Love and War in the Apennines Read Online Free PDF Page B

with a broken ankle, the result of an absurd accident in which I had fallen down an entire flight of the marble staircase which extended from the top of the building to the basement while wearing a pair of nailed boots which my parents had managed to send me by way of the Red Cross. The prison camp was on the outskirts of a large village in the Pianura Padana, the great plain through which the river Po flows on its way from the Cottian Alps to the sea. The nearest city was Parma on the Via Emilia, the Roman road which runs through the plain in an almost straight line from Milan to the Adriatic.
    ‘That’s right, knock the bloody place clown,’ someone said, unsympathetically, as it shuddered under the impact. The doctor who examined my ankle, who was also a prisoner, took much the same view. He couldn’t do much, anyway, because he hadn’t got any plaster of paris. It was, however, he said, ‘on order’ and for the time being he did it up with some adhesive plaster which was a rather wobbly arrangement.
    The only other occupant of the hospital was another officer who was suffering from a boil on his behind. He was the onewho had proposed that we should dig a tunnel, the most dreary and unimaginative way of getting out of any prison, on which a number of us had been working for some months, and which we had only recently abandoned because events seemed to have rendered it unnecessary. The head of the shaft of this tunnel was in a bedroom on the piano nobile of the building, practically in mid-air, and the shaft went down through the middle of one of the solid brick piers which supported it and down into the cellars. When we reached mother earth, somewhere below the floor of the cellar, if ever, he had planned to construct a chamber, in which the spoil could be put into sacks and hauled to the surface, and from it the tunnel would be driven outwards under the wire. The shaft had a false lid, designed and made by a South African mining engineer. It was a marvellous piece of work – a great block of cement with tiles set in it that was so thick that when the carabinieri tapped the floor of the bedroom with hammers, which they sometimes did, the lid gave off the same sound as the rest of it. This lid was so heavy that special tools had had to be devised to lift it.
    There were a lot of attempts at escape, some successful, some of them funny. One prisoner hid himself in a basket of dirty linen, destined for the nuns’ laundry over the wall. We wondered what would have happened if they had actually unpacked him inside the convent. Some were very ingenious – two people had had themselves buried in the exercise field which was outside the main perimeter wire and was not guarded at night. They nearly got to Switzerland. 1
    No one from our camp ever reached Switzerland before the Italian Armistice in 1943. It was generally believed that two British prisoners of war had succeeded in getting there, but Ihave never met anyone who actually knew who they were or which camps they came from. It was very difficult to get out of a prison camp in Italy. Italian soldiers might be figures of fun to us, but some of them were extraordinarily observant and very suspicious and far better at guarding prisoners than the Germans were. It was also very difficult to travel in Italy if you did get out. The Italians are fascinated by minutiae of dress and the behaviour of their fellow men, perhaps to a greater degree than almost any other race in Europe, and the ingenious subterfuges and disguises which escaping prisoners of war habitually resorted to and which were often enough to take in the Germans: the documents, train tickets and ration cards, lovingly fabricated by the camp’s staff of expert forgers; the suits made from dyed blankets; the desert boots cut down to look like shoes and the carefully bleached army shirts were hardly ever sufficiently genuine-looking to fool even the most myopic Italian ticket collector and get the owner past the