by Anthony Paul
and he copies babbo at everything
when we eat hes watching babbo all the time and keeps looking down at his hands to see if hes using his knife and spoon the same way
his talking is getting better but he can still only do now words
luigi keeps telling him he must also do yesterday words and tomorrow words
he keeps showing him lists in his schoolbook and makes him say lots of doing words in a row
and then roberto gets angry again
he still walks in a funny way
his shoulders are always back and his arms swing all over the place
when he does it I pretend to be him and march around the room like the militia pretending to blow a trumpet and then he gets angry again
i feel very sorry for him
his mamma and babbo dont know where he is
they dont even know if hes alive
he says he wants to go home to them but the germans will stop him if they dont think hes from round here
auntie came round today and was very angry when she heard roberto is here
she says it is dangerous to have him here and we must tell him to go away
i hope he doesnt go away
I know his mamma and babbo are missing him but he is such fun and I will miss him
–
‘Elvira says it’s hard to believe he’s an officer, doctor. Apart from his temper. He’s listless, just mopes around the place. She’s even caught him talking to the cat. He won’t concentrate on his verbs. He’s just like a sulking schoolboy.’
‘He’s depressed, Carlo, it’s as simple as that. My medical opinion. He might even have lost hope. Remember he’s a prisoner again, this time only two or three days away from rejoining his own army. And last time he was a prisoner he was with other Englishmen, talking his own language, doing English things. Even on the walk south he had the other English captain as his friend, almost his brother, and now he’s lost him too.’
‘At least he’s safe with us, doctor, as long as he stays hidden.’
‘Does he feel it? He still doesn’t understand enough to be reassured by you. Imagine Enrico on the run in Russia, away from all his friends, told he must forget he’s Italian, speak Russian, eat like one, behave like one. Can you imagine what it’s like?’
‘We’ve got to let him go, doctor. It’ll give him hope again. And even if he fails he’ll know we wanted what was best for him. And if he comes back to us he’ll try harder so it’s better next time.’
‘It’s too dangerous for you.’
‘Isn’t it more dangerous having a frustrated man in your house?’
‘Maybe you’re right. Apart from anything else he’s losing his stamina, his ability to stand the cold. But I can’t see him getting through the lines at the moment. The Germans are well dug in on all the ridges now and the snow is deep. He will be back, and he’ll find you again, just like last time. Can you imagine it? He’d only been to your house once before, reaching it and leaving it in darkness, yet without a guide he found his way from the camp straight to your front door without bringing the Germans down on you. Can you imagine where we’d be now if we’d had an officer like that in charge of the camp?’
7
Giulio Camarro set out two hours before dawn, aiming to be out of the main valley before daybreak. It was not unusual for workers to be out that early, even in the fallow winter. The farmers’ fields were so far apart and small that early morning starts were normal. Dogs barked as he climbed through the peasant cottages so that he could strike down the valley at height amongst the trees. He strode purposefully, clenching his fists to keep his fingertips warm, his breath frosting the air. After the heavy rain of recent days the sky had brightened late yesterday afternoon. The gloom was gone. He was relishing the fresh air, the space. It was a morning for hope, to feel that he was once more in control of his destiny.
As the sky pinkened to the east he had already turned into the side valley heading up to the pass to the south, the pass he must be over by nightfall. Ten or so miles as the crow flies, on foot twenty five, maybe thirty, in the day. He would have to keep moving but it was not a daunting distance, even when hungry. The road, a patchwork of stones and mud, followed the contours, forever turning back on itself, but it was quicker to stay on it. If he could keep to it he would be back on lower ground by sunset. Today, in the lea of the mountain ridge to the east, there was no wind to blow away the sounds of approaching vehicles. When it passed through fields the road had stone walls to the side and for the rest of the time it was in woods, often with a steep downward slope to where the river had cut into the bottom of the valley. There would always be somewhere to hide when a vehicle was coming, at least until he reached the pass. He would have to leave the road when it passed through the villages but they were all huddled on rocky spurs, so he could always slip down to the riverbank in order to pass them by.
The rising sun caught the snow on the peaks to the west turning them pink, then gold and yellow. As it rose the colours passed down the slopes and the crests became a blinding white against a deep crystal blue. The prospect of warmth slipped slowly down the mountain sides. Yes, it was a day on which he could make distance if he stayed alert.
Staying alert was going to be the difficulty while he was practising his new identity. For days he had been rehearsing the answers in Italian to every question that could be put to Roberto DiGiovanni, the Tyrolese carpenter. His biography had been mapped by Luigi, learned by him, all in advance of the identity card the doctor was to produce. But last night, apologising that there had been no time and that the break in the weather gave the captain the sudden chance to cross the line on Christmas Eve, the doctor had sent a stolen fascist party membership card as at least something. Giulio Camarro, motor mechanic from L’Aquila. It would be just his luck to turn a corner and find a silent German car with its driver swearing under its bonnet. No Italian mechanic would be unfamiliar with the Mercedes engine. ‘Where’s your identity card?’ ‘Stolen at a railway station. Pig Allies bomb the lines, make the trains late. I fall asleep on the platform. When I wake up my pockets are empty. Perhaps some filthy communist. Or an Allied escaper. They steal everything.’ Not very good, but simple men use simple grammar; and the insults would be consistent with the party card; and the photograph looked like him, or as like him as any Italian’s photograph ever looked, if one ignored the ears.
