War in Val d'Orcia

by Iris Origo

  We once again, however, keep a coat, shoes, etc., beside our beds at night, so as to be able to make for the woods at a moment’s notice.

  One can plainly hear cannon-fire beyond Radicofani, and we presume that the Allies must have reached Acquapendente. The BBC bulletin says that Bolsena is taken.

  In the afternoon I drive with Schwester Marie in the pony-cart to Montepulciano, as we need some medicine for Giovannino, the baby, and, since the Pianoia incident, none of our men wishes to take that road. We meet, however, no one, and only have to jump down into a ditch twice, as the fighter planes swoop down over our heads. At Montepulciano the population is very jumpy, as a German anti-aircraft battery has just been installed at the gates of the town, and a rumour has spread that the whole population is to be evacuated. This news appears to be based, however, on very slight foundation. A most lovely drive home in the sunset—the red clover in flower, the green cornfields waving in the breeze, the hedges full of briar-roses. Meet a few German cars, heavily camouflaged with branches, the troops sitting on the bonnet or the roof, so as to be able to observe the sky. Heavy bombing in the Val di Chiana.

  In the evening, worrying news is brought by one of the keepers. It appears that some German officers have been up the hill at the top of our property, between Castiglioncello and Pietraporciana, to look for a suitable emplacement for guns. Five partisans fired upon them, and one of the Germans has been killed. So now, presumably, the whole of that district, and particularly the village of Castiglioncello, and the surrounding farms (of which Pietraporciana is the nearest) will be surrounded and searched. This settles the question of using that farm as a shelter for the children.

  JUNE 13TH

  Send up a cart to fetch away all our things from Pietraporciana, in case the Germans choose this farm for their reprisals, and discover that all the partisans have left, presumably for the same reason.

  The news is unsatisfactory. There seems to be some tough German resistance round the lake of Bolsena, and the Allies have now been stuck there, for three days, while in the evening the BBC tells us that three German divisions from the north have arrived there as reinforcements. Very scant activity, too, in the air, and we begin to wonder whether some of the planes on this front have been sent to France.

  Another message summons us again to meet Beppe’s brother and some other partisans, at dusk, in the woods. They tell us that, by order of the Central Committee of Liberation in Rome, they are forming a citizens’ defence corps to take charge of each city, as soon as the Germans have left, and to enter into contact with the Allies on their arrival. The Chianciano Committee is already formed, and they wish Antonio to be the new Mayor of the Comune. He accepts, and they then show us the draft of the proclamation which they propose to issue on taking charge—an admirable document, urging the citizens to moderation, to return to law and order, and to refrain from all private vengeance for any injuries they may have received. ‘Justice,’ it says, ‘will be performed—but this is no time for private grievances. We can afford to be generous.’

  It is strange, after this conversation, to return down the hill, and find the courtyard still full of German troops.

  JUNE 14TH

  A company of German sappers arrives here during the night. The captain is billeted in the house, the men in the woods; they sleep in their cars, and wash in our laundry, greatly disturbing the women who want to get on with their washing, and find large naked young Germans occupying the tub.

  Spend the day in widening and cleaning a deep natural trench in the woods, as a possible emergency bolt-hole for the children. Air activity again in the afternoon—bombs near the bridge on the Miglia, and machine-gunning on the Castelluccio road, hitting two German lorries.

  In the evening, a messenger from Montepulciano brings the bad news that Bracci, together with nine other citizens of Montepulciano (the bank manager, head of the school, etc.) have been arrested by the Germans, apparently, as hostages, following upon yesterday’s attack of the partisans on Germans between Montepulciano and Pienza. An urgent message has accordingly been sent to Beppe that all partisan activity is to cease for the present in this district.

  The news is slightly better, the Allies have passed Orbetello, and are proceeding towards Grosseto. American troops have taken Pitigliano, on the other side of Monte Amiata. At Bolsena, fierce fighting continues.

