Love and War in the Apennines (11 page)

The next day, the seventeenth of September, while we were having what was to be our last language lesson together, I told Wanda that I must leave the
ospedale.

‘You are right,’ she said. ‘If you had not suggested it yourself I was going to tell you. I am worried for you but I am much more worried for the
superiora.
There are Germans everywhere now. But it will have to be tomorrow. My father and the doctor will arrange something. They are great friends.’

I was worried for everyone who was helping me. All I had to lose was my freedom; their lives were in danger. I was particularly worried about Wanda and all the other women and girls quartering the country round about on their bicycles bringing food every day to the prisoners who were still hiding among the vines wondering, like me, what was the best thing to do.

Our relationship had changed a great deal since we had first met. It had progressed far beyond the stage of giving one another language lessons. I had begun by thinking her a very good-looking girl and being flattered that she should take any notice of me. Then I had begun to admire her courage and determination; now I was in love with her.

These feelings were not entirely one-sided. Now, when we were alone together, we sat as close as we dared to one another on the seat in the garden, knowing that we were under observation by one or other of the
suore
but on several occasions I managed to kiss Wanda in one of the dark corridors on the way back to my room.

Early the next morning I received a visit from the
superiora.
She was in tears. Apparently the Germans had discovered that I was in the hospital, and a guard was already posted outside my door.

‘What is to become of you?’ she wailed.

I told her not to worry. If I was recaptured I would be protected by the Geneva Convention and she had done everything she could. I was sure she would not be punished for taking in an injured man whatever his nationality was; but when I got out of bed and opened the door to go to the
gabinetto
, there were two
carabinieri
sitting on chairs in the corridor armed with carbines, the tools of their trade; heavy-jowled, big-behinded brutes, rustic oafs, but none the nicer for being so.

‘Eh! Eh!’ they both screeched, uttering the depressing, minatory epithet that I had first heard what now seemed a lifetime ago on the airfield in Sicily and that I knew so well from being guarded by Italians and had hoped never to hear again, at the same time waving me back into my room. Just like all the other
carabinieri
I had ever encountered, these two seemed incapable of performing the simplest task – in this case guarding an unarmed, partly incapacitated man – except in pairs; but it was and still is a rule of the service that each
carabiniere
must have a mate who goes everywhere with him.

‘Devo andare al gabinetto.’

‘È vietato!’

What a gormless pair they were! How could they forbid anyone to go to the lavatory in a hospital? They must have thought they were guarding someone in a cell in some filthy provincial gaol, which is what I was probably destined for.

‘Perchè?
’

‘È proibito.’

It seemed a waste of time to ask them who could possibly have issued such an ordinance.

‘Ho mal di stomaco,’
I said.

Immediately, their attitude changed completely. They roared with laughter.

‘Ho-Ho!’ they went, slapping their great thighs. Like certain coprophilous German soldiers to whom the mere mention of excreta and, or bottoms, was sufficient to lay them on their backs helpless with mirth, they thought this very funny; but they let me go.

When I emerged they told me, laying their hands on the places where those organs should have been, that it broke their hearts, but that the
feldgendarmerie
, who were more or less the equivalent of our own, to me, odious military police, had given orders that they were to guard me closely until arrangements could be made to send me to Germany; and that if I tried to escape they would, reluctantly and with tears in their eyes, be forced to shoot me, or themselves risk being shot by the
feldgendarmerie.

I was at some pains to try to appear sympathetic to them in their dilemma; but I had no tears to waste on these men. I was as impressed by their lamentations as a condemned criminal by the executioner, who not only wants to carry out the execution but at the same time wants to be loved by his victim. Nothing would have pleased me more at this moment than to be certain that they would both be shot.

With my lunch, which was brought to me on a tray by one of the more forbidding-looking
suore
, who had been specially
selected for this dangerous mission by the
superiora
in order to discourage the
carabinieri
from rooting amongst its contents, came a message, hidden under an almost redhot dish. It was unsigned but I recognised the style. ‘Get out!’ it read, in English. ‘Tonight, 22.00, if not Germany tomorrow, 06.00. Go east 500
metri
across fields until you reach a very little street, then torn right and go on 500
metri
until you reach a bigger street. Wait there! Don’t worry about clothes and shoes.’

These were less ambiguous orders than most of those which I had been accustomed to receive during the last few years and, what was best, they left the method of executing the escape to the discretion of the person who was going to carry them out. They had, in fact, been drafted by Wanda’s father who had not been an officer in the Austrian Army for nothing, and she had rendered them into English.

They were not difficult to carry out. At 21.57, after having eaten a formidable last dinner at 19.30, I opened the door of my room for the tenth time that afternoon and uttered the magic words.
Ho mal di stomaco
to the solitary
carabiniere
on duty. They no longer stirred him to mirth, or his companion either, when he was on duty. After a few hours spent in a dark corridor sitting on a pair of chairs of a hardness which only the Roman Catholic church could devise, outside a labour ward from which awful sounds came from time to time, they had decided to each do stints of two hours on guard, while the one off duty sat below in the entrance hall. Whichever one of them was on duty now ignored me completely.

As soon as I had hopped into the
gabinetto
I locked the door, and after a short interval began to make various groaning and grunting noises which I hoped were appropriate, having practised them already that afternoon on nine previous visits, at the same time hoisting myself with some difficulty through the high, narrow
window which I had already opened, and slid with surprising ease, down a convenient drainpipe, bootless and in my pyjamas, like someone leaving a burning house in an early Keystone film, to land with a great clonk on my plastered foot on the path below.