But no-one asked to see the card that day. It was the same route he and Mike had taken to the line a few weeks before and he knew where to leave the road in order to avoid the villages with their inquisitive eyes. The battle he could hear going on to the south on the other side of the snow-covered ridge between him and the sea, too high for him to cross, meant that the Germans were sparing no troops to patrol this part of the road. It was as if he was the only man in the valley.
At midday, watched by a black and grey hooded crow, he ate one of the signora’s boiled potatoes in a grove of poplars by the river bank, a few yellow leaves still clinging to their topmost branches. Despite the sun he was quickly cold and was on his way again, up the snaking passage between the beech trees, their brown leaves still on their twigs, the last vegetation below the snowfields that covered the mountains. By late afternoon, as the artillery barrages lulled on the coast, he was above the tree-line on the pass, a dusting of snow underfoot. No Germans there either, so he went quickly down the other side to the gorge with the caves. It had been a good day, many miles covered, with shelter in prospect.
–
‘You can’t stay here.’ An old man wrapped in a blanket blocks his entrance to the cave. Behind him a family, his daughter and her barefoot children, huddles for warmth around a damp wood fire, its smoke now settling down from the low roof of the cave. ‘It’s occupied.’
‘I go another.’
‘They’re all occupied.’
The captain brushes his snowflakes away and pulls the old jacket as far across his stomach as he can. Its pinching shoulders s
o hamper his movements that it is hard to try for warmth when he isn’t walking. He hugs his sides, hunches his shoulders. ‘Possible to sleep one night? Am English officer.’
‘We’ve helped too many like you already. That’s why we’re here.’
The captain looks behind the man through the smarting smoke to the small fire. The woman sees his despair and slips the blanket from her mouth. ‘From where do you come today?’
He dare not name the village. ‘Thirty miles.’
‘Let him in, Babbo. The poor man is exhausted. Are we not Christians?’
Are we not Christians? How many times had he heard those words in the last few months? He and Mike had never been former enemies on their journey south, soldiers who might have shot at the farmers’ own conscripted sons. Always they had been seen and received as travellers, sons of mothers, fellow Christians in need of shelter and food, fellow victims of governments and their wars. The welcome of these people, hiding in this cave on this cold mountain, is the same.
The woman asks if he is hungry. He looks around at their meagre stores lining the cold damp walls of the cave and says he is not. They sit in silence, the smoke from the fire scouring their eyes. ‘Why are you here?’ the captain asks.
‘It’s a sad story’ the man replies. ‘In September, at the time of the Armistice, there were thousands of English prisoners in camps on the plain below. They scattered into the mountains and the local people looked after them. We sheltered them, we fed them. We used up food we’d need for the winter, but it didn’t matter. The Allies took Naples within days. How could they not? They’d thrown the Germans out of Africa, then Sicily, and now they were not far south of us. Even the shepherds could no longer take their sheep down to the plains of Foggia for the winter, the way they have done for centuries. The lines were that close. How could the Allies not be here within a week or two?
‘But they weren’t. The Germans started round-ups in the valleys. They blew up the houses of the people found sheltering escaped prisoners, and then they started emptying the villages, taking our animals as they went. Taking our animals. For us a sheep is years of milk and cheese and wool, the promise of lambs. For them it’s a day of meat. So we starve as well as freeze. The caves in this valley are full of the people of two villages, the ones who don’t have relatives in other places they can stay with.
‘We’re the lucky ones. In one village near the Sangro they just took the old people, the women and the children and shot them all, a hundred of them. It was a good place to try to cross the line, you see. Hundreds had crossed from there. The Germans wanted to make an example.’ A tear runs down the old man’s wrinkled cheek, the woman hugs his grandchildren closer to her, the captain is silent.
–
The captain left a chit and set out down the gorge before dawn. He still had three boiled potatoes in his pockets, but had not eaten yet today. It would be a long dangerous day and it was better to conserve his food. There would be more patrols in the stretch to the next pass into the Sangro valley, and that pass was sure to be guarded. He had to make as good time as he could before he reached the areas where dodging through and between the patches of scrub would slow him down. He had to be at the front tonight, so he could see the minefields by the moon, even before then so that he could spot the German gun positions and their fields of fire before the sun went down.
The track had trees alongside, bare trees, but cover of sorts should he need to hide. He dodged a foot patrol in the half-light, its soldiers huddled in their greatcoats, stretching their rifle-slings, eyes to the ground, wishing they were back in barracks. The morning wore on, he walking as fast as he could as old stone villages on rocky spurs came into view and then receded behind him. Occasionally a flurry of snow swept past him, muffling the sound of the big guns to the south, but the weather was still good enough for his trek. If anything the snow would make the patrols less watchful.
