My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) (21 page)

But instead the Salò government devised a cunning trick to trap all of us lads not due to be called up immediately. Without warning, they issued an edict requiring all those born in the early months of 1926 to present themselves for dispatch to work in Germany. In the small print, they explained that we would be employed mainly in factories and in useful services. In short, we were to make up for the skill shortages resulting from the disastrous bombing raids. My father's immediate comment was: ‘It's worse for you all than being sent to the front!'

There was one way out: the Anti-Aircraft Artillery Command in Varese was accepting volunteers. Anyone who enlisted in that corps could avoid being sent as a pseudo-deportee to Germany. No sooner said than done: I linked up with a sizeable group of conscripts of the same age as myself, nearly all from the lakelands, and all together we presented ourselves at the artillery barracks. We were mightily pleased with our choice, not least because they assured us that, since there were no active artillery postings available, high command would send us temporarily back home, on provisional leave, pending further orders. But, alas! it was a trap: that very evening we were given a consignment of uniforms, kitbags and equipment. Very early the following morning, they loaded all thirty of us, scared little rabbits that we were, onto cattle trucks bound for Mestre, where we were to receive instruction in the use of heavy artillery. There was a sign printed in large letters on the side of the carriages transporting us – horses 12, men 40: in other words, the advantage lay with the horses. The commanding officers behaved with a certain magnanimity towards their dazed recruits: there were only thirty-five of us to each coach. What extravagance!

It was summer and the heat inside those wooden boxes was suffocating, so we travelled with the door wide open. As the train speeded up, the din and the creaking grew in volume until it left us stunned. How did the horses cope?

When we arrived in Milan, they shunted us into a siding and we got off to go in search of water. We found a fountain near a goods yard and filled our flasks. Returning to our train, we cut across five or six lines and then proceeded alongside a row of coaches, from which we heard people shouting to us: there were gaps between the wooden boards, and through them we made out eyes and mouths begging us for something to drink. ‘Water, water!' repeated men, women and children. Some of our number tried to force open the doors, but they were all locked and bolted. A boy from Luino exclaimed: ‘But these are deportees!'

There were some cartons lying on the ground. We cut them into strips a couple of centimetres long, then each of us stuck his narrow piece of material in between the gaps and began to pour in water which flowed along the cardboard and down on the other side of the wall, where thirsty mouths opened wide to gulp every last drop.

After a few minutes we heard the cry:
‘Weg! Weg von hier! Es ist verboten!'
The German soldiers guarding the train came running up in a fury, using the butt of their rifles to shove us back.

Fortunately for us, we were saved by an officer who appeared with a detachment of around a dozen railway guards. The determination and resolve they showed silenced the bawling of the Krauts, who discreetly retired. We climbed back on our trucks. The images of despair, the imploring voices, those faces glimpsed between the bars of locked and bolted wagons would never leave our memories.

We arrived in Mestre two days later. American bombers had made a direct hit on the two bridges over the Adige, so we had to make the crossing on a barge. We were still on board, a few metres from the bank, when the alarms sounded and the rumbling of engines was heard overhead. Some, panic-stricken, dived into the water, but on this occasion the bombs were not destined for us. The four-engine planes were heading for Germany.

In the Mestre barracks, we joined another thousand or so recruits from all over Italy, the majority of whom had enlisted for the same reasons as us: to avoid forced transfer to Germany for work in factories which were being carpet-bombed. But even in that area of sea, canals and marshes, it was no laughing matter to have all those bombs raining down.

A few days after our arrival, we were evicted from the barracks and taken to the countryside, where we were billeted in various abandoned houses. We had to sleep stretched out on the beaten-earth floors. We asked an elderly sergeant why we had been moved. ‘We had to make way for a battalion returning from Yugoslavia,' was the reply. That night, they bombed Mestre and Marghera. We could see flames and white flashes rising over the residential areas, and could hear the roar of the aeroplane engines as they passed over our heads. A matter of minutes later, streaks of light and tongues of fire shot up somewhere behind us. Immediately afterwards, an endless volley of terrifying blasts caused the ground to tremble. ‘They're flattening Treviso,' shouted the sergeant. The anti-aircraft guns fired wildly, making it all look like a carnival fireworks display, but at that moment more than ten thousand people, men, women and children, were dying.

