summer, burning away all traces of green vegetation by day, had brought out small fragrant night flowers all round us, and fireflies were winking everywhere in the scrub. The Canadians, laden with weaponry and Strega, were jubilantly excited, the Carabinieri nervously resigned, the British MPs inscrutably correct. A heterogeneous force, but alas with no one in control.
There was no shortage of clandestine travellers. A Carabiniere with a lamp waved the cars and lorries into the roadside, and the passengers tumbled out of them, their faces whitened like clowns by the dust. About one in ten was authorised to be making the journey. Those who were not produced a miscellany of scraps of paper wheedled out of Allied officers who were not entitled to issue passes, or passes that were out of date, or not valid for this particular journey, or that were straightforward forgeries. Every vehicle was stocked with contraband of one kind or another, and this was joyfully off-loaded by the Marshal, in theory to be taken according to the regulations to the municipal depot. Since a drum of olive oil was worth about 50,000 lire on the black market, one wondered how much of this treasure would really finds its way to the ammasso. There were pleadings, offers of bribes, tears – and almost certainly whispered deals. I was alarmed at one moment to realise that the Marshal was no longer with us, then to see him come into view from behind some bushes with a young lady who then quietly and complacently took her seat again in the lorry she’d been travelling in.
The Canadians had discovered that most cars were travelling on stolen tyres. These they ordered to be removed on the spot, although I feared less out of zeal for the protection of Allied property than from the knowledge that every serviceable tyre would fetch 30,000 lire, and no questions asked.
By great good luck the routine travellers had been dealt with and
cleared off the scene before the bandits arrived. It could have been two or three in the morning in the flat, dead moonlight when we were beginning to yawn at each other, and in my case hallucination had crept into the fatigue brought on by three sleepless nights. The familiar cocoon of dust of an approaching lorry failed this time to alert us. The lorry, going fast, slowed as it approached the barrier, switched off its lights, then accelerated again to sweep the Carabiniere with the lamp aside, and go crashing through. It passed us in a sprinkling of shots, and a disorderly rush to take up firing positions. Reaching the end of the demolished bridge, it swung aside, lowered itself carefully down the river bank, trundled through the stones and the thin current of the river bed, and began to climb the opposite bank, already safe from the fusillades of the Carabinieri’s toy weapons, and out of accurate range of the Thompson sub-machine-gun fired by Peters, the MP sergeant.
The emergency had caught the Canadians’ Dodge facing in the wrong direction, and for some reason the Bren, mounted on its tripod, couldn’t be swivelled through 180 degrees. The bandits’ lorry was on the skyline on the farther bank for only a matter of seconds before the Dodge could be started and manoeuvred into a position where the Bren could be used. Jason at the Bren fired an excited half-clip. We saw the sparkle of the bullets’ impact on metal, then the lorry dropped down below the skyline, and the Dodge went off in chase. Our attention was now wrenched away by the sudden apparition and stoppage two hundred yards short of the ruined barricade of a second lorry. We saw a number of figures leave it and make for the shelter of an olive grove, and we began to run towards them. I found myself with one of the Carabinieri recruits and tried to keep close to him. Someone had thrust a Thompson into my hands which I knew only vaguely how to operate, and I was filled with a drowsy determination to avoid killing or getting killed. We ran forward in a slow, lumbering fashion into the empty lanes of olives, which repeated themselves like a wallpaper pattern. Roots tripped us up, we slumped into dry irrigation ditches, and the nightjars flapped away from us like enormous moths. Then a tall, thin Negro capered into sight ahead, facing us. I saw a sad, elongated head thrusting from the jacket of an American uniform, a Schmeisser sub-machine-gun held in the crook of the right arm, and the left arm dangling as if damaged. Shots were crackling a long way away. The Negro, his mouth hanging open, and capering and ducking like a boxer, swung his gun from one to the other of us, as if to wave us away. I pointed the Thompson in the direction of his thighs, pressed the trigger, and a single clunk announced that it had jammed. The young Carabiniere dropped to one knee to aim his popgun Carcano. He fired and the Negro flopped over backwards weightlessly, like a hollow figure in a fairground shooting range, and then, to my relief, scrabbling about with arms and legs, began to get up again. We came in on both sides of him. There was a black stripe across the top of his forehead going back through his hair, where the bullet had miraculously grazed his skull without penetrating it. He wobbled about showing the white palms of his hands, and then the young Carabiniere jumped on him, pulled him down, and handcuffed him. The Carabiniere pulled out a length of lightweight chain. He attached this to the handcuffs, pulled the Negro to his feet, then led him away to be chained to a tree-stump, just as if he were chaining up a bicycle. The Negro sat down among the fireflies and put his head in his hands, and a little blood began to ooze through his fingers. Not a word had passed between the three of us.