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 took no notice of the blows which the Italian soldier was raining on her behind with a cudgel; and I was no help at all. Every time my damaged foot touched her it was agony.
We seemed destined to remain there for ever, but something happened to make her utter a terrific snorting, whinnying noise, rear up on her hind legs and come down with her front ones in the slime in the bottom of the ditch with a resounding splosh, which catapulted me over her head on to the far bank and hurt my ankle dreadfully.
‘Bloody funny, that Iti must have struck a lighted cigarette up her chuff,’ someone said.
‘One way of crossing the Rubicon,’ someone else said who had had a different sort of education. Everyone who witnessed it was cheered by this spectacular happening.
Then the parachutists picked me up and lugged me over a whole series of similar ditches while Mora, who had crossed them unencumbered, waited for me to catch up.
Finally, we emerged on to a narrow lane. In a field to one side of it men and women wearing wide-brimmed straw hats were harvesting wheat with sickles. They stopped work as the head of the column approached and looked alarmed, but when they realised that we were unarmed prisoners from the camp they smiled and waved to us.
Then a man in a striped city suit with square shoulders appeared and spoke to one of the Italian interpreters who was with us, and we halted in the shade of a grove of tall poplars. No one spoke and it was very cool and quiet. The only sound was the humming of bees and insects and the wind stirring the tops of the trees. High above them in a dark blue sky, small puffs of cloud floated, as if of a cannon that had been discharged at regular intervals. After some minutes we moved on again. None of us, except the interpreter and the more senior officers at the head of the column, knew what the man in the striped suit had said. None of us really cared. We were not yet used to the idea of freedom. Although we each one of us still felt that we were individuals, we were really a herd lacking any power to make useful decisions, and although we were in theory a battalion organised in companies of a hundred or so, any one of these companies could probably have been re-captured in this moment by two or three resolute Germans armed with Schmeissers. We were rather like one of those outings of lunatics which I had so often encountered in the Surrey pine woods when we had been training in the first summer of the war. And like many of them we were irrationally happy. Even I on my horse, or mule, of which I was terrified.
Then, suddenly, there was an awful roar and the Italian soldier was trying to drag Mora into a deep, watery ditch, and I clouted him over the head with his cudgel, of which I had relieved him, harder than I needed to in revenge for his having stuck a lighted cigarette end up Mora’s backside, as a Messerschmidt 110 skimmed overhead, two hundred feet above us, silvery, like a flying fish in the sun. It was gone before we had time to hide ourselves, and then it didn’t seem to matter much whether the pilot had seen us or not.
With so many stops and starts it took us until early afternoon to reach our destination, some fields on the far bank of one of the torrents which roared down from the Apennines at certain seasons, now with hardly any water in it at all. Here, below one of the steep, grassy embankments, we lay down under the vines and waited, dozing and discussing the various rumours that came to us, no one seemed to know from where: that the Germans had arrived at the orfanotrofio with tanks, that they were looting, were drunk, were smashing everything, had gone away for good, had gone away and were coming back the next day to round us up.
What had actually happened was that some lorryloads of Germans, probably feldgendarmen, military policemen, had arrived at the camp,