  An important detail, from our personal point of view, is the news that the troops fighting in the Bolsena area are largely coloured Moroccan troops, and it is these that presumably will be the first to arrive here. After so many months and years of waiting for the Allies, this will be the Val d’Orcia’s first impression of them! There is also, however, a South African division at Bagnoregio, so let us hope that these may turn up instead.

  Some of the partisans come down to our cellar to fetch some wine, carrying up the demijohns under the very noses of the Germans, who are sitting in the yard by their lorries, not twenty yards away. Among the partisans is a tall young South African, who comes into the house to talk to me and shares my anxiety that the Allies, when at last they do arrive, should not disappoint the high expectations of the population. ‘I’m going to tell all my mates,’ he says, ‘about the kindness I’ve received here—and about the farmers who have risked their lives and homes to take me in. Now it is up to us to play the game.’

  JUNE 15TH

  Wake up to find that many more German cars have arrived during the night, and that the surrounding woods are full of them and their owners. While the men of the Red Cross units and the sappers quartered here have been ‘correct’, the stray units which are now straggling north—many of them on foot, their cars having been bombed—are very different. Yesterday at one of our farms three men stole a ham, some cheese, and a thousand lire; at another they took a woman’s wristwatch; at yet another, some hens. The peasants, on their side, are incredibly slow-moving and stupid over hiding their possessions. This morning—while Antonio was away at Montepulciano—an alarmed messenger came running up from one of our farms to say that two German soldiers had ransacked the house, stolen three large hams, some sugar, bread, eggs, and flour, and had now gone on to another farm, presumably for the same purpose. I accordingly hurried off to the captain of the sappers to ask for help—but found him at lunch and much disinclined to be his brother’s keeper. ‘They certainly don’t belong to my unit’, was all he could say, but eventually I persuaded him to send a sergeant with me and we went down the hill to the farm house, just in time to meet the German slinking away in the corn, carrying a large sack. The sergeant took out one ham and returned it to its owner, but where were the other two? The peasant then said that they had seen the second man hiding something lower down the field, and with some difficulty we found, hidden in the high corn, the other two hams, and so returned triumphantly home. In the afternoon, however, setting off on a similar mission to another farm, we were not so fortunate: a lorry carrying the stolen goods was already driving away.

  Antonio, meanwhile, has been spending an exhausting day at Montepulciano and Chianciano. On arriving at Montepulciano, he discovered that the arrest of Bracci and nine other hostages was in consequence of the Castiglioncello episode. When the German Command realised that it had not occurred in the Comune of Montepulciano, these hostages were released. Antonio accordingly saw Bracci freed, but as soon as he got back home, was called up by the greatly distressed secretary of the Comune of Chianciano, who informed him that ten citizens of Chianciano have now been arrested in their stead, and that all the other men in the town had run away, leaving him (who can speak no German) alone to cope with the situation. Antonio then set off for Chianciano, to find a deserted city, in which no one even knew who was responsible for the order of arrest. On hearing that the general of the Hermann Goering Division had arrived, he went straight to him, and found him coming out of the bathing establishment. ‘Are you the Burgmeister?’—‘No.’—‘Then what are you doing here?’—‘Herr General, the Burgmeister has run
away!’ The general laughed, and said he would send a squad of ‘Feldpolizei’ to police the town to prevent its being looted, but that he could do nothing about the hostages, for this was the first he had heard of the matter.

  Antonio brings back a basketful of cherries, the only thing for which poor Giorgio longs, and which have become practically unprocurable, since no farmer has the courage to take them (or anything else) to market. Giorgio is now a tragic sight, and his nights are made hideous by continual attacks of coughing and suffocation. He is as thin as a skeleton, and the other day, coming in suddenly when he was asleep, Antonio and I started back in horror, for we both thought that he was dead. But still, whenever we come in, his first eager question is about the news, his only complaint that all the fighting is being done without him, and he still, with the incurable hopefulness of consumptives, speaks of ‘next month, when I am at home again’.

