Private Angelo

by Eric Linklater

  The motor-cycle came to a stop beside the lorries, and the officer with the torch sent a soldier to see who had come and ask what he wanted. The soldier quickly returned with a dispatch-rider. The two officers, their shoulders touching, read his message by torchlight, and then the senior fell into another paroxysm of coughing.

  When he recovered he announced, as though it were a matter of no importance, ‘Your execution has been postponed. The actual murderer has been captured, and you will be taken back to Montenero to await a final decision as to what is to be done with you.’

  He lighted a cigarette, but his throat was sore and he could not smoke it. He threw it away, and little Ercole the boot-black picked it up.

  On the way back to Montenero the Count felt that his legs were made of green cheese, but his chest was like a barrel bursting full of new wine, and he could not restrain himself from talking very volubly to all his fellow-travellers, who listened to never a word, for all were talking with an excitement no less than his.

  They were taken to the school again, and into the classroom decorated with pictures of the farmer’s year. Shortly after their return the Count saw Fest. With a soldier on either side, and one behind him, he walked past the open door. His head was high, and he seemed quite calm. He still wore his monocle of clouded tortoiseshell.

  Later in the day a squadron of Allied bombers attacked some German transport on the road near Montenero. A few of their bombs fell in Montenero itself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MOVING BRISKLY on his crutches, Simon Telfer was walking along a high cliff-road in Sorrento with Angelo beside him. At the entrance to a large white villa, temporarily occupied by the military, stood a tall sentry, gravely still. As Simon approached he sprang to attention, with smart and sudden action clapped his rifle on to his left shoulder, and with a hard hand resounding on the small of the butt, saluted. At every movement a small thick cloud of dust rose from his clothing as though he were an ancient carpet that someone was beating with a cane.

  From the cone of Vesuvius across the bay rose thick columns, densely spiralling, of purple smoke shot with a fierce flush or melting glow of pink. High into the tall and clouded sky they rose in oily whorls, until the upper wind caught and bent them suddenly, and sent them flying over the sea in a flat brown canopy from which descended the close volcanic dust. Oozing from the crater’s lip and trickling down the upper slope of the mountain came scarlet rivulets, thick and slow, of molten lava. Below them, under clouds of evil smoke, the glaciers of iron-dark cinders crawled down hill, filling the hollows, shirking heights and promontories, and crushing houses, tumbling pines and chestnut-trees in their sluggish flow.

  Angelo coughed and blew his nose, and turning to shake his fist at Vesuvius exclaimed, ‘This is too much! It is really too much!’

  ‘I agree with you,’ said Simon. ‘Whatever else one may ask from a landscape, one does expect stability.’

  Angelo smacked a puff of dust from either shoulder. ‘My poor Italy,’ he said. ‘Now your stuffing is coming out.’

  They were on their way to visit two of Simon’s friends, brother-officers who were spending a few days’ leave with an Italian family which, before the war, had occasionally acquired an American stepmother, sometimes an English daughter-in-law. Their villa commanded a view of the clouded bay, and there were about twelve or fourteen people in a handsomely furnished but somewhat chilly drawing-room. A well preserved woman of fifty, with dark eyes and gleaming teeth, was loudly declaring as they went in that the eruption had been caused by a treacherous airman who had privily dropped into the crater of Vesuvius a bomb weighing two thousand kilogrammes, which had acted like a violent emetic.

  A brisk debate on the weather followed, and everyone agreed that the exceptional severity of the winter, so unlike the temperate climate to which they were accustomed, was due to the air being shaken and battered by gunfire. A gentleman with a jaundiced eye said that the future of the world was dark indeed, for its atmosphere would be increasingly tormented by aeroplanes, ships in the stratosphere, and wireless; with appalling consequences.

  ‘Everywhere the climate will deteriorate,’ he said. ‘On five days out of seven there will be rain or sleet, and neither corn nor fruit will ripen.’

