Death In Captivity (28 page)

Next morning they made their way quietly down to within distance of the Sangro, and lay up all day watching the road.

The sergeants had not exaggerated. The traffic was continuous. But there was more to it than that. When they looked closely they noticed that the same sort of truck would come backwards and forwards, once or twice in the hour. They were small German troop carriers, and they were not part of the through traffic. They were patrolling.

In the early afternoon, an even more alarming thing happened. One of the trucks which they had been watching stopped and spilled out a dozen men; small men in the dark green uniform of the Alpini. The party disappeared into the wood below the point where Goyles and Byfold were lying. An hour later they reappeared, got into the truck and moved slowly off.

‘Lucky we weren’t too close to the road,’ said Byfold.

‘Very lucky,’ said Goyles. ‘The thing may look a bit more practicable by night.’

As soon as it got dark they moved down towards the road. They had never tried moving by night before – certainly not across broken country – their progress was slow, painful and noisy.

They were still a hundred yards short of the road when they noticed the lights. These were coming on and off, irregularly; when one suddenly turned on immediately below them they realised what they were.

‘They’re headlights,’ said Byfold. ‘The bastards have got lorries parked up and down the road. When they hear anything they turn the lights on—’

Goyles was looking ahead, at the country on the other side of the river.

‘They’ve got patrols out there, too,’ he said. ‘You can see the lights from time to time. Defence in depth.’

‘What’s it all about?’ said Byfold. ‘They can’t have laid it all on, just for us.’

‘I expect this is one of the check points,’ said Goyles. ‘It’s one of the obvious places. Whenever we’ve looked at the map we’ve agreed we’d cross about here. They can’t be as thick as this on the ground all the way round the Sangro. We’ll go back and try again further to the east.’

It was very late indeed, and they were very tired by the time they got back to their charcoal-burner’s hut. They turned in without a word. They had hardly realised until then what a bad effect on their
morale
the act of turning back would have. Also they were running short of food.

Things looked more cheerful in the light of morning. It was late when they got up and set their faces northward up the valley. After a short walk they stumbled into a camp of Italians – refugees from a village which the Germans had taken over. They were unaccountably cheerful, and, since they had killed a sheep the night before, Goyles and Byfold were able to eat a satisfying breakfast of mutton broth and limp
polenta
.

They went on up the valley.

‘We’ll go well to the east, this time,’ said Goyles. Towards Agnone.’

‘We mustn’t funk it again,’ said Byfold. ‘It’s like jumping in the deep end of the swimming bath. Anyone can be excused for fluffing it once, but if you fluff it twice you’re finished.’

A little later they caught sight of a figure, some way ahead of them on the path and coming fast.

They removed themselves circumspectly into the under-growth.

A few seconds later Byfold raised his head, took another look at the advancing figure, scrambled to his feet and ran forward.

Goyles put a hand to stop him, but Byfold said, ‘It’s all right, Cuckoo. I’d know those trousers anywhere. It’s Tony.’

He ran on to the path. Goyles sat watching him.

It was Long all right.

In a few minutes they had heard each other’s stories. In an hour it was as if they had never parted.

Long didn’t say much about his defection and the others refrained from pressing him. ‘I heard you shouting, all right,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t take any notice, because I was fed up with you. I very soon got un-fed up. In fact, I was pretty lonely. I’m glad to see your faces again.’

He asked them about their adventures and they told him.

‘Yes. I gather that crossing isn’t healthy,’ said Long. ‘I fell in yesterday with an S.A.S. type – chap called Morgan – regular cloak-and-dagger merchant. As a matter of fact I’d met him once before when I was training in England. Apparently he and two or three others have been sent to tell us to get a move on—’

‘Hell,’ said Byfold. ‘What do they expect us to do – double smartly across the lines?’

‘It’s not us,’ said Long. ‘In fact, he admitted we’d done very well getting as far as we had in the time – but apparently there are a lot of parties just sitting on their bottoms waiting to be rescued – people who, anyway, started from the southern camps, and have come about fifty miles in two months and got tired. His job is to whip them on as quickly as possible—’

‘The implication being,’ said Goyles thoughtfully, ‘that the British Army has done all the advancing it’s going to do this year.’

