Eric Newby - Love and War in the Apennines

There was even a bar in which these concoctions were served, high up in a sort of minstrels’ gallery above the chapel, which was used by the more staid prisoners to play bridge, and on Sundays for church services. We were forbidden by the Italians to look out of the windows of the bar which faced the road to the village, and if we did, the sentries in the watchtowers beyond the wire used to fire shots at us, some of which used to come whistling through the windows – the glass had been blown out long ago – and bury themselves in the walls and ceiling of the bar which had the same ecclesiastical decor as the chapel below. These bullet-holes gave the place a raffish appearance, like a middle-western saloon built by some renegade, gun-toting priest.

But in spite of these fusillades we still continued to risk our lives by putting our heads out of the windows, in order to be able to look at the girls of Fontanellato who, every evening when the weather was fine, used to promenade along the road in front of the orfanotrofio.

Some of my fellow prisoners had not spoken to a girl since they had been captured in 1940. Old or new prisoners, few of us had set eyes on girls like these for years and years. They were all shapes and sizes and colours and as they went past they laughed, as if enjoying some private joke, and tossed their heads impertinently in our directions. They all had long hair, short skirts and brown, bare legs and, as they swayed along the road, the high-heeled wooden sandals, which they all wore because there was very little shoe leather in Italy, clacked on the hard surface of the road. Some of them walked arm in arm with other girls carefully chosen for their inferior looks; some were so sure of themselves that they walked with girls who were their equals; others wobbled past in little flocks on bicycles, so slowly that they sometimes fell off uttering squeals of alarm – none was ever injured. There were scarcely ever any men with them. Presumably they were at the war.

The effect of these visions on the wretched Italian guards who were immured high up in their watchtowers, was as powerful as it was on us. Utterly distracted, they turned their backs on the orfanotrofio in order to look at them more closely, until some N.C.O., old enough and sour enough to be indifferent to women, screeched at them so loudly that they whirled round and, seeing us, discharged their rifles in the direction of the bar.

But not even the Italian Army in its most bellicose mood was able to stop us looking at the girls of Fontanellato, or the girls at us.

On one side of the orfanotrofio was the village cemetery in which the dead were stacked in recesses in the walls, one above the other, as if they had been put away carefully in some giant filing-cabinet marked ‘Pending’ until the last Trump sounded. Every Sunday, wet or fine, what must have been almost the entire girl population of Fontanellato as well as large numbers from the surrounding country, used to make the long pilgrimage up the via Cimitero to the gates, ostensibly to mourn their loved ones, and completely outnumbering the real mourners who could be easily distinguished by their black garb. If all these girls had been visiting the graves of their own kith and kin then the cemetery would have had to have been at least five times the size it was. Like participants in a slow-motion film they crawled past the front of the orfanotrofio , past the exercise field which had been opened a month after our arrival, and in which all exercise ceased from the moment the first of them came into view, and turned left up the road to the cemetery. Few of them bothered to enter it. Sometimes they waved if they thought the guards were not watching, or they might simply twirl a scarf, and from behind the barbed wire in the field and from every upper window of the orfanotrofio , from which the occupants could also see on fine days, and equally unattainable, the peaks of the pre-Alps beyond Lake Garda, more than 150 kilometres away to the north, the prisoners cheered and waved at them.

But in spite of these distant encounters with girls we were not unduly troubled by the lusts of the flesh – perhaps it was something to do with the diet. As one of my friends said, after drawing on himself one or two random shots while craning out of one of the windows of the bar, ‘It isn’t that one just wants to poke them. I’m not sure if I could do it any more, but it would be heaven just to be with them,’ which for him was a pretty profound remark.

It was fortunate that most of us felt as he did. Had we felt otherwise there was not much we could do about it except pull our puddings, and to perform the operation while lying cheek by jowl with twenty-six other people in a room which was illuminated by searchlights, required a degree of stealth which had deserted most of us since leaving school. Nevertheless, some of the more vigorous among us revived these ancient skills.

The lavatories – the gabinetti – were even more unsuitable than the dormitories for this purpose. They were of the kind in which you squatted over a dark hole in the floor and at unpredictable intervals a huge head of water like the Severn Bore came swirling up and filled your boots. It was hazardous enough using the gabinetti for the purpose for which they had been constructed without lingering in them, even to study the astonishing graffiti which can only have been produced by people who owned wellington boots. One officer made a fortune in cigarettes, which were the hard currency of the camp, salvaging valuable objects such as lighters, false teeth and wrist watches which their owners had dropped down the holes while occupying the gabinetti and which had gone round the bends in the pipes.

Even more difficult for the residents in the orfanotrofio was any kind of homosexual act. Whatever loves there were between prisoners could only be expressed by looks and words or perhaps a surreptitious pressure of the hand, otherwise they had to remain locked away within the hearts and minds of the lovers until they could be free or were moved to some more private place. 2

Although they were outnumbered by officers drawn from the middle and lower classes who had had to be commissioned, just as they had been in the First War, because there were not enough members of the upper class to go round, it was the upper class which set the style in the orfanotrofio , just as they had done in the pre-war world outside; the sons and younger brothers of peers and Highland lairds, young merchant bankers, wine shippers and gentlemen jockeys who had ridden in the National, most of them concentrated in cavalry regiments, rifle regiments, one or two Highland regiments and the Brigade of Guards. These amateur soldiers, for they were mostly amateurs, and any professional soldiers who had the same sort of background (any others were soon made into figures of fun), made up the coteries of O.K. people who exercised power.

These people were very reluctant to consort with outsiders, but as the orfanotrofio was very overcrowded and it was almost impossible to summon up a coterie large enough to take over one of the bigger rooms which contained anything up to twenty-seven beds, and because these rooms were the most desirable because they were on the side of the building which faced away from the afternoon sun, and because not all coteries found other coteries agreeable to them for innumerable reasons which there is no space to go into here, the members always tried to ensure that the rest of the beds were occupied with what they regarded as more or less acceptable ballast, that is to say, or as they would have said if they had actually said it out loud, marginally O.K. people, the sort of people they were prepared to talk to and drink with while the war was on, and then would never see again. And this included a number of people whom they regarded as being downright common but who had the saving grace of being funny; and they took these comics on to the strength in much the same way as their ancestors had employed jesters and dwarfs, to while away the tedious hours between breakfast, lunch and dinner. Everyone else they ignored completely, unless they owned something worth buying, or had some skill which they could make use of to increase their comfort. It was not that they consigned these unfortunates to outer darkness; they simply never invited them in out of it.