  An English daughter-in-law – pretty, plump and petulant – was describing to a lieutenant of the Royal Navy the hardships of life in Sorrento during time of war. A saturnine young man, passing with a bottle of Italian vermouth in one hand, a bottle of Plymouth gin in the other, halted and turned his head to listen. ‘For many years to come,’ he said, ‘the world is going to be full of people competing for attention with stories of what they have suffered. And those who have suffered the least will have the most to say. It will be extremely boring.’

  In a corner of the room Simon was looking at a replica, in bronze, of a whimsical piece of some ancient statuary’s work that one of his friends had recently bought in Herculaneum or Pompeii. It represented a satyr making satyric love to a briskly co-operating nymph.

  ‘Our follies,’ he said, ‘have such antiquity that it is almost impossible not to respect them.’

  ‘But our virtues,’ said his friend, ‘are like a litter of puppies untrained and delicate. Some are gun-shy, some will chase rabbits, and all require worming. Their noses cannot distinguish between a skylark and a grouse, their mouths are untaught, and most of them will be carried off by distemper.’ – With his forefinger he drew an arabesque on a dusty table-top, and added, ‘There’s brimstone in the air today. Oh, damn Vesuvius!’

  Angelo took the bronze and looked at it with eyes that swam in unshed tears. ‘Does it not make you sad,’ he said, ‘to think of all the beautiful girls there have been, whom we never knew and could not enjoy? To have missed so much: I can hardly bear it! I imagine them turning their heads so neatly on their little white necks to look at me as I come in, and their voices when they are soft and husky, and their slim round arms – and then I remember they are dead, they are the dust that the wind blows round the corner, and I am overcome by the cruelty of life.’

  ‘You must look forward, not back,’ said Simon. ‘Think about meeting and marrying Lucrezia –’

  ‘But there again I see the unfairness that rules the world!’ cried Angelo. ‘Because I am in love with Lucrezia I am faithful to her; or very nearly faithful. And therefore I am deprived of a hundred enjoyable experiences that a person less sincere, or not quite so sensitive as I, could quite easily obtain! It is wrong to suppose there are principles of natural justice in life, or that life is ever peaceful. Life is war, and we who are virtuous may well lose every battle but the last one.’

  ‘That,’ said Simon’s friend with noticeable stiffness, ‘is the prerogative of the English.’

  ‘Because you are good?’ asked Angelo.

  ‘It is an attractive hypothesis,’ said Simon.

  ‘There was a time when we aspired to goodness,’ said his friend, ‘and the world regarded us as hypocrites. Then we decided to pose as realists; and the world said we were effete.’

  ‘But why do you win your last battles?’ asked Angelo.

  ‘We are amateurs,’ said Simon’s friend with a noisy yawn, ‘and the amateur lasts longer than the professional.’

  At night the molten lava, creeping slowly in blunt-headed streams, shone like wet silver, and the dark air smelt more strongly of sulphur. So long as the eruption continued Angelo was melancholy and given to superstitious fear or dubious philosophy, but as soon as the volcano recovered its equilibrium he regained his good spirits, and discovered the truth of the matter. Vesuvius had felt the need to purge itself, and having purged was better. There was the symbol. Now Italy must take heed of it, and would. And oh, the content, the relaxed and satisfied euphoria that follows a deferred and large purgation! Yes, he declared, the future was bright.

  Some days later Simon received an official letter which informed him that he had now, as a result of his wound, been absent from duty for three we
eks, and had in consequence been reduced in rank from captain to lieutenant. This was in accordance with an old-established regulation of the War Office which saved the taxpayer money and dissuaded junior officers from staying in hospital longer than was strictly necessary. It also discouraged unruly ambition; for the British War Office has always set its face against militarism.

  Simon took a balanced view of his diminished status, made a hurried calculation, and thought it might save him a few pounds of income tax; but Angelo was deeply mortified and for several days refused to speak English, which, he said, was the language of injustice and ingratitude.

  Simon was in no hurry to return to duty until he heard that some part of Force 69 was about to begin training for a new operation, when he at once presented himself for medical examination, was declared fit, and promptly set out for Benevento, whither his company had lately removed. An elaborate secrecy enclosed their training programme, and Angelo, to begin with, had no part in it. But the general preparation for large events could not wholly be concealed, and as April vanished from the calendar and May came in, expectancy grew large and taut like a balloon plumping for the ascent.