Today it would be called collateral damage.

But why this massacre? Were these not supposed to be our liberators? Wave after wave of bombers came over as we stood there in the fields, staring at the skies, petrified.

No sooner had the flashes and blasts ended than from the distance we heard the screech of sirens as fire engines raced out from Padua. Near to where we were standing, three roads met: one from the direction of the lagoon, another running from Mestre to Treviso, and the third snaking up from the ‘Pavania', that is, the zone around Padua. The fire engines were all heading for Treviso. One vehicle pulled up in front of the house where we were lodged, and an officer got down to tell us to stand by in readiness to be moved to Mestre. They needed manpower to shift the debris and help out with the first-aid services. Minutes later, we were loaded onto lorries and taken to the city.

They had struck the entire city centre. I found myself facing the same scene as in Milan, with the one difference that huge craters had opened up and from them jets of water were shooting into the air like fountains: people screaming, the wounded being carried away in the arms of helpers, the dead laid out under the porches. It was a full hour before we got ourselves organised. No one had told us what to do. Earth-moving machines with mechanical diggers arrived, and we were handed spades and told to pile up the debris pushed aside by the bulldozers. We heard voices from underneath slabs of stone, and hacked furiously at the rubble until a kind of tunnel opened up: little by little, one by one, we pulled about ten people out. Our hands were bleeding: only a few of us could boast the hard, callused skin of building-workers.

Next day, parade in the central barracks, change of uniform. ‘The clothes you are wearing are winter gear, you'll die in this heat, but we've managed to get you more suitable uniforms, summer wear.' They distributed strangely coloured trousers and jackets, the yellow of desert sand. We put them on, and stared at each other wide-eyed. ‘But these are German uniforms, Wehrmacht uniforms!'

‘Don't talk nonsense,' the officers reassured us. ‘They may be German but the insignia is our army's. Calm down.'

In the following days, we began training: ‘We'll do a little practice with these model-88 cannons.'

‘But aren't they the ones we borrowed from the German anti-aircraft divisions?'

‘We'll have to adapt and work with their batteries. Our own model-91 guns are not available at the moment.'

A week went by. Another parade. ‘Pack up your kits, gather your things together. You're going home, or at least to Monza, the HQ of the four battalions. We'll continue our training exercises there, since that camp is better equipped.'

We got back aboard the goods coaches, together with the veterans from Yugoslavia. One of them commented: ‘I can't see anything good coming from this transfer. I think they're going to fuck us good and proper.'

‘In what way?' we recruits asked.

‘In what way, I couldn't say, but this business of the Deutsch uniforms … the training with the Kraut model-88, and now this transfer with an escort of German guards … doesn't smell good.'

‘Where are these Kraut guards?' we asked incredulously.

‘Just wait. They'll be along any moment.'

I have no idea how the ‘old hands' had got wind of it, but the moment we got settled in the goods carriages, along came our guardian angels, armed with machine guns and Gerver rifles. They took up position in the conductor's cabin, without so much as deigning to glance at us. ‘Don't get upset,' advised a sergeant, ‘they're here to protect us.'

‘From what? From the big, bad wolf?'

As the train drew in to Verona, the sirens, as punctual as bad luck, were going off. The engineers had only just replaced the destroyed bridge with another one supported on pontoons. Our troop train pulled up about a hundred metres from the new bridge, the doors were thrown open and we jumped down from the coaches. ‘Leave your kitbags on the train: they'll only get in the way,' shouted the sergeants.

I did not understand why all the old hands ignored that advice and dragged their bags along with them. The order was to stand back from the banks of the Adige and away from the railway line. ‘Spread out in the fields, in the middle of the corn, but stay together,' yelled the German interpreter, obviously a native of Alto Adige.

