For King and Country

by David Monnery

  ‘The boss and Morrie are dead,’ Farnham told the others. The edge of panic had disappeared and he now felt almost supernaturally calm and collected. ‘Corrigan and Imrie were on the other side of the river when the bridge went down. They’re making their own way home. We’re going out the way we came in. OK?’

  The others nodded at him.

  The train was almost on top of them. ‘So let’s go,’ Farnham said, leading off at a run towards the line of trees beside the river. To their left two more charges went off on the broken bridge, momentarily eclipsing the deafening hiss of the braking locomotive.

  The train was composed entirely of closed and lightless wagons, and once away from the bridge area the four SAS men found themselves cloaked once more in the relative safety of darkness. They raced towards the road, occasionally stumbling over rough pieces of ground, expecting to hear gunfire behind them at any moment, but the German troops were either very green or unusually disorganized, and none came. Reaching the road, Farnham resisted the temptation to seek the safety of the high ground they already knew, instead ploughing on through the orchard opposite. From this they emerged into an open field, which in the darkness seemed to stretch for miles.

  This was the escape route they had decided on earlier that night in the OP. If anyone got separated from the party the plan was to rendezvous a quarter of a mile north of the tiny hill village of San Giuseppe, which was itself about six miles east of San Severino. The spot in question might be a swamp or a local trysting place – their map was somewhat limited, to say the least – but if Corrigan and Imrie escaped from the Germans then that would be where they’d expect to find their comrades waiting.

  And then they could all cheerfully hike their way to the sea.

  Farnham suddenly felt cold all over. The remaining radio had been in Corrigan’s bergen, and that was still lying where Corrigan had left it, on the floor of the railway hut. They had no way of contacting the Navy, and if they missed the pick-up there would be no second chance. How could he have been so stupid?

  As they tried to hurry across the wet field, slipping and sliding in the mud, he told himself it was done, and there was no point in dwelling on the fact. They still had forty-eight hours to go, or two whole nights. The Germans would be looking for them, but they couldn’t have that many men in the area, and with any luck the Anzio landing – which would be starting in an hour or so – would give the enemy something more important to think about.

  He became aware that Rafferty had stopped a few yards ahead of him. ‘The railway’s only just over there,’ the younger man said, pointing to a dark line of bushes away to their right. ‘Don’t you think we’d be better off walking down the track than wading through all this muck? Just for a while, anyway. They can’t follow us with their lorries, can they? And if they try backing up that train we’ll hear it coming.’

  It was a good idea, Farnham realized. Rafferty’s brain seemed to be working better than his own. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.

  The four men struggled across the last thirty yards of mud, bulldozed their way through the line of bushes and on to the track. Away to the right, they could see nothing of the station half a mile away – only the faint yellow glow which hung above it.

  As they started walking in the opposite direction Farnham tried to think himself into the mind of the ranking German. He would know the intruders couldn’t have got far, but he would have no idea of their direction, and the night was dark enough to hide an army. As regards the four of them, he would wait for daylight before casting a net. As regards the other two, Farnham realized with a sinking heart, he would immediately seek to slam the door on their escape route.

  Maybe Corrigan and Imrie would find a way of crossing the river or scaling the cliffs, but their map hadn’t suggested any. If it had, they would have made the initial approach from that direction.

  He put the problem to the back of his mind and concentrated on adjusting his step to the evenly spaced wooden sleepers. Rafferty was about ten yards in front of him, Tobin about ten to his rear, McCaigh a similar number behind the Welshman. Their training was showing, Farnham thought, and about time too, because so far this operation had hardly covered the SAS with glory. Two dead men, the unit split up, one radio broken and another left behind, an over-hasty retreat from the scene of the action.

  But at least the bridge was down.

  They walked on, ears alert for the sounds of a train or motor traffic on the nearby road, but in half an hour only one motorcycle dispatch rider, also heading east, disturbed the dark silence. They had, by Rafferty’s estimate, walked about three miles when the mouth of the tunnel suddenly emerged out of the gloom, and a few yards more when the rain started to fall. By the time they had reached the shelter of the portal it was coming down with a vengeance.

