A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (19 page)

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I said, ‘I’m sure we do the same sort of thing and, if we don’t, I’m sure the Americans do.’

‘Really,’ he said. ‘You surprise me. You would not say that it is strange?’

‘The intention is, of course,’ he continued, ‘to make us popular with the inhabitants, but that is something we can never be. For instance, I came to that village down there by car, I suggested to the driver that he might like to accompany me up here; but he is not interested in the countryside or
lepidoptera
. Besides he told me that there is a regulation against leaving military vehicles unattended. I did not ask him to accompany me because I wanted his company but because I knew that he would not enjoy himself in that village, or any other. When we arrived at it no one would speak to us. There was scarcely anyone to speak to anyway, which was very strange because it is a Sunday. They must have thought I had come to make some kind of investigation. It might have been better if we had not been wearing guns; but it is a regulation.

I could visualize the state of panic the village must have been thrown into by their arrival, with young men running from the house and the
stalle
and up the mountainsides, like hunted hares.

‘It is not pleasant to be disliked,’ he said, ‘and it is very unpleasant to be German and to know that one is hated, because one
is
German and, because, collectively, we are wrong in what we are doing. That is why I hate this war, or one of the reasons. And of course, because of this, we shall lose it. We must. We have to.’

‘It’s going to take you a long time to lose it at this rate,’ I said. ‘Everything seems to be going very slowly.’

‘It may seem so to you,’ he said. ‘But it won’t be here, in Italy, that we shall be beaten. We shall hold you here, at least through this winter and perhaps we could hold you through next summer, but I do not think there will be a next summer. What is going on in Russia is more than flesh and blood can stand. We are on the retreat from Smolensk; we are retreating to the Dnieper. According to people who have just come from there we are losing more men every day than we have lost here in the Italian peninsula in an entire month. And what are you doing?’ he asked.

I told him that I was on my way south towards the front. There seemed no point in telling him that I was living here. Also I was ashamed.

‘If you take the advice of an enemy,’ he said, ‘you will try to pass the winter here, in these mountains. By the time you get to the battle front it will be very, very cold and very, very difficult to pass through it. Until a few days ago we all thought we would be retiring beyond the Po; but now the winter line is going to be far south of Rome. It has already been given a name. They call it the
Winterstellung.’

‘Tell me one thing,’ I said. ‘Where have we got to now. I never hear any news.’

‘You have Termoli and Foggia on the east coast, which means that you will now be able to use bombers in close-support and you have Naples; but take my advice and wait for the spring.’

I asked him where he had learned his English. He told me that he had spent several summer vacations in England before the war.

‘I liked England,’ he said. ‘And the English. You do not work hard but you have the good sense not to be interested in politics. I liked very much your way of life.’

He got to his feet.

‘Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘it has given me great pleasure to have met you. Good luck to you and, perhaps, though I do not think it probable, we shall meet again after the war at Gottingen, or London.’

‘Or Philippi,’ I felt like saying, but didn’t.

‘Now if you would be so kind,’ he said, ‘please give me the empty bottle as I cannot obtain more of this beer without handing the bottles back. Bottles are in short supply.’

The last I saw of him was running across the open downs with his net unfurled, in the direction from which I had come, making curious little sweeps and lunges as he pursued his prey, a tall, thin, rather ungainly figure with only one lung. I was sorry to see him go.

When I got back to the Pian del Sotto that evening everybody had already returned, except Armando, and the sole subject of conversation was the arrival at the village in the valley of
Oberleutnant
Frick and his driver and their subsequent departure from it. The bush-telegraph was working well – it was a pity that it operated in two directions, outwards as well as inwards.

As I imagined it would, the panic created by their arrival had sent all the men of military age in the area rushing off to the woods and in the time that it took someone who had a kinsman in our village to climb up by some secret path over the cliff and down to it, the
paura
had begun there and with similar results – even Armando had skedaddled – and it had been communicated to the occupants of every other village within walking distance. It was as if a stone had been thrown into a pond and the splash it had made became ripples moving outwards in concentric circles, one behind the other, as more messengers had gone out bringing the latest reports on the situation, what in our army were called ‘sitreps’.