There was no need to worry about making a noise. The croaking of innumerable frogs, and the chirping of crickets were deafening; but I was no less apprehensive for that. Wishing that I had with me the crutches I had used in the
ospedale
, I rushed across the path and crashed through a hedge into a large field of stubble, over which an enormous moon was just rising. It was horribly bright and, as I began to cross it, I heard violent banging noises from the interior of the
ospedale
, which must have been the
carabiniere
hammering on the door of the
gabinetto.
I set off across the stubble at a terrific rate, which was extraordinarily painful with one bare foot, like walking on nails, so fast that I failed to see a large, concealed ditch, an upstream continuation of one which Mora had catapulted me over eleven days before, and into which I plunged up to my waist in black slime. The 500 metres to the very little street where I was to ‘torn’ to the right seemed longer than I had imagined they would, but eventually I reached a rutted track which led away to the north, and there was no doubt that this was it.

I followed it for a quarter of a mile or so, past a farmhouse with a yard full of savage, barking dogs, until I reached a place where three roads met. There, at the junction, I found a motor car with two men hovering impatiently about it. One of them was the doctor, the other was someone whom I had never met before, a man with grey hair
en brosse
, whom the doctor addressed as
Maestro.
It was Wanda’s father.

‘You are late,’ he said in Italian with more than a hint of severity, just as I imagined he did to the boys and girls in his class. He had the same high forehead and the same stubborn expression which
I had seen on her face when she had been trying to make me work harder at my Italian, except that he looked as if he wore it permanently. I would have liked to have asked him how his daughter was but this was not the right moment, exposed in the moonlight at a treeless crossroads, with a hue and cry beginning less than half a mile away.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. It sounded feeble and for a moment I thought of adding some flippant, mock-heroic remark about having had to go to the lavatory on the way, but I was not yet sufficiently good at the language, and if I had I would probably have found myself being bent over the bonnet of the Fiat and being given ‘six of the best’ with a Slovene cane for impertinence.

‘Well, get in!’ said the doctor. ‘Don’t stand there!’ He sounded just like a doctor who has been called out in the middle of the night to minister to some trivial complaint which, in effect, he had. Neither of them commented on my extraordinary appearance, wearing nothing but pyjamas and covered in filth.

As I got into the back of the car I noticed for the first time that the door panel had a Red Cross painted on it. This at least partly explained how the Doctor was able to drive about the countryside during the curfew without being riddled with bullets. But now, if we were stopped and I was found travelling with these rather severe-looking middle-aged men who addressed one another formally as
maestro
and
dottore
, who, as Wanda had told me, first became friends because of their longstanding mutual distaste for Fascism, there was little doubt that they would be shot.

We set off at a terrific rate on a road which had all the qualities necessary to produce a fatal accident; narrow, winding and raised above the surrounding country on an embankment with deep ditches on either side. It was an eerie night, remarkably like that of the ninth of September. The moon, which was like a huge rusty
coin, had barely risen above the level of the vines and long, tattered streamers of mist floated above the fields. Apart from ourselves there was not a living soul to be seen. It was as if, suddenly, we had become the only inhabitants of the
pianura.
The black-out and the curfew had done their work too well. We were extremely conspicuous, simply, by being in it.

We crossed a little bridge over a stream which flowed between high, grass-grown embankments with a farm standing alone like a guardhouse beside it, and roared through a hamlet which the
maestro
said was called Cannetolo and then followed a winding road which eventually crossed the torrent on the banks of which, according to the doctor, further downstream, we had taken refuge. We must have been heading almost due south now because sometimes I could see the Apennines ahead of us, black against the night sky and far off. I wondered where we were going, but I contented myself with asking the
maestro
the names of some of the places through which we passed, names which I immediately forgot.

At a sharp bend in the road we crossed an irrigation canal by a bridge, and after a bit we came to a junction with a signpost pointing right to a place called Soragna, and left to Fidenza, a town on the
Via Emilia
, which itself must have been quite close because the noise of the traffic on it was very loud now, and I could distinguish the peculiar whining sound that the treads of the cross-country tyres of army vehicles make on a hard surface. Here we turned northwards, away from the main road.

We must have covered five miles, still without seeing anybody, when we reached a village which seemed to be about the same size as Fontanellato, with a large castle and a church with a campanile looming up in the middle of it.

‘Soragna,’ said the
maestro
, informatively. ‘
II castello del Principe,’
and then, suddenly and urgently,
‘carabinieri!
Get down!’

There were two figures in the road in front of us and one of them was waving us to a halt with a torch. One side of the bottom of the little car was occupied by the doctor’s bag and as I tried to squeeze myself down head first behind the seat my huge feet, one a soggy mass of plaster of paris, the other bare, rose in the air to occupy the position in which my head had been previously, until the
maestro
got hold of both of them and forced them down, at the same time putting a blanket over me. He managed to finish performing these operations just as the car came to a stop.

Upside down in the back, I could hear the doctor opening the side window and I could see the glare of the
carabinieri
’s torch through the blanket when he shone it into the car. Then I heard a voice say,

‘Ah! È lei, dottore! Da dove viene?
’ The tone was friendly enough but just verging on being suspicious. The man was obviously curious.

‘Da Fidenza. Ho avuto un caso di emergenza, uno scolaro del Maestro Skof con la polmonite.’

‘È adesso?’

‘Vado a casa.’