‘Yes, I think so. Will you do rearguard while I go on and see how Corporal Trivet is?’
‘Have no fear,’ said Pasquale. ‘I will protect you.’
Tom Trivet, with one arm round Angelo’s neck and the other hand tucked into his shirt, was keeping a good pace, but his cheeks were as white as a bone, his nose waxen, and his right sleeve drenched with blood. He was unwilling to stop, but when they came to a small stream Simon washed and examined the wound, and discovered that the tip of his shoulder-blade had been broken. He dressed and bandaged the wound as well as he could, and they continued their march to the south. Before it was dark they had reached a friendly farmhouse on the east bank of the Arno, where they waited for Pasquale and the cover of night.
Pasquale arrived about two hours later, still in high spirits, and said that the German patrol, now reinforced, had apparently picked up a false trail; the Tedeschi, he said, were watching the road and the river-bank in the neighbourhood of Rignano, well to the north of where they were. He himself had had no trouble.
Simon was a little worried and considerably annoyed by the disappearance of Fest. It was ridiculous, he told himself, to suppose that Fest would betray them; he had a long record of hostile acts against the Germans, and his assassination of a General, a Colonel, and their driver seemed to indicate, if not sympathy with the Allies, at least a genuine antipathy to their enemies. But from the military point of view his behaviour was most unorthodox, and his loyalty – well, loyalty was a difficult word to define, but even were it given its broadest definition, Fest would still appear to be deficient in it. He was fundamentally selfish, Simon decided. It was a vice that foreigners, and foreign countries, were much addicted to. They were selfish and irresponsible, and there were far too many of them in the world. – So thought Simon, brooding over Fest’s unloyalty, and his mind discoloured by it.
His mood softened, however, when he turned to Pasquale, for Pasquale, his leathern face creased with delight and his broad hands filling the air with gestures, was describing for the tenth time how he had hit a giant Tedescho in the noggin, and laid him like a dead ox on the grass; and their hosts, a sturdy black-browed farmer and his broad-built wife, who were known for the help they had given to many British and American airmen who had been shot down and gone into hiding, were encouraging him with great exclamations of pleasure; and the farmer was filling, brim-full and spilling over, everyone’s glass from a new flask of wine; and four children in the doorway, wide of eye and sucking their thumbs, were listening as though it were the first fairy-tale they were hearing; and the farmer’s wife, without a thought for the morrow, was cutting for her guests’ entertainment her last loaf of bread and the knuckle-end of her last smoked ham.
Suddenly regretting the ungenerosity of his thoughts, Simon raised his glass to Pasquale and said, ‘You’re a good fellow, Pasquale, and you’ve done well.’
‘Right in the noggin,’ said Pasquale happily. ‘A Tedescho six and a half feet high, the biggest I ever saw, but bic-boc! and down he goes, arse over tip.’
‘When the war is finished,’ said Simon to the farmer, ‘I shall come back to Italy.’
‘Why not?’ said the farmer. ‘Before the war, all you English used to come to Italy. Italy is very beautiful. Naturally you will return, and perhaps quite soon.’
‘Speriamo,’ said Pasquale.
‘But the war’s not over yet,’ said the farmer’s wife.
‘Pazienza,’ said the farmer. ‘Even wars come to an end.’
A few minutes later Simon left them to reconnoitre the river-crossing, and when he came back, with the news that all was quiet, Angelo went to wake Tom Trivet, who had been sleeping in the farmer’s bed. Trivet woke in a fright and began to talk with rambling excitement; but a glass of brandy seemed to calm him, and presently they set out with Simon in the lead, Angelo and Trivet a hundred yards behind him, and Pasquale in the rear. The night was dark but clear, with clouds like black continents dividing a grapeskin sky, and the Arno running noisily, flushed with the day’s rain. They had no great difficulty in fording it, however, and two hours later they were in the upland country to the west. Then Trivet collapsed, and they found that the wound in his leg was bleeding again.
