Naples '44 Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Black Book with its vagueness and its sometimes almost poetic idiocies, began to put on bulk.
    Within days of settling in, three section members were sent out on detachment to Sorrento and the coastal towns, and Eric Williams, our best Italian speaker, became a solitary exile in the important town of Nola. Three more people, apart from the FSO, were tied down to administrative duties at HQ, leaving only four of us, Parkinson, Evans, Durham and myself, to confront the security problems of that anthill of humanity, the city of Naples itself.
    First impressions of my colleagues under working conditions are favourable. They are hampered in several cases by their lack of Italian, but they are an industrious lot, and set to work with enthusiasm to learn the language. Like all sections, this has developed its own personality. It is less informal than most, and a little bureaucratic. I cannot imagine any member of 312 FSS being able to manoeuvre himself into a position where he could turn up at an airfield, wave his pass about, and bamboozle some Airforce officer, British or American, into arranging a quick unofficial flight back to England – an achievement of the kind which has been possible in certain other sections. All my new friends have been issued with special officer’s-type identity documents replacing the normal AB 64, but Captain Cartwright has clearly not wished to have these endorsed as in the case of those issued to 91 FSS – one of which I still carry – with the authorisation to be in any place, at any time, and in any dress. Nor, so far, do section members wear civilian clothes. Army Books No. 466 (no erasures, no pages to be detached) are scrupulously carried, and daily entries condensed in the form of a log, handed in to the FSO first thing each morning, and discussed at a parade at nine, at which certain regimental formalities are carefully preserved. These things are quite new in my experience.

October 8
    Contact with the military units brought its inevitable consequences. The phone started ringing first thing in the morning and rarely stopped. An excited officer was usually on the line to report the presence in his area of an enemy agent, or a secret transmitter, or a suspected cache of abandoned German loot. All this information came from local civilians who poured into the nearest army HQ, anxious to unburden themselves of secrets of all kinds, but as not even phrase books had been issued to help with the language problem, mistakes were frequent. Today, being the only section member left in the office, I was sent hurriedly on the motor bike, in response to the most urgent request, to Afragola, where an infantry major was convinced from local reports that a village woman was a spy. In this case evidence had been transmitted mostly by gestures which the Major had failed to interpret. It turned out that what the villagers had been trying to explain was that the woman was a witch, and that if allowed to cast her malefic gaze on the unit’s water supply, she would make it undrinkable.
    On my way to resolve this misunderstanding I saw a remarkable spectacle. Hundreds, possibly thousands of Italians, most of them women and children, were in the fields all along the roadside driven by their hunger to search for edible plants. I stopped to speak to a group of them, and they told me that they had left their homes in Naples at daybreak, and had had to walk for between two and three hours to reach the spot where I found them – seven or eight miles out of town. Here a fair number of plants could still be found, although nearer the city the fields had been stripped of everything that could be eaten. There were about fifteen different kinds of plants which were worth collecting, most of them bitter in flavour. All I recognised among their collections were dandelions. I saw other parties netting birds, and these had managed to catch a few sparrows and some tiny warblers which they said were