‘He's off his head,' we all guffawed as one. ‘How can you spread out and stay together?' Our laughter quickly died away, or more precisely froze in our throats. About half a dozen Hurricanes were nose-diving towards us, dropping bombs as though they were handfuls of rice scattered over newly-weds. At each raid, jets of water and gravel were tossed up into the air.

‘Got it dead-centre!' was the cry of one of our men as he peeped out from the shoots of wheat, but in fact as the clouds of dust created by the explosion cleared away, the bridge floating on the pontoons came back into view, rocking uncertainly after the buffeting it had taken, but perfectly intact. That bridge seemed magic! After the third unsuccessful attack, the Hurricane squadron gave up and retired to their base behind the Gothic Line. ‘All clear! Back on the train.'

Several of the carriages seemed to have been holed, as one of the American hunter jets had been firing twenty-millimetre rounds at the train. So that was why the veterans from Yugoslavia had taken their kit and belongings with them!

At this point, the sergeants of the various companies began to take the roll-call, but our officer in charge was no longer there. The Germans in the escort started swearing:
Hurensohne! Fanhfluchtige! Verrate!
It was not long before we discovered the reason for this rage. All the more experienced members of the detachment, including our sergeant, had made off. Disappeared!

We set off again. The carriage we were travelling in was one of those which had been holed, and many of the kitbags had been ripped apart. The Germans ordered us off yet again: the train was about to cross the bridge, but it was too risky for us to stay on board. The troop made the crossing on foot, hopping from one plank to the other. Finally we got back into our trucks, and here we had the joy of a wholly unexpected surprise: as we took our place in the carriage, the German escort slammed the doors shut, locking us in with padlocks. ‘What's going on? Are we being deported now?' we yelled in indignation. ‘Bastards!'

The interpreter, with his rich Bolzano accent, shouted back at us: ‘Say your prayers that they don't come back and bomb us again, because this time no one's getting off. You're staying put! You've got your son-of-a-bitch friends who took to their heels to thank for that!' We stayed on our feet in those creaking traps, totally bemused by what was going on, while the train sped along at high speed. A couple of hours without further mishap and we were at the Sesto San Giovanni junction outside Milan: another half-hour and we finally reached Monza.

A completely peaceful week followed, making us more than ever convinced that the veterans' flight had been a futile and risky act, leaving them liable to arrest and arraignment in front of a court martial on a charge of desertion in the face of the enemy. Meanwhile, every day, other artillery contingents arrived from Albania and Greece, each group escorted by men from the Wehrmacht. From time to time, some soldiers from the SS would turn up, but there was nothing to fear. Apart from anything else, those of us who were enrolled at the university had no problem obtaining permission to go to Milan to take our exams. So it was that every week I went to the
Accademia della Brera
to continue work on my thesis, and to the
Politecnico
to do the so-called ‘Six Days', a practical examination involving a survey of historic buildings. In the barracks, I kept myself busy doing portraits of various non-commissioned officers in the battalion. I admit it: a classic example of beguiling arse-licking, winning me the privilege of wandering from office to office and of obtaining for myself concessions and special leave. In all honesty, my life in those barracks in Monza was almost idyllic. Slowly, the nightmare of the journey on the troop train as deportees was slipping away from my mind: even the Germans had disappeared. The Mestre episode, the carpet-bombing, the job of digging out corpses now seemed to all of us like a distant memory, better forgotten. The final, definitive liberation from that nightmare was the order for a further change of uniform. In truth, I would be tempted to describe it as the ultimate metamorphosis, for this rite also involved the transformation of our physical role in the whole absurd comedy. The order to change clothing and role was imparted to us in the course of a parade in which we were introduced to the new commander-in-chief of the anti-aircraft artillery. No sooner were we lined up on the big parade-ground than a gruff but extremely personable colonel appeared, gave a summary glance at us then almost assaulted us: ‘What is this God-awful costume they've dressed you up in? That's the yellow of dromedary shit, all very well for the desert. Very sorry for the lot of you, but the Afrika Korps has been disbanded! Kaput! So, either you find yourselves a camel each, or else ditch that uniform!' There was a general guffaw, and even a sprinkling of applause. That wit and outrageous irony from an officer were liberating bombshells.