  According to their map the tunnel was about three-quarters of a mile long.

  ‘It’ll keep us dry,’ Rafferty argued.

  ‘We’re already wet through,’ Tobin protested. Nor did he like the idea of a walk in the pitch dark. ‘And we’d be like rats in a trap,’ he added.

  Farnham wasn’t sure why, but he agreed with him. Taking the tunnel felt a bit too much like walking into the spider’s parlour. He looked at his watch. It was almost three o’clock and they were probably about three miles from San Giuseppe. ‘We’ll go over the top,’ he announced.

  The next two hours were among the most miserable any of the four men could remember. In the teeth of a near-gale, with the cold rain whipping into their faces, they stumbled across two ranges of hills and climbed in and out of one deep valley. Wet through and freezing cold, their only consolation lay in their complete invisibility to the enemy. But then again, if the Germans were out searching for them in this weather, more than just Hitler needed his head examined.

  At around five Farnham called a halt. They were crossing a small valley similar to the one they had camped in two nights before, and the low branches of the trees, once they were hung with groundsheets, could offer a temporary bivouac and the prospect of cooking up some soup to warm the blood. If they just pushed on, Farnham decided, there was every chance they’d blunder past San Giuseppe in the dark. They couldn’t be far from the village, and if this weather kept up they wouldn’t have much to fear from spotter planes, especially in the first hour of half-light.

  It took McCaigh only a few minutes to get the hexamine stove set up and a couple of cans heating. ‘I wonder where the stupid bastards have got to?’ he muttered to no one in particular.

  ‘What went wrong, do you think?’ Tobin asked.

  ‘Must have been a faulty time pencil,’ Rafferty said. ‘I can’t see Morrie making a mistake.’

  ‘Yeah,’ McCaigh agreed. ‘He was good.’ He gave the soup a final stir. ‘At least it was quick. The miserable bastard wouldn’t have known what hit him.’

  The others murmured agreement.

  ‘He had a wife though, didn’t he?’ Tobin asked.

  Rafferty frowned at him. ‘Yeah,’ he said curtly. The thought of getting killed wasn’t so bad, but he found it hard to think about leaving Beth with no one to look after her and the baby.

  Bending over the soup, McCaigh remembered his dad’s line about 1918 – ‘All those women in black, and not enough men left to satisfy half of them.’ There was no woman praying for his return – well, maybe a few here and there were offering up the odd wishful thought – but his sixteen-year-old brother Patrick would probably go right off the rails if someone wasn’t there to keep an eye on him.

  Half an hour later, Farnham’s claim that he could detect a lightening in the eastern sky was received with some scepticism, but a few minutes more and even McCaigh was willing to admit that the shade of darkness had slightly changed. Now the swirls of mist and rain were being painted in charcoal grey rather than black; the difference, he said, was ‘like night and night’.

  They pulled down their groundsheet roofing and started off once more. San Giuseppe turned out to be only a
few hundred yards away, and they were almost on top of the village when the first cluster of buildings loomed alarmingly out of the gloom.

  ‘Nice navigating, Neil,’ Farnham murmured. He checked his compass, and pointed them north.

  ‘Let’s hope there’s a Lyons Corner House where X marks the spot,’ said McCaigh.

  At first there seemed to be only a bare hillside, and that hardly seemed the ideal place to wait for their comrades, rain or no rain. But then fortune smiled on the four men, lifting a swirl of mist like a curtain to reveal a small chapel set amid a grove of oak trees. From the outside it looked ruined, but inside they found a simple altar set on a stone plinth in an otherwise bare chamber.

  This was as good a place as anywhere to sit out the day, Farnham decided. There were no roads nearby, and the other two would have a good chance of finding them. Best of all, it was dry.

  ‘Cup of tea for breakfast?’ McCaigh suggested.

  He was just pouring the first cup when the door opened and the two Italians walked in.

  The newcomers looked almost reproachfully at the Sten gun that Rafferty was pointing in their direction. ‘Friend,’ the older of the two said economically, in Italian. He was probably in his forties, with greying hair, a weathered face and eyes that even at this moment seemed full of amusement. His companion was a young man barely out of his teens, still apparently struggling to grow a full moustache.

  ‘Enzio,’ the older man said, tapping himself on the chest. ‘Giancarlo,’ he added, pointing at the other. ‘American?’ he asked, offering two open palms to the four SAS men.

  ‘We are English,’ Farnham told him in reasonably adequate Italian. He’d been learning the language on and off since 1941, partly to fill in the periods of boredom endemic to army life, partly to maximize his chances of being selected for exactly this sort of mission. And he had to admit that during the last six months in Italy he had developed a definite hankering to return here when the war was over.

  Enzio beamed at his linguistic proficiency, though Giancarlo seemed a bit disappointed that they were not Americans.

  ‘You are the men who blew up the bridge in San Severino,’ the older man half stated, half asked.

  There didn’t seem much point in denying it. ‘We did,’ Farnham agreed, wondering how the news had reached the middle of nowhere so fast.

  ‘We are partisans,’ Enzio said, as if in explanation. ‘We have people in the town.’

  ‘How did you find us here?’ Farnham asked.

  Enzio smiled. ‘You were seen at San Giuseppe, and followed here,’ he explained. ‘By a six-year-old,’ he added, his eyes almost dancing with amusement.

  Farnham had the grace to laugh.

  ‘But you cannot stay here,’ Enzio went on. ‘This is a holy place, and some people will not understand. You must come to the village, dry your clothes, have something good to eat, and then we can talk about your plans. You will be safe there,’ he added, seeing the look of doubt on Farnham’s face. ‘The Germans are not likely to come, but if they do there will be warning. They cannot surprise us.’

  Farnham smiled. ‘This is very generous of you,’ he told the Italian, ‘but first I must talk to my men.’

  ‘Of course,’ Enzio said.

  Farnham turned to the others. ‘They say they’re partisans. They’re offering us shelter, food and somewhere to dry out. If they’re who they say they are then they’ll be able to help us get to the sea. And if the others don’t turn up they’ll probably have ways of finding out what’s happened to them. What do you reckon?’

  ‘Do you think they’re the genuine article?’ Rafferty asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Farnham said without hesitation.

  ‘Then why not?’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ McCaigh said. ‘Especially the bit about drying out.’

  ‘We shall be honoured,’ Farnham told Enzio.

  The two Italians escorted them back across the rainswept hillside to the village, and as they walked down the only street the doorways seemed full of curious eyes. Their destination was a large barn that had obviously been built to withstand the winter weather, for inside it was dry and relatively warm. Enzio left them for a few minutes, and then returned with a pile of dry clothes in varying sizes. Not long after that two oldish women arrived with a pot of steaming noodle soup and two loaves of freshly baked bread, all of which left the four men feeling truly warm for the first time since their departure from Salerno three nights before.

  Every now and then the door would inch open to reveal one or more children staring in at them. One young girl, probably no more than six years old, with dark, saucer-like eyes seemed unable to drag herself away.

  ‘But where are they keeping the older sisters?’ McCaigh wondered out loud.

  ‘They’ve probably been locked up for the duration of your visit,’ Rafferty told him.

  ‘Ah, fame,’ McCaigh said dreamily.

  ‘We should get some sleep,’ Farnham said, interrupting the reverie. His instincts told him the Italians were trustworthy, but he wasn’t about to lower their guard completely. ‘I’ll take first watch,’ he added, and it seemed only seconds before the barn was echoing to satisfied snores. Farnham sat with his back against a stall, running through the events of the past twelve hours. He couldn’t pretend he had liked Morgan – he’d always thought of him as one of those men who found it hard to imagine a world without them – but there was no doubting that the man had been tailor-made for the SAS.

