Love and War in the Apennines Read Online Free PDF

even if they had known how to hire one, they trotted up the platform beside us between the escorting lines of soldiers who had been given orders only to shoot or bayonet us if we tried to escape, with the residue of their possessions balanced on their noddles, while the sotto-tenente screeched at us to put their bags down and the maggiore , not wishing to make an exhibition of himself, disembarked from the carriage in a leisurely fashion. These were the last girls any of us spoke to for a long time.
    In the city we were housed in barracks occupied by the Cavalleria di Genova , a regiment in Italy of similar status at that time to one or other of the regiments of the Household Cavalry in Britain. They still had their horses and the few officers and men who were about looked like ardent royalists. They certainly all knew about which was the right boot for the right spur, which was more than I did and, although they were not allowed to speak to us, their demeanour was friendly. They sent us magazines and newspapers and the food, which was provided by the officers’ mess and brought to us by a white-jacketed mess waiter who had the air of a family retainer, was of an excellence to which none of us were accustomed in our own regiments, although there was not much of it.
    After the first day we were all separated from one another and we began a period of unarduous solitary confinement in the course of which we contrived to communicate with one another by wayof the mess waiter who carried our innocuous written messages from one room to another among the dishes. At intervals we were all interrogated, but never really expertly, by people from military intelligence. As we had been taught never to answer any questions whatsoever, however fatuous they might seem, we learned more from our interrogators than they did from us. It was interesting to find out how much they knew about our organisation. About some parts of it they knew more than I imagined they would; about others they seemed to know much less.
    Once a day, but never together, we were let out to exercise on the pathway which surrounded the manège. Here ‘by chance’, we met other ‘prisoners’, an extraordinarily sleazy collection of renegades and traitors, most of them South African or Irish, dressed in various British uniforms, some in civilian clothes, who called us ‘old boy’ and offered to fix us up with nights on the town and escape routes into the Vatican in exchange for information.
    I enjoyed being alone. It was so long since I had been. From my room, high up under the eaves of the barracks, I used to watch a solitary, elegant officer taking a succession of chargers around the tan. He was a wonderful horseman, even I could tell this without knowing anything about horses. The days were poignantly beautiful. The leaves on the plane trees were golden. Here, in Rome, in late August, it was already autumn. I was nearly twenty-three and this was my first visit to Europe. Locked up, isolated in the centre of the city, I felt like the traitor Baillie-Stewart, ‘the Officer in the Tower’, or, even less romantically, someone awaiting court martial for conduct scandalous and unbecoming, looking out across the Park in the years before the war.
    After a few days we were dispersed, the officers to one camp, the men to another. We all survived the war and so did Socks, the dachshund. Pat, in accordance with Desmond’s last wishes, took her to Beirut where she took up residence with Princess Aly Khan.And George recovered sufficiently within a few days to make one of the most cold-bloodedly successful escape attempts from the camp to which we were sent when he, in company with a number of others, marched out through the main gate disguised as Italian soldiers. Unfortunately, they were all re-captured soon afterwards.

CHAPTER TWO

Grand Illusion
    A year later, on the seventh of September, 1943, the day before Italy went out of the war, I was taken to the prison hospital