‘I think so, yes. He couldn’t say so, of course. However, I got some tips off him. One was on no account to try to cross that bit of road you two types seem to have taken a running jump at—’

‘Thank you for nothing,’ said Byfold.

‘The other was more constructive. He gave me a route towards the Adriatic. The fighting’s pretty fluid there, and it’s not armoured country, so you’ve got nothing but patrols. I wrote down the key points, but a lot of it’s in my head. You start from San Lorenzo – that’s two cottages and a sheep-run about ten miles east of here. Cross the Ventimiglia upland – you’ve got to be careful about that. Pietransieri – Agnone – Trivento—’

They spent some time working it out on Goyles’ map. They got to San Lorenzo that evening. The farmer welcomed them without embarrassment. He seemed quite used to British prisoners.

When they were sitting over their evening meal, Goyles, remembering his breakfast, said, ‘Do you think he’d sell us a sheep. We’ve still got quite a lot of money—’

‘Drive it in front of us, do you mean?’ said Byfold. ‘Sort of camouflage?’

‘Ass. No. Have it killed and boiled. Food’s not going to be so easy now, especially if we have to move at night.’

‘Quite an idea – what do you think, Tony?’

Long came out of a deep reverie and agreed that it was a good idea.

Fortune favoured them. The farmer was not even interested in their money. He would give them a sheep. ‘Normally,’ he explained, ‘in the autumn, we drive them down to the plains at Campo Basso. Now both armies are across the road. The sheep must stay in the hills. When the snow comes, most of them must die.’

The butchery took place promptly and the meat was boiled there and then with salt – they had to pay for the salt – in a huge cauldron. They had a second supper of mutton broth and they breakfasted off mutton chops. When they started out the next morning each of them had a cold joint of mutton in his sack. There was no paper of any sort in the house. Goyles wrapped his in his spare pullover.

The sky that morning was grey, with a promise of rain before the evening. They made their way slowly up a long neck of the valley, Long, with his eye constantly on the compass and the map. At eleven o’clock he called a halt.

‘Here’s where we have to make a detour,’ he said. They turned off the track and went up the left-hand side of the valley. It had looked innocent enough when they were walking along a made track at the bottom, but it was a rough and exhausting sixty minutes before they had pulled themselves up and could look over the crest into the valley which paralleled them to the east. This was a much shallower valley – almost an upland. It was full of sheep. There were thick woods crowning the bluff on the other side, and beyond the woods the ground fell away, presumably to the river, which was out of sight.

‘What are we waiting for?’ said Goyles. ‘The sooner we’re in those woods the better.’

‘That’s what you’re meant to think,’ said Long. ‘Do you see those huts?’

‘Shepherds’ shelters.’

‘They’re guard huts,’ said Long. ‘Just you watch them.’

An hour later they saw a German make his way carefully up behind one of the huts and disappear into it.

At four o’clock it started to rain, a maddening, persistent drizzle which always promised to stop and never did. If they had been on the move they would have thought nothing of it. They lay in the shelter of a large rock and cursed.

‘Shelter, my foot,’ said Roger. ‘All it does it to collect the rain and empty it down my neck.’

Goyles said nothing. He was carving his leg of mutton with a safety razor blade. Darkness seemed a very long time coming.

With the darkness the rain stopped. They got up, shook themselves together and went on slowly. The sky was still overcast and it was pitch dark. Long led; of the three his night sight seemed best. All they knew was that they had to keep straight on across the shallow dip ahead of them, find a way down the side valley masked by wood, get down to the river, road and railway, cross all three and take the first valley to the right as far as the village of Pietransieri. It was a journey which would have taken less than two hours in daylight.

After midnight the sky cleared, there was the rind of a moon, and they were able to go a little quicker. By three in the morning they were safe in a hay-loft at Pietransieri. Goyles was the most exhausted. He found it difficult to see at night and so he had fallen most often.

