Eric Newby - Love and War in the Apennines

The one thing which united the prisoners in the orfanotrofio and which gave them, as it were, a ‘team spirit’, was their attitude towards the ‘Itis’. ‘Itis’ in the abstract, because it was difficult for any but the most hidebound to actively dislike our ‘Itis’, apart from one or two horrors who would have been horrors whatever their nationality, and we all loved the ‘Iti’ girls – soldiers always make an exception for the women of the enemy, for otherwise they would feel themselves completely alone.

The colonello was generally conceded to be ‘all right’, a ‘good chap’ in spite of being an ‘Iti’; and most people liked one of the Italian officers because he smoked a pipe and was more English than many of the English. For most of the others and the wretched soldiery who guarded us, the privates and the N.C.O.s, with their miserable uniforms, ersatz boots, unmilitary behaviour and stupid bugle calls, we felt nothing but derision. What boobs they were, we thought. We used to talk about how we could have turned them into decent soldiers if only we were given the opportunity.

How arrogant we were. Most of us were in the orfanotrofio because we were military failures who had chosen not to hold out to the last round and the last man, or, at the last gasp, had been thankful to grasp the hand of a Sicilian fisherman and be hauled from the sea, as I had been. We were arrogant because this was the only way we could vent our spleen at being captured and, at the same time, keep up our spirits which were really very low. Deep down in all of us, prisoners isolated from the outside world and Italian soldati , far from home, subjected to a twentieth-century Temptation of St Anthony and without the money to gratify it, firing volleys at us in fury because we laughed at them in front of girls who by rights should have been their girls, tormenting us all, reminding us constantly of something for which we felt that we would give up everything we had for one more chance to experience, something we ourselves talked about all the time, was the passionate desire to be free; but what did we mean by freedom? I thought I knew, and so did everyone else; but it meant so many different things to so many of us.

We were, in fact, as near to being really free as anyone can be. We were relieved of almost every sort of mundane pre-occupation that had afflicted us in the outside world. We had no money and were relieved of the necessity of making any. We had no decisions to make about anything, even about what we ate. We were certainly much more free than many of us would ever be again, either during the war or after it. And as prisoners we did not even suffer the disapprobation of society as we would have done if we had been locked up in our own country. To our own people we appeared as objects worthy of sympathy.

1 One of them was Captain Anthony, later Major-General, Dean Drummond, CB, DSO, MC and Bar, captured in North Africa in 1941 and escaped in 1942.

2 For a remarkable book on this subject, set in the orfanotrofio , see The Cage , by Billany and Dowie, Longmans, 1949.

The evening of the eighth of September was hot and sultry. The hospital was a room on the piano nobile immediately opposite the wooden huts in which the Italian guards lived and in which they kept the radio going full-blast.

At about a quarter to seven, while Michael and I were lying on our beds sweating, he on his stomach because of his boil, a programme of music was interrupted and someone began reading a message in a gloomy, subdued voice. It was to the effect that the Italian Government, recognising the impossibility of continuing the unequal struggle against overwhelming superior enemy forces, and in order to avoid further grave calamities to the nation, had requested an armistice of General Eisenhower and that the request had been granted. As a result, all hostilities between the Italian and Anglo-American forces would cease forthwith. Italian forces, however, would resist attacks from any other quarter, which could only mean Germans.

The voice we had been listening to was that of Marshal Badoglio who had been head of the Italian government since the fall of Mussolini on July the twenty-fifth. Although neither Michael nor I could speak Italian we both understood what was said because, like a lot of other prisoners, we had become quite proficient in the kind of clichés which the Italian Supreme Command employed in its bulletins, and this announcement was in the same idiom. What the Marshal didn’t say in his speech was that what had been arranged was not an armistice but an unconditional surrender signed under an olive tree five days previously in Sicily, and that he had been forced to make the announcement this evening very much against his will, because Eisenhower had already done so an hour and a quarter earlier, and the B.B.C. forty-five minutes before that, in what was to prove one of the most lamentable scoops of the war (lamentable, because it gave the Germans valuable extra time in which to disarm the Italian forces before any Allied landings began).

Later that night, without having done anything to organise the resistance to the Germans which he had called on his soldiers to make, Badoglio departed from Rome for the Adriatic coast, together with the King, from where they were taken by warship to Brindisi, leaving an apathetic and utterly disorganised nation in the lurch, a state in which the Italian people had long been accustomed to be left by their rulers and so-called allies. They were now left in an even deeper mess by the Anglo-Americans who had been stupid enough to inform the Germans of their intentions.

Badoglio’s announcement provoked some mild cheers from various parts of the building and a more extravagant display of joy by the Italian guards outside our window which we watched a little sourly. We had seen and heard it all forty-five days before when Mussolini had been deposed. Then the Italians had hurled his picture out of the window, torn down Fascist insignia, defaced the notices on the gable-ends of their huts with their injunctions Credere, Combattere … and other similar nonsense, and shouted to us in Italian simplified for our benefit, ‘BENITO FINITO!’ Now they shouted ‘ARMISTIZIO!’

The only difference Mussolini’s departure had made to us was that the sentries no longer fired at the windows of the bar when we looked out of them, and our walks were cancelled. If anything, we had suffered a reduction rather than an increase in our amenities. What now roused us from our lethargy was the thought that when the Germans retreated northwards, as none of us doubted they would have to, they might carry us off with them over the Alpine Passes. ‘Like a lot of concubines,’ someone said on one of the innumerable occasions on which we had discussed the possibility.

Our friends gave us all the latest news when they came to see us later in the evening.

‘The colonel called a parade in the hall,’ one said. ‘There’s to be no fraternisation with the Itis and we’ve mounted our own sentries on the gate. A party’s just gone off to recce the country round about in case the Germans come and we have to break out. If they do the colonello says he will fight, but there doesn’t seem much chance of his having to. Airborne landings are expected at Rome and Milan, and sea landings at Genoa and Rimini. It’s really a matter of holding out for twenty-four hours at the most until our people arrive. Anyway, we’re getting your gear together and we’ve got two of the biggest parachutists in the camp organised to help Eric if we do have to get out.’

‘I wish the M.O. would hurry up and get some plaster of paris for my ankle,’ I said. ‘Then all I’d need would be a stick instead of a couple of bloody great parachutists.’