  What to do with him, if we are bombed or turned out of the house, is one of our greatest problems, but I suppose we shall carry him on a stretcher with us.

  At midnight we walk round the farm-buildings to have a look round. It is a strange sight—the great bulks of cars, filled with sleeping men, concealed behind every arch and under every tree or thicket, camouflaged with young cypresses which they have ruthlessly cut down. Now and again a match shows the face of a man who is unpacking, or tinkering at a car; or the rumbling of an engine and the shouting of orders announces yet another car laboriously making its way up the dark wood-road. We wander about among it all, with a curious sense of detachment, feeling like ghosts of the past, who have no business here.

  JUNE 16TH

  Awakened at six-thirty by planes circling low above the house. We wonder if there is a column on the road, and if so, whether it, and we, will be bombed together. The speed with which the planes arrive shows the uselessness of any shelter in the wood; there would never be time to get the children to it. At the best we can only hope to take them down to the cellar. However, this time the planes only machine-gunned the road, about six hundred yards away, setting fire to a haystack beside one of our farms. All the morning die Brüder (as the Germans call them) were very active, and at about ten a.m. they again bombed the bridges on the Orcia and the Miglia. Cannon-fire is now to be heard, directed against the southern side of the Radicofani hill and Piancastagnaio. The front is very near.

  The whole place is now full of troops. Several lorries drive up the hill-road towards Chianciano, and we hear later that they are after the partisans, who have stolen a lorry and killed two soldiers. At one of our farms, Fontalgozzo, a cow is stolen by the Germans; at another, Chiarentana, a donkey, a cart, and food. In both cases, a German Red Cross sergeant-major who is quartered here intervenes, but in the second case, too late. A German colonel and two other officers turn up at midday from the front, and tell us that Viterbo has been badly bombed, and that the Allies have broken through at Orvieto, and are already half-way to Chiusi. The cannon-fire is louder now, and our first shell has fallen, beside one of our farms. The German colonel, a regular officer, is very bitter about Hitler’s order to spare Rome and not to use any of the bridges. His men had to swim the Tiber in consequence, and there were many casualties. He advises us to keep the children here, and to take refuge, if necessary, in the cellar, but not in the woods, which, he says, are much more likely to be fired upon than the houses.

  In the evening, the sapper captain who is quartered here comes to say goodbye. He says speculatively, ‘I’d give a lot to be in your place, to be able to talk in a few days to some British officers, and find out what they really think about the war’. A great many other German officers have said something of the kind. As to the general morale, they are all quite frankly tired of the war and of five years away from their houses and families, appalled by the bombing of Germany, and depressed by the turn of events here and in France. But there is not one of them who does not still express his blind conviction that Germany cannot be beaten, and their equally blind belief in a terrible Vergeltung against England, which is close at hand. What form it will take, they say, they do not know, but the Führer has promised it to them, and he has never yet failed to keep his promises to his own people. Should this promise prove to have been only a bluff, then the whole nation’s trust in the Führer would collapse, for they would feel that he had betrayed them. But, they hastily add, this will not, cannot happen.

  JUNE 17TH

  Cannon-fire all night. The electric light and telephone are both cut, so we get no news, which matters the less, in that the news is now happening here. The first wounded are beginning to come through on lorries and motor-bicycles, and a German medical officer who has stopped his ambulance at the cross-roads to ask the way, and of whom I ask: ‘Are you going to the front?’ laughs and replies: ‘And where do you think you are?’ This is a new idea to me, who, like most civilians, think that the front is somewhere where we are not. The fighting is now just beyond Radicofani—and the Allied troops are said to be coloured. We can only hope that the German retreat, and their pursuit, will be equally rapid. Last night the Germans took with them, on leaving, our car, our mattresses, and towels from the captain’s bedroom.

