Love and War in the Apennines. Eric Newby

my room bearing one of the leaflets which the gardener had retrieved from the road outside. He was a fat old thing with a red face and a large, bushy moustache. He reminded me of Tenniel’s drawing of the Walrus, but without the tusks. His name, he told me, was Giulio.

      The leaflet was printed on a single sheet of paper. Il Governo ha tradito l’Italia … the text began and it continued in the same vein. Anyone reading it could be in no doubt either about the Germans’ feelings or their intentions. They were very angry about being betrayed; they were going to fight, and God help anyone who got in their way.

      ‘Molto male,’ Giulio said, with gloomy relish, speaking in telegraphese to make it simpler for me to understand, which he punctuated with puffing noises, the sort of sounds which I imagined a real walrus might make, surfacing by an ice-floe in some Arctic sea.

      ‘PFF! Roma kaputt, PFF! Tedeschi in tutta L’Emilia, PFF! Una disgrazia per I’Italia. Una disgrazia per lei, Tenente, PFF! Kaputt.’ He was just like the Walrus. It was as if he was saying ‘I weep for you. I deeply sympathise, Oyster, but somebody is going to eat you up.’

      Later that evening fearful groans and cries began to issue from the ward next to my room, which was only normally employed for ‘difficult’ cases. Powerfully affected by other people’s pains – I invariably faint away during performances of King Lear, Coriolanus, any Greek tragedy worthy of the name, and in any film in the course of which operating theatres and torture chambers form part of the mise en scène – and never having heard the sounds of a confinement at first hand, I lay on my bed listening to them in terror as they rose to ever greater heights. If this was an ordinary childbirth what on earth could a ‘difficult’ one sound like, I wondered. Finally, in the early hours of the morning they ceased and were replaced by the powerful roarings of a baby. Only then did I go to sleep.

      Every afternoon Wanda visited me in the ospedale. We sat together in the back garden, hidden from the outside world by one of the projecting wings of the building and a hedge, under the benevolent but constant chaperonage of the superiora and her attendant suore who were never far away. Centuries of invasion of their country by foreign soldiery, and the concomitant outrages which had been inflicted on them had made the members of female religious orders particularly adept in protecting not only their own virtues, but that of those temporarily committed to their charge.