In the village in the valley the
paura
had begun to diminish as soon as the
Oberleutnant
had assembled his butterfly net and had begun to move out of the village on what he imagined was the way up the mountain. Officers were known to be addicted to outdoor sports, it was the one thing that officers were known to have in common, whatever their nationality, and this one was obviously a fisherman, though what he hoped to land with such a flimsy net and no rod in a river which had hardly any water in it at this season, no one knew and no one dared to ask. None of them had ever heard of butterfly hunting, or laid eyes on a German officer.

It was now the middle of October. I always knew what day of the week it was but I was never sure of the date and no one in the house seemed to know either. Agata knew that the preceding Sunday, the second one in succession on which I had gone out for the day, but without this time meeting anyone or collecting any fungi, was the seventeenth after Pentecost, but no one else did, not even her daughter. The only calendar in the house was contained in the almanack over the fireplace,
Barba-Nera Lunario dell’ Astronomo degli Appennini
, to which I had recourse on wet days but I discovered when I first opened it that it was already four years old and was no good for movable feasts, and was all wrong about the moon which had been full on the preceding Wednesday, which was my second one at the Pian del Sotto, and was also, according to the book, the day of
S. Eduardo re d’Inghilterra confes.
, which I would have been tempted to celebrate if I had noticed it at the time.

The following day was a Friday and in the afternoon I was left alone on the plateau to carry on with the work of
zappatura
, breaking up clods with a
zappa
, a hoe. Because it was a fine, warm day Rita had been taken off by her mother to help with the enormous operation which involved changing all the sheets and pillow cases in the house, and washing the dirty ones at the spring at the top end of the plateau where there was a large open cistern of water. There they walloped the linen on a sort of stone washboard. This was done every week and when the washing was finished it was hung on long lines at the edge of the cliff where it became incredibly white in the sun and wind. On this particular afternoon Dolores was not helping with the washing which she usually did; she was somewhere out of sight, working either in the house or in one of the outbuildings; Armando was ploughing, and soon after the midday meal Luigi had gone away up into the woods to decide on what trees they would cut that autumn.

Late in the afternoon, while I was hacking away with my
zappa
, I was consumed with an urgent need to visit the
gabinetto
which was a great bore, not only because it involved a longish walk but principally because it brought me within biting range of the odious Nero who seemed to bear even more murderous feelings towards me than he did to the rest of the family – and they were evil enough – probably because I was something foreign which smelled nasty to him and certainly because I used to throw the contents of the
vaso da notte
at him, which I would not have dreamt of doing if he had been nice to me in the first place. As it was, in order to reach the
gabinetto
, I always used to arm myself with a couple of carefully selected stones, one for the inward run, the other for the run-out of the yard, except when there were other members of the family present in which case they used to take over the defensive duties. Getting past Nero into the yard always reminded me of
Operation Pedestal
, I being one of the practically defenceless merchant ships, Nero a dive bomber.

On this occasion I did what I always did, pretended to make for the door of the house and as he made a rush to intercept me, foaming at the mouth (he was much too enraged to bark), I altered course to port and rushed through what was the equivalent of the Sicilian Channel, the narrows between the house and a pigsty, jumping over his chain as I did so, at the same time raising one of the stones above my head in a threatening manner and roaring at him at the top of my voice, which sufficiently impressed him with my murderous intentions to halt him long enough to let me get through and out of biting distance. And as usual, I succeeded.

When I emerged from the
gabinetto
, still prudently clasping my stones, I was more or less at peace with the world. Nero was not. As always, he was furious at having been thwarted in his desire to tear me to pieces, and this time his rage lent him a supernatural strength. I was about thirty yards from him when, practically at the full length of his chain, he executed a fantastic leap in the air very similar to the capriole, one of the most difficult of all the evolutions performed by the horses in the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, of which I had seen photographs in a book in the
orfanotrofio
.