  The battle began a little before midnight on May the eleventh. From the mountains beyond Cassino to the lighted water of Gaeta’s gulf a thunderstorm of gunfire bellowed among the hills and over the sea, and filled dark valleys with reverberant echoes. An army mustered from the five continents of the world advanced to the attack, to destroy the opposing army of Germany and its subject peoples, and to open the gates of Rome. On the Allied side there were Poles and Englishmen, Frenchmen and Scots, Irish and Welsh: that was the European contribution. There were New Zealanders who looked like Cromwell’s Ironsides and fought with pride and professional severity: that was the Antipodean levy. There were small and merry highlanders from the mountains of Nepal, tall ones from the passes of the Afghan frontier, bearded plainsmen from the Punjab, the heirs of Rajput chivalry and Shivaji’s Mahrattas: they were the voluntaries of Hindustan and High Asia. There was on the coast an American army enlisted from New England and California, from Oregon and Kansas and the Carolinas, and at the mountainous end of the line a Canadian corps: that was the New World’s share in the venture. From the fifth continent there came an armoured division, some of English stock and some of Boer descent, with black auxiliaries, and panting for the signal to start a wild and huge array of tribesmen from the Atlas mountains; and the latter, who were compendiously known as Goums, were the semper aliquid novi out of Africa.

  The Eighth Army had already won fame enough to make its story live, but none of its battles had been so fierce and hard as this, and the blood of many valiant men ran with the waters of the Rapido and the Garigliano to the Great Sea. In the mountains beyond Cassino the Poles were checked, and British troops and Canadians found the entrance to the Liri Valley held strongly against them. On the coast the Americans of the Fifth Army made progress, but slowly at first. Soon they would go like a river in spate, but to begin with their advance was hardly won. It was on the high hills near the middle of the line that the German defences were most decisively broken in the early days of the battle, and the troops who went through them, farther and faster than anyone else, were the wild men from Morocco: the Goums.

  Quickly they created, not merely a salient pointing like a spearhead to the north, but a legend of fear and a fabulous renown. They worked in silence and by night, and terror was their ally. They killed with long steel blades, and in lonely farmhouses the women dreaded them for another reason. Many a German sentry lay headless behind their patrols, and many a woman, it was said, looking up to see the swart and narrow face of a Goum at the window, had miscarried on the spot. In the broad pathway of their advance German outposts betrayed themselves by the chattering of their teeth, and the contadine fled from evening shadows screaming ‘Gli Marocchini, gli Marocchini!’

  When the battle had been raging for nearly a fortnight, Simon sent for Angelo and said to him in a casual way, ‘We are going to have a little party of our own. There is a rumour that the Germans are about to do something that we take a poor view of, and I’m going to see if I can put a stop to it. It will be quite a small party, but I’ve got permission to take you with us. You will be very useful, knowing your way about Rome as you do, and I thought you might like to come. We start tomorrow.’

  ‘And where is your party going to be?’ asked Angelo.

  ‘In Rome,’ said Simon. ‘Didn’t I make that clear?’

  ‘But Rome is still occupied by the Germans!’

  ‘That will add to the interest of it, don’t you think? – Why, what’s the matter?’

  Before Simon could catch him, Angelo fell to the ground in a dead faint. Simon made haste to turn him over, to loosen his belt, to pour water on his face and chafe his hands. As soon as he showed signs of recovery, Simon gave him rum in an enamel mug, and Angelo sat up, pale and shivering.

  ‘What is the matter?’ Simon repeated with anxiety in his voice. ‘Are you ill?’