They carried him into the shelter of a nearby copse, and Pasquale went in search of a neighbouring friend of his, another farmer who had, from time to time, succoured Allied soldiers who had escaped from their captors. He returned before dawn with a short ladder, half a dozen eggs, and a disconcerting account of the increased number of German troops in the neighbourhood. The farm where they had hoped to leave Trivet, in comfort and reasonable security, was occupied by the enemy.
All day they lay hidden, listening to the not-far-distant noises of an intermittent battle, and fed thinly on biscuits, chocolate, and raw eggs. For most of the time Tom Trivet slept, and when evening came he seemed better, though he was still too weak to walk. Both Angelo and Pasquale knew the country they were in, and after long discussion over a map Simon had come to the conclusion that by keeping to the higher slopes of the Chianti mountains they might break through the German lines and reach the nearest troops of the Eighth Army before another dawn.
‘I don’t think they’re much more than ten miles away,’ he said, ‘and if we can average a mile and a half an hour, carrying Trivet, we can do it in seven hours, and that gives us a little margin of darkness for safety. What do you think, Pasquale?’
‘By myself I could go through quite easily,’ said Pasquale. ‘Carrying the Corporal, it will be more difficult, and hard work. But not impossible.’
‘Angelo?’
‘We must do everything we can for him,’ said Angelo very earnestly. ‘He should be in hospital now, and delay may be dangerous.’
Angelo had spent the day keeping flies off the Corporal while he slept. His heart was full of gratitude, and devotion, and self-reproach. Not only had Tom Trivet saved his life, or saved him from captivity, and suffered grievous wounds in consequence; but he had set Angelo an example in generosity which he now saw as a great and humiliating lesson. He, Angelo, had committed a fault unpardonable in a soldier: he had sought safety in a ditch when his plain duty was to stand up – for the short time it would take to cross a narrow road – and thereafter fight or run as he might be ordered. He had failed in his duty, he had sinned against discipline. But Tom had forgiven him and proved his forgiveness by risking his own life to rescue him. How much more, then, should Angelo forgive his dear Lucrezia, whose fault he could pardon at no cost to his skin, but only a little wound to his pride? Yes, Tom had taught him a lesson. A man should be generous always – and the mere thought of his coming magnanimity filled his mind with the anticipation of its pleasure.
‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘Corporal Trivet needs medical attention, and though it may be difficult to carry him through the German lines, I do not think we should be deterred by that.’
‘Good for you,’ said Simon.
‘And afterwards, I very much hope that you will allow me to return to Pontefiore.’
‘For any particular purpose?’ asked Simon.
‘I have set my heart on being married at the earliest possible moment,’ said Angelo.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WHEN THEY HAD TIED Tom Trivet firmly to the ladder which Pasquale had found, Angelo and Pasquale lifted it to their shoulders, inserting their heads between convenient rungs at either extremity, and began their night-march, led by Simon some forty yards in front of them. Good fortune and their choice of the most arduous route enabled them to avoid the Germans, but nothing could mitigate the burden of Tom Trivet. They had to carry him up steep hill-paths to lofty starlit ridges, where a boisterous wind assaulted them, and down again by tortuous rocky trails. They followed sheep-tracks across ground so perilously aslant that Angelo often feared they would lose their footing and go tumbling and rolling into unseen depths; and they forced their way through thickets of tall bracken. The poles of the ladder pressed deeper and
deeper into their aching shoulders, or leaned horribly against their necks when they walked upon a slope. Whenever they were climbing, Tom Trivet’s weight hung backward so that they were in danger of being garrotted, and when they went downhill their heads were bowed in agonizing obeisance. Long before midnight Angelo began to suspect that a wounded giant lay on the ladder. By two o’clock in the morning the giant had acquired some uncommonly heavy luggage: his tombstone, perhaps, the field-gun that he used for a fowling-piece, two thousand demijohns of the local wine, and so forth. A couple of hours later, pain had created a fantasy more malignant still, and the giant was an ogre whose monstrous thumbs were pressing Angelo and Pasquale, like drawing-pins into a board, deep into the resistant earth. Angelo wept and prayed, Pasquale groaned and swore. Tom Trivet was silent, for he was unconscious again. And Simon, with no mercy for himself or them, still sought improbable paths and compelled them to follow.