In doing so, he broke the running wire to which his chain was shackled and which gave him so much mobility. It parted with a twang like a breaking harp string and he landed on his stomach, unlike the horses in the Riding School, from which position he immediately regained his feet and streaked at me, as much like a rocket as a powerful mongrel dog trailing twenty feet of chain behind it could manage to be; and I took to my heels and fled in the direction from which I had come.

Yet terrified as I was of him, I was damned if I was going to take refuge in that awful
gabinetto
, and wait for him to break through the flimsy outer walls and eat me up inside it.

Having rejected it I had very little of refuge. I might have tried for the
stalle
but all the doors were shut. My best chance of survival seemed to lie in reaching a barn about thirty yards away in which hay was stored. This barn had a sort of lean-to construction outside it in which the hay was piled until it could be transported to the upper floor. I was doing well with Nero about fifteen yards behind me when I tripped over some large piece of disused agricultural machinery which was concealed in the grass, hurting myself dreadfully, and by the time I got up the bloody dog was almost on me; but fortunately his chain became entangled in the thing and this gave me sufficient time to reach the lean-to under which the hay rose up in a solid, sheer, unscalable wall above me.

I was just about to turn and make a last desperate stand with the one stone which remained to me (I had dropped the other when I fell over) and with my boots as a last resource, when Dolores appeared like a chatelaine on top of it, knelt down, extended a brawny arm and hauled me up with Nero holding on to one of the turn-ups of my decrepit trousers which came away in his fangs and left him below, roaring with vexation. Although Dolores was a fantastically strong girl the effort she made threw her on her back in the hay and as I came shooting over the top with our hands locked I fell beside her, not on top of her as I would have done in a film about bucolic peasant life.

For a moment she lay there, with tears of laughter rolling down her cheeks. Then, still laughing, she turned towards me, enfolded me in her arms like a great baby and kissed me passionately.

It was an unforgettable experience, like being swallowed alive, or sucked into a vortex. It was not just one kiss, it went on and on. I felt myself going.

It was entirely spontaneous. She was obviously not expecting visitors, certainly not me, and because it was a warm evening and much hotter up in the barn where she had been working, she had taken off the tight sweater which she usually wore and was now dressed in nothing but a faded, sleeveless, navy blue vest which displayed her really superb upper works to great advantage, a short skirt and boots.

This was not the first time I had seen her in this outfit. I saw her like this almost every evening when it was fine, washing herself at the trough, together with Rita, before going inside for the evening meal, but I had always endeavoured to put her out of my mind.

This had not been as difficult as the reader might imagine. Apart from the fact that my thoughts were with Wanda, my unofficial
fidanzata
, I would not have allowed myself to even try to do what I was undoubtedly engaged in doing at this moment, if for no other reason than it would have been a gross abuse of hospitality which was being offered to me at tremendous risk and which, if it was discovered by my host and hostess and the facts were broadcast, could have a disastrous effect on the whole relationship between prisoners of war and those who were helping them. I had not even had to work this out for myself. Even before we left the
orfanotrofio
the colonel had gone to great pains to impress on us all that we must behave with the utmost punctiliousness in any dealings we had with the civilian population, and, indeed, after the prisoners made their first contact with them in the yard of the farmhouse near Fontanellato where the food and clothing depot was set up, his warning seemed superfluous. Anyone who did otherwise would have had to be possessed of a heart of stone. I myself was probably on terms of greater intimacy with Wanda than any of the other prisoners were with the girls of Fontanellato, but they were such that not even the
superiora
or her
suore
could possibly take exception to them, although I had kissed her; but even they did not know this. And at the Pian del Sotto my relationship with Rita and Dolores had been equally formal until they had begun to tease me about my
‘fidanzata’
, as they insisted on calling her, and it was not only the previous day when they had begun to ask me which of them I was going to take to the dance that for a few moments I felt the atmosphere between us as we
zappa’
d away, to be charged with sexuality.