That day they lay very close. Two or three times people came into the barn below them, but no one came up the ladder into the loft. They made themselves an inner shelter, deep down in the hay in one corner, to which they could retreat if they had to with some hope of avoiding detection if the loft was entered. There was no question of going out or seeking help. The village was thick with German troops. It looked like an anti-aircraft unit. Their chief trial was an entire lack of water. During that day Goyles’ dislike of cold mutton became an obsession.

When it was dark they let themselves out of the back of the barn and dropped down to the cobbles. Thy paused for a quick drink in the communal wash-house at the foot of the village street and then moved out on to the hillside. There was more light, but the going was worse. Goyles remembered that night as the incidents of a nightmare. As a result of the wet and cold his feet and legs soon lost their power of feeling – which may have been as well, for he seemed to bump his shins or stub his toes every few paces.

The only serious accident occurred in the early hours of the following morning. They were making slow but steady progress round the upper slopes of Monte Agnone. The ground was a series of scrub-covered slopes cut by small ravines – the beginning of numerous mountain streams, now dry. Byfold unexpectedly slipped the last ten feet into one of these, and turned his right ankle. He could still move slowly, with help, and they hobbled and crawled for another mile, into the outskirts of a fairly large wood. Here they tried to get some sleep. At first light they heard men and animals moving quite near them.

They lay still because there was nothing much else to do.

A moment later they saw – and had been seen by – a party of woodcutters. This turned out to be the finest stroke of luck imaginable, for the woodcutters proved not only friendly but refreshingly tough. They had little use for the Germans, and were of the opinion that liberation by the Allies was round the corner. They put Byfold on one of their mules and led the three of them back to their encampment – it was a sort of summer house of logs and brushwood – where they were given a meal and a blanket each, and where they slept the sleep of the dead, waking when the sun was going down and the woodcutters were coming back from their day’s work.

In front of a huge fire, in the mouth of the shelter, they talked it over. The woodcutters were unanimous in their advice that the Englishmen should stay. They would not be breaking their encampment for another ten days, they said, and during that time the English Army might be with them. They were well hidden in the woods far from all made roads.

In a way, the answer lay with Byfold. He said that his ankle, though stiff, was serviceable. He could go on if necessary. Long said that he was in favour of going on.

Goyles for a time said nothing. He had been in a very odd mood for some time. Neither of the others had seen anything quite like it before. Since they had met up again with Long, three days previously (it was difficult for any of them to realise that it was only three days), he had been unusually quiet, alternating fits of silence with an equally unusual jumpiness. This was more surprising because until that moment he had been the steadiest of the three.

Now, as he sat in front of the blazing fire, he would neither look at his friends, nor address them directly. Instead, he aimed a rapid-fire of questions at the leader of the wood-cutters.

‘How far was the nearest point in Allied hands? (Ten miles, perhaps fifteen.) What was the route? What German posts were there? Had anyone been that way before? English prisoners or Italians?’

When he had listened to the answers Goyles said, ‘We should be able to make it tonight. I’m going to try, anyway.’

He stated it as a fact. It was hardly an invitation.

There was an awkward pause; then Byfold said, ‘All right, that makes it unanimous. We’d better start as soon as it’s properly dark.’

‘We’d better eat first,’ said Long.

The woodcutters seemed unoffended by the abruptness of these proceedings. They served a meal of vegetable stew and pancakes. Ten minutes after finishing it the three were off. Long led, suiting the pace to Byfold, who came next, using a sort of crutch the woodman had made for him. Goyles brought up the rear.

‘You might have been a bit more polite to those types,’ said Byfold, as they moved on.

‘Was I being rude?’ said Goyles. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t notice.’

Nothing more was said for some time.

About an hour later Long said, ‘We ought to press on a bit if we can. We want to be well out of the patrol zone before light.’

‘I could go faster,’ said Byfold. ‘It’s Goyles who keeps hanging back.’