When daylight came they were some three hundred feet below the crest of a great green hill, at the upper corner of a straggling wood that climbed its southern slope, and there was nothing to be seen of the enemy, nothing of the English army. Simon at last gave the order to halt and rest, and Angelo, so weary that he could no longer bear even the sight of other men, staggered a little farther downhill, a hundred yards or more, and falling into a clump of ferns at the edge of the wood was sound asleep within the instant.
He was awakened, when the sun stood overhead, by the iron growl and screech of approaching tanks, and immediately was seized with a fear of their crushing him where he lay hidden among the ferns; but as he did not know whether they were British or German he dared not get up and run away, lest he expose himself to the enemy. The leading tank halted not far from him, and a little while later Angelo heard men’s voices. He held his breath to listen, and then had to bite his fingers to keep his teeth from chattering. It was not English they were speaking.
‘En wat is daar nou te doen noudat ons hier aangeland het?’ said one of the invisible soldiers.
‘Ons Kan die natuurskoon bewonder,’ replied another. ‘Daar is, goddank, niks anders om te doen nie.’
There was a pleasant tune in their voices that was certainly not German, but the words were more like German than anything else, and Angelo was well aware that the enemy had recruited foreign legions who spoke in many tongues. He lay still for three minutes more, tormented by doubt as well as fear, and then, with relief that merged quickly into gratitude and pure happiness, heard other voices and words – familiar English words – that now seemed inexpressibly kind and comforting.
‘Shock me,’ exclaimed a hoarse and breathless Cockney, ‘if ever I want to see a shocking mountain again! It’s like that shocking old nursery rhyme, this shocking war is:
The good old Duke of York,
He had a thousand men,
He marched ’em up to the shocking top of a shocking hill,
And shocking well marched ’em down again.
I’m browned off, I am, and my shocking feet are on fire.’
How sweetly they fell upon his ears, the homely English syllables! He was free, he must be free, in the company of these good fellows who spoke the tongue that Shakespeare spake; and crawling softly through the fern he saw presently some half-a-dozen tall soldiers, wiping their sweaty brows, of the Grenadier Guards, and with them the crews of two tanks of the South African Division. They appeared to be on terms of the warmest friendship, and the voices that had lately been speaking Afrikaans now joined with Cockney in genial debate. Angelo, not yet revealing himself, watched them and listened with the greatest pleasure until a Guardsman, coming into the fern on business of his own, tripped and fell on him. This caused some confusion, and Angelo for a moment or two was in near danger of his life, but saved it by his own command of English.
‘I am not a shocking spy!’ he exclaimed indignantly. ‘I am a shocking co-belligerent!’
They listened to him then, both Englishmen and South Africans, with a proper respect, and readily went with him to look for Simon and Pasquale and Corporal Trivet.
Simon, they discovered, had already met the Grenadiers and was talking to one of their officers who happened to be an old friend of his. Tom Trivet had been carried away and put in the doctor’s care, and Pasquale, who had never before seen tanks on a mountain-top, was patting their steel flanks with admiring hands, as though they had been fat cattle.
For a little while, in this small segment of it, the war had the innocent look of some old pastoral foray. The day was fine, and the great shoulders of the green Chianti hills showed firm and muscular beneath a tall blue sky. A gentle wind rustled the bracken and whispered in the branches of some lonely trees. Two officers with field-glasses, patient and quiet as deerstalkers in a Highland forest, searched the opposing mountainside for a possible head; and the Guardsmen and the South Africans – the sons of Queen Victoria’s infantry and of Kruger’s long-sighted riflemen – lay gossiping together and drinking tea.