Then a blizzard swept up the new valley towards him. He wound his scarf around his jaw, clamped his blotched hands into his armpits and leant into the wind. Through the blizzard another patrol appeared, too close for him not to be seen. To his left was a slope of scree up to a line of pines. It was his only chance of escape. He leapt off the road and started scrambling up the scree, cascading stones as he went, three steps up, one step back, hoping a squall of snow would hide him. Behind him stones clattered down to the road. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t been seen, that bullets were not once more pinging off the rocks around him. At last he made the pines, stopped to look round for his pursuers, but there were none. The patrol was still tramping unconcerned along the road, faces fixed to the ground. How could they not have seen him, not fired at him, not followed him up the scree?
For the next two hours he was following the stream up the now beech-wooded valley to the last pass, the snow ever deeper under his feet. The snowstorm had passed, but the sky had the yellowish tinge of more to come. The patrol must have seen him, but its soldiers must have been tired, sick of the blizzard, going through the motions on their way back to their barracks and a fire. What would his own men have thought in the same situation? They’d have looked up the scarp and thought: probably only another scared local; Christ knows we’ve done enough to scare them all; reports to file; just make it a routine patrol, so we can put our feet up, with no officer ordering a new search party when we get back. Conscripted soldiers were the same everywhere when away from the battlefront: keep it simple, there are enough risks as it is, keep it easy, give him the benefit of the doubt.
–
But there would be no benefits of doubt on the line. He had half an hour of daylight left, scampering across the snow from one brushwood thicket to the next, looking for a route down the valley side to the river, the last river to cross, still two, three thousand feet below him. Since he’d crossed the last pass he’d once again been alone in the black and white landscape, except for the patrols. There had been no locals to ask for directions; a solitary one had turned his back and walked the other way when he’d seen him coming. It was a valley of people cowed into seeing and doing nothing. Even the church clocks were silent. There was no chance of a guide down to the river, a man who knew the safe paths down the slope and where the Germans were. He would have to rely entirely on his own observations, the way he, if himself defending this position, would dispose his own men and weapons.
He looked down into the valley. It was an easy line to defend: a machine-gun post here, one there, interlocking fields of fire and a minefield in that little pocket out of sight. The umpteenth such position he had looked down on since arriving in the valley, all just as bad. He looked despairingly across to the other side of the valley, where exploding shells showed the equivalent positions of his own army, maybe men of his own battalion, encamped within his sight. He thought of them drinking tea from enamel mugs, warm in their greatcoats, passing cigarettes, eating corned beef sandwiches, speaking English to English friends, maybe whistling carols. How much would he risk tonight when by dawn, on Christmas Day in the morning, he could be over there with them?
There was no more time to find another spot today. This one would have to do. He crouched into some bushes to wait for nightfall. There would be moonlight early on to check the route, then darkness for the passage. The old trick when on patrol in the desert: by moonlight you could always see the wheeltracks, the footprints in the sand that told you the way that was free of mines. Snow would do the same. He ate his last potato.
–
The moon was up and the days-old snow in the dell was glistening like icing on a cake. No footprints that would tell him there were no mines. As white as the snow on a Christmas card, and the gunners in the pillboxes, reading his mind that Christmas Eve was a good time for every Allied prisoner-of-war straggling on the wrong side of the line to try to slip through, were practising their arcs of fire with heavy machine-gun bursts. No faint harmonious singing of Stille Nacht or Tannenbaum - it was in the firing line. He had picked the wrong p
lace to try to cross the river. There was no hope of getting through here. He would have to find another way tonight, or have to wait another day, here in this valley swarming with troops, with the weather worsening. He could not delay. He had to find another route tonight. He edged to the open ground, looked for the next patch of cover and set out for it.
He moved ever further along the side of the valley, despairing as every possibility turned out to be more hazardous than the last. And then the first puff of snow at his feet, followed by the crack of rifle fire rising up through the silent cold air, told him he had been spotted. Get up this fucking mountain as fast as I can.
8
Elvira Golvi sits at the kitchen table watching the captain tear and gulp his way through a hunk of dry bread like a hunting dog, starved for days, attacking his prey. Once again he has knocked at her door, frozen and scared, after another escape from a German patrol in the mountains. He had been away for five days, trying to find a way through the German lines, and he had failed again. On the fourth night it had snowed for the first time in the village, only lightly, but up in the passes, where he would have been, there must have been feet of it.
The poor boy. But Europe is full of poor boys. And poor mothers. This boy’s mother hasn’t heard of him in months, worries if he is still alive. Just as she wonders if her own Enrico is still alive. She hasn’t heard from him since March. The war has reached the stage where no-one knows if her soldier son is still alive. No letters, not even from the authorities when they are killed, just as happened when her own father was killed in the Great War. And the snow will be worse in Russia. Maybe a Russian mother, who doesn’t know if her Sergei is still alive, is looking after Enrico even now.
It is only the good mothers and the good sons who suffer like this. If your father was a trusty fascist you got a nice cushy posting at home, like that good-for-nothing Giobellini boy next door. If you’d no connections, or were just poor, ’twas the fighting front for you. Enrico was rushed off to Russia as soon as he reached military age. Always the lot of the anti-fascists’ sons, to be sent off to fight against the mightiest anti-fascist army in the world.