  Life was so easy to snuff out. One moment a whole person, in all his or her bewildering complexity, and the next – nothing. Unless of course you believed in an afterlife, and Farnham was pretty sure he didn’t. It would have been nice to believe that a life in heaven had saved Catherine from extinction, but only for his own sake. She would have found it boring.

  The morning went by. Farnham took a brief look around outside – he needed some idea of where they were – but otherwise kept to the safety of the barn. More food arrived early in the afternoon, this time accompanied by a jug of wine, from which he poured four conservative measures. This didn’t seem the time or place for dulling their brains or motor skills.

  Soon after dark Enzio returned, a stern look on his face. ‘The Germans have captured them,’ he said without preamble.

  Farnham’s heart sank but he wasn’t surprised. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

  ‘They are being held in the town hall. They have been there most of the day – the story is that they walked straight into a German patrol in the darkness.’

  ‘Are they being treated as prisoners of war?’ Farnham asked anxiously. Late in 1942 Hitler had ordered the execution of all commandos captured behind enemy lines, regardless of whether or not they were in uniform. In Africa Rommel had ignored the order, but on at least two recent occasions German commanders in Italy had carried it out.

  Enzio didn’t know. ‘The Army captured them, but the men in leather coats arrived this afternoon.’ He shrugged.

  Farnham’s heart sank again. If they were being questioned by the Gestapo, then torture was a real possibility. That would be bad enough in itself, but both men knew the pick-up point at the mouth of the River Chienti. ‘How many men are guarding them?’ he asked Enzio. After all, a town hall was not a prison.

  The Italian raised both eyebrows. ‘You are thinking of a rescue?’ he asked.

  ‘If it is possible.’

  Enzio blew a silent whistle with his lips. ‘The town is full of Germans now. Your broken bridge – well, they are like flies around shit. But maybe the town hall…I don’t know…’

  ‘Could you get us into the town to take a look?’ Farnham asked.

  The Italian nodded. ‘Two of you, perhaps. Early in the morning, when there are many carts on the road.’

  ‘That would be wonderful. Now, I must tell the others what you have told me.’

  Enzio nodded, turned away, and then turned back again. ‘And I have other news for you. Better news. Your armies have landed this mor
ning on the coast south of Rome.’ He smiled. ‘You were expecting this, I suppose.’

  ‘It is why we came to blow the bridge, to make it harder for the Germans to reinforce their armies in the south.’

  Enzio smiled again, and left.

  Farnham turned to the others. Their grim faces told him they had guessed the gist, but he went through the conversation in detail. This was the SAS, not the regular army, and they needed to know everything he did before a decision could be taken on what to do next.

  ‘So what do you think, boss?’ McCaigh asked, once all the information had been shared.

  Farnham chose his words carefully. ‘If there’s any chance of getting the two of them back without getting everyone – including them – killed, then I think we’ll have to give it a shot. And if that means blowing the boat…’

  ‘We can always steal a boat,’ Rafferty said with a sniff. Both he and Tobin seemed to be developing colds. ‘The Adriatic can’t be that wide.’

  ‘Yeah, but Yugoslavia’s on the other side,’ McCaigh said. ‘And I seem to remember a German invasion.’

  ‘So we sail south,’ Rafferty said. ‘We’re bound to hit Africa sooner or later.’

  Farnham did a round of the faces. They all knew that staying where they were was risky, let alone taking a trip back into the lion’s den, but he could detect no real desire to cut and run. They’d rather head for the sea and home – who wouldn’t? – but they wouldn’t desert their mates without a damn good reason.

  He felt proud of them. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll give Enzio the good news.’

  The cart left the following morning as dawn was breaking, Farnham and Rafferty sharing the back with seven villagers, while Enzio, Giancarlo and a woman called Carmela sat in the front. Most of their fellow passengers seemed friendly, but Farnham couldn’t help noticing the resentment in a few of the eyes. In their place, he thought, he might well have felt the same.