  Carry Giorgio on a stretcher to a room in the office building, away from the constant traffic of the road. His colour is ashen; he is very much afraid.

  At midday a German colonel, passing through, gives us the appalling news (which we have missed, as we have now no radio) of the beginning of the German Vergeltung in England. The details that he gives are so terrible that one can hardly either take them in or believe them. Rocket planes without a crew, carrying some terrible unknown explosive, have come down over London and the south coast. The explosion of these rockets, according to his story, brings utter destruction for a radius of over a kilometre. There are nearly two hundred thousand dead in London alone, and the Lord Mayor has stated that only five shelters are deep enough to be of any use. The town is being evacuated. Such is the German’s tale, and all day—utterly unable to find out how much of it is a lie—I am haunted by it. What is happening here seems child’s play in comparison.

  Nevertheless, one must get on with what each hour brings. The gun-fire is now considerably nearer and one sees the shells falling on this side of Radicofani. A soldier tells us that the casualties there, among the civilian population, have been very high, as they all took refuge above the little town, in the old castle, which was precisely the area that was most heavily shelled. The people here are getting very jumpy. Fannina (the maid who helps to look after the refugees) has already gone off with her family (most prematurely) to camp out in a cave. The fattore’s wife and family are preparing to do the same tomorrow morning. All are very nervous of the cellar. Meanwhile I try to keep the children happy and occupied, by rehearsing ‘Snow-White’ with them.

  In the late afternoon, a billeting officer turns up: he requires quarters for the general of his division and a major, who both come into the house, and for several other officers, for whom he takes the school buildings. This arrival suggests that events are not moving quite as quickly as we expected.

  JUNE 18TH

  Our ‘guests’ arrived at eleven p.m., and we at once discovered that they were precisely the paratroops against whom we have been warned. The colonel (acting general) is Trettner, and the chaplain turns out to be an acquaintance of Antonio’s sister. The others are the most complete set of ruffians that I have ever set eyes upon. Tramping in (and looking even more sinister by the uncertain light of a flickering acetylene lamp) they take possession of the house—set up a telephone in the dining-room, which is to be their office, and a bed for the colonel in Antonio’s sitting-room, while the others sleep, smoke and eat all over the rest of the house. Before they have been here half an hour the chaplain—a tall, thin man in pince-nez, of a ‘correct’, not to say prim appearance, which is in comic contrast with that of his flock—comes up to Antonio, and solemnly warns him not to leave anything about that he may value. We accordingly remove waterpr
oofs and coats from the downstairs cupboards, and anything else that occurs to us (unfortunately forgetting my sun-glasses and hair-net, which immediately disappear). We also lock the door of every room, both on entering and leaving—but hear the soldiers wandering about the house all night. Some break into the clinic during the night—and some others into the school—but Antonio is in time to save the teachers’ mattresses. In the course of the day we get to distinguish them better. There are a few quiet fellows among them (one sergeant-major, like the chaplain, going out of his way to warn us about his comrades’ long fingers) but most of them look even more ruffianly by day than the night before; more like figures out of a second-rate film of the Foreign Legion, than members of a regular army. They are all over the place, bathing stark naked in the laundry; preening themselves, in emerald green or scarlet bandannas or loin cloths; invading the kitchen, the fattoria, and every unlocked room in the house; sleeping behind every bush and under every tree. In the wood the keeper finds evidence of their recent activities in two large, empty safes, which they have picked, as well as numerous empty boxes and suitcases, presumably from the houses which they have just left. And all day a constant stream of terrified, anxious peasants flocks to us for help—which we are wholly unable to give—in the calamities that are overtaking them. All have had their food-stores stolen, most have lost at least a pig, or some geese or fowls, some have been turned out of their houses altogether, and three have had their daughters raped. One of these, a child of twelve, was saved at the last moment by her father, who brought her here, and she is now sleeping in the house.