to be left by their rulers and so-called allies. They were now left in an even deeper mess by the Anglo-Americans who had been stupid enough to inform the Germans of their intentions.
Badoglio’s announcement provoked some mild cheers from various parts of the building and a more extravagant display of joy by the Italian guards outside our window which we watched a little sourly. We had seen and heard it all forty-five days before when Mussolini had been deposed. Then the Italians had hurled his picture out of the window, torn down Fascist insignia, defaced the notices on the gable-ends of their huts with their injunctions Credere, Combattere … and other similar nonsense, and shouted to us in Italian simplified for our benefit, ‘BENITO FINITO!’ Now they shouted ‘ARMISTIZIO!’
The only difference Mussolini’s departure had made to us was that the sentries no longer fired at the windows of the bar when we looked out of them, and our walks were cancelled. If anything, we had suffered a reduction rather than an increase in our amenities. What now roused us from our lethargy was the thought that when the Germans retreated northwards, as none of us doubted they would have to, they might carry us off with them over the Alpine Passes. ‘Like a lot of concubines,’ someone said on one of the innumerable occasions on which we had discussed the possibility.
Our friends gave us all the latest news when they came to see us later in the evening.
‘The colonel called a parade in the hall,’ one said. ‘There’s to be no fraternisation with the Itis and we’ve mounted our own sentries on the gate. A party’s just gone off to recce the country round about in case the Germans come and we have to break out. If they do the colonello says he will fight, but there doesn’t seem much chance of his having to. Airborne landings are expected at Rome and Milan, and sea landings at Genoa and Rimini. It’s really a matter of holding out for twenty-four hours at the most until our people arrive. Anyway, we’re getting your gear together and we’ve got two of the biggest parachutists in the camp organised to help Eric if we do have to get out.’
‘I wish the M.O. would hurry up and get some plaster of paris for my ankle,’ I said. ‘Then all I’d need would be a stick instead of a couple of bloody great parachutists.’
‘Pity you’re both stuck here,’ said another. ‘Someone’s done a big deal with the Itis, and the bar’s doing terrific business. The ration’s been abolished; but we’ve brought your mugs. You can have some more when you’ve finished.’
Our drinking mugs were made from big tins which had originally contained powdered milk sent to us by the Canadian Red Cross, whose food parcels, together with those from Scotland, were easily the best. Each of these receptacles held more than a pint and they were now filled with a dark brownish liquid of a sort which neither Michael nor myself had ever seen before.
‘I say, this is rather strong,’ Michael said after tasting it. ‘What do you think it is?’
‘It’s supposed to be Marsala, but the wine merchants in the camp say they’ve never tasted Marsala like this. And I’ve just met someone on the way here who was drinking it out of an enamelled jug and the enamel’s coming off.’
‘Could you remember to put all my socks in my pack and my pullover and The Tour of the Hebrides,’ I said. ‘Otherwise, I mightn’t finish it before we go home.’
What we did not know, how could we, was that the Allies’ dispositions were already made, and that none of their plans included the liberation of the occupants of the orfanotrofio. The assault convoys bound for Salerno were at sea and had already been sighted south of Capri. The Sixteenth Panzer Division which was in the area had already ordered a state of alarm, and its members were now engaged in disarming all Italian troops and taking over the coastal batteries. The only airborne operations which had been planned, a drop on Rome by the United States Eighty-Sixth Airborne Division, had already been cancelled after its deputy commander, who had arrived in the capital on the afternoon of the seventh on a secret visit, had found on the morning of the eighth that all the airfields were in German hands. It was he who told Badoglio that the main Allied landings were due to begin the following morning, the first that the Marshal or any of his staff had heard of it. They had been led to believe that no landings would take place until the twelfth. What difference it would have made no one will ever know, or care.
For the rest, the greater part of the British Eighth Army was committed in Southern Italy where it was fighting its way up through Calabria in order to link up with the troops which were to be landed at Salerno. There were not going to be any airborne landings at Milan or anywhere else and no seaborne ones at Rimini or Genoa either.
CHAPTER FOUR The Ninth of September
Late on the following morning an Italian bugler sounded three ‘g’s’, the alarm call which meant that the Germans were on their way to take over the orfanotrofio, and everyone began to move out of the building into the exercise field at the back. From the window of the hospital, of which I was now the only occupant, Michael’s boil having burst during the night, brought to a head, perhaps, by the events of the previous day, there was no one to be seen on the road; only Italian soldiers setting up machine-guns and scurrying into slit trenches, reluctantly preparing to carry out the colonello’s order to defend the camp to the last round and the last man.
Looking at them I knew that they would not do so. By this, the fourth year of the war, too many personages too far from the scenes of the battles which they were trying to control, without themselves being under the necessity of firing a shot or of laying down their lives, had issued too many such orders to too many troops who invariably ended up by having to lay down their arms ignominiously, in order to save their skins. These Italian soldiers would have been mad to die in defence of an empty building, and they didn’t.
With my pack on my shoulder I hopped through the deserted corridors towards the back door. On the way, amongst the debris on the floor, I found a little book with the Italian tricolore on the cover, entitled ‘Say it in Italian’, or something similar, and I picked it up. By the time I reached the corner of the field where the rest of my company were, they were just beginning to move off through one of the several gaps which had been cut in the wire.
There, the two parachutists were waiting for me. They looked enormous in their camouflaged smocks, in which they must have been roasting, but without which any parachutist feels naked. They had been relieved of their packs so that they could help me.
They told me to take it easy and we went out through one of the gaps in the wire in the sweltering midday heat, and as soon as we were beyond it one of the British orderlies in the camp, a small, nut-brown man, a trooper in some cavalry regiment, came up and said, ‘It’s all right. You got a horse! Name of Mora, quiet as a lamb.’ And there she was, standing with a stolid-looking Italian soldier in the shade of some vines, taking mouthfuls of grass, swishing her tail at the flies, looking contented and well-fed. She was a little horse.
The parachutists were delighted to have my weight off their shoulders. They hoisted me into the saddle, half-strangled by my pack strap which was twisted round my neck, and then the soldier led Mora forward, chewing a straw, happy to be seconded for this easy duty, free of the obligation to sell his life to no purpose, while the rest of the people in our company moved on ahead in the shade of the vines, picking great bunches of grapes and churning the earth into dust.
For me the journey was a nightmare. Although the country was dead flat it was intersected by irrigation ditches (the same ditches that the escapers who had had themselves buried in the field had spoken of with revulsion after they were re-captured). The last thing one wanted in such country was a horse. The last thing I wanted anywhere was a horse. All I knew about horses was derived from a couple of ruinous visits to some trotting races at Heliopolis. I had never been on a horse in my life and I was terrified of them. And every horse I met knew it too.
At the first ditch Mora stopped dead on the edge of it and refused to move backwards or forwards, more like a mule than a horse. Perhaps she was a mule. She