  Angelo stared at him with wide-open, terrified eyes. Never in his life had he heard a more fearful proposal than this calm suggestion that he should join a party of desperadoes to break through the German lines, and enter by stealth the enemy’s citadel! The shock of hearing it had frightened the blood from his brain – and who, he thought with a passion of returning fear, who could blame it for retreating before so monstrous a prospect? Never, never would he consent to put himself in such agonizing jeopardy, and throw his life away to crown it! And yet, when he tried to speak, he could not find the words of refusal. He looked at Simon and thought: He and his friends are going, and they have asked me to join them because they regard me as a friend. They are very brave, they do not think deeply but they laugh a great deal, and in a careless way they are very kind: it is a good thing to have such friends, but Ο my God, what a price to pay! If I refuse to go, if I admit that I am too frightened, I shall lose their friendship for a certainty; and if I agree, and make myself one of them, I may very well lose my life, and how much good will friendship be then? What a choice for a May morning!

  ‘Give me some more rum,’ he said, and emptied the mug.

  He gasped and shuddered slightly, but soon felt a warmth inside him like a great lusty visitor coming with a laugh and a heart-stirring greeting into a cold quiet house. That was excellent. The visitor was most welcome, and when he laughed again it sounded throughout the house, and lamps were lighted in every room. But then, surprisingly, the visitor took charge of the situation, and borrowing Angelo’s vocal chords, his palate and teeth and tongue, addressed Simon in quite unforgivable terms and offered an explanation of the fainting-fit that was wildly mendacious. – It was the idea of seeing Rome again, long before he had considered the possibility of such happiness, that had keeled him over, he said. An emotional type was Angelo, quite unlike the English, and his lack of self-control must be forgiven him. – So said the rum-bold swaggering visitor, and a moment later, to make things infinitely and irretrievably worse, declared: ‘And I shall, of course, be delighted to come with you. We are a band of brothers and nothing shall divide us!’

  An hour later Angelo lay in his tent and felt his heart beating against his ribs like a funeral bell, with a slow and melancholy stroke. He had signed away his life, he was convinced of that, and in return for the indifferent friendship of a score or so of young men as callous as they were reckless – a friendship that would be long-lived if it lived for a week – he had done no more than ensure that his last week upon earth would be spent in a torment of gathering dread. Never a thought came into his mind that he could survive the adventure. Danger had always filled him with such awe that any danger had seemed allpowerful to destroy, and this was no common danger but stark peril for a hero to gamble with. He was self-doomed, there was no doubt of it, and he listened as he lay to his heart that beat a funeral-knell.

  In the morning the face in his shaving-mirror looked at him so whitely, from such dark enormous eyes, th
at he was at first startled and then impressed by it. His cup of warm water grew cold while he studied it. It was the reflection, he thought, of a tragic but romantic figure. It was the face, he told himself, of a man of destiny. It had caught its pallor from the coldness of fate, and he could not avoid his allotted task however deeply his eyes might mourn the necessity. – This perception did not exactly give him courage, but lent him a kind of resignation, or hypnotized his wilder fears, and let him pass the next few days without drawing much attention to his utter unsuitability for service with Force 69.

  Simon, quickly promoted to captain again, was to command the foray. His party consisted of two subalterns and a score of men. They were all heavily armed, and though Angelo knew most of them fairly well, and had seen photographs of their wives and sweethearts that made him feel very much at home with them, he was deeply impressed by their appearance in battle-array. How little, he thought, their wives and sweethearts really knew of them.

  They went first to Naples, and there before nightfall embarked in a very small ship for the port of Anzio. Fortunately the sea was calm, and nothing interrupted their passage. The starlit darkness was warm as new milk, and Simon, sitting under the lee of the deckhouse in a mood of pleasant anticipation, told Angelo what they were proposing to do.

  Allied sympathizers in Rome had reported that the Germans were preparing to blow-up the bridges over the Tiber. The Allies, who were looking forward to pursuing a defeated German army across the bridges, would be seriously hindered by their destruction, and Simon’s task was to prevent it. The circumstances, he said, would probably favour him, because the Germans would not explode the charges until they had withdrawn all but the last rearguard of their troops, and by then there might be some confusion in the city. There would be a period favourable for attack, and if he could strike in the very bull’s-eye of opportunity, they might well be successful. They would enter Rome from the north …