A tank moved slowly forward, and its gun was depressed till its barrel lay on a downward slant like the slope of the hill. Three shots were fired, and from the wall of a farmhouse in the valley below floated small clouds of dust. A man, crouching, ran from the farm into a copse behind it, and in the flat fields to the east little khaki figures could be seen advancing. Three aeroplanes, circling their target, stooped like hawks upon it, and as they climbed again tall plumes of smoke rose behind them. The sound of distant machine-gun fire mingled with the stridulation of grasshoppers.
Angelo and Pasquale ate some bread and bully, and went to sleep again. Then Simon sent for them, and they found him, half a mile downhill, sitting with a Guardsman in a borrowed jeep. They had no difficulty in returning to Pontefiore, for the curving front of battle was now several miles to the north of it, and peace, with a look of stunned surprise, lay upon the ruined village. In the castle they found Fest drinking white wine with the Countess.
Simon’s manner, when they met, was cold and constrained, but Fest was bland and smiling, and the Countess took such obvious pleasure in his company that Simon had to master his feelings and assume a friendlier air than he had any mind to. What would otherwise have been an acrimonious discussion became in fact, at the Countess’s table, a protracted dinner-party with Fest, on her right, playing the part of the distinguished guest, accomplished in conversation, until they retired to her drawing-room, where the Countess herself kept the talk going with anecdotes of her early life.
Angelo, in the meantime, had found Lucrezia, proposed immediate marriage to her, and been accepted. Lucrezia’s objections to a wedding in war-time had seemingly vanished, and though Angelo warned her that he would certainly have to leave her again, she made no reference to the sad plight and many difficulties of a young wife, married one week and left alone the next, which had been the mainstay of her argument the year before. She had responded, indeed, with such a melting warmth as Angelo had never seen in her. She had hung upon his neck as though in utter abandonment to his will or care, and lying in his arms had looked up at him with eyes so lovely in their trust and gratitude that Angelo, at one moment ravished with delight, was at the next intoxicated with the pride of his triumphant manhood.
He was, however, somewhat taken aback by the coolness with which she listened to the tale of Tom Trivet’s heroism and the wounds he had received. She made no concealment of her agitation when Angelo spoke of the danger that he himself had been in, when he found himself on the wrong side of the road; but the news of Tom Trivet’s wounding did not affect her in the least.
‘He is all right now?’ she asked, with plain indifference in her voice.
‘By no means!’ said Angelo indignantly. ‘He was hit in two places and it will be a long time before he is all right again. He will recover, certainly, but at this moment, I suppose, he is lying in great pain; while I, who owe everything to him, am alive and well and supremely happy.’
‘Oh darling, how glad I am that you are alive, and ver
y, very glad that you are happy!’
‘But we must also think about Corporal Trivet –’
‘Let us think about him some other time. Just now it is enough to think only about ourselves.’
On subsequent reflection he admitted that her loss of interest in Tom Trivet would be a decided advantage to their married state; but he was surprised, and dubiously hurt, and even alarmed a little by the completeness of her unconcern. That Tom had jilted her could not be denied, and to get a girl with child and then desert her was something, of course, quite unforgivable. But even so, the spectacle of unforgiveness was a trifle shocking; or so it appeared to Angelo.
He was, however, far too happy in his possession of Lucrezia to waste time in fault-finding, and early the next morning he sought the village priest and told him that he wanted to be married as soon as possible.
The village church and the village priest had both suffered badly in the bombing of Pontefiore. The church, with its west wall blown down and most of the roof gone, stood wide open to the sun and the rain, and the priest, having lost the placid view of life that had protected him for half a century, now seemed equally exposed to the elements. He shivered in the noonday heat, he was frightened of the dark, and when Angelo said firmly that the day after tomorrow would be most suitable for a wedding, he at once agreed. The sacraments, he said, were always available for those who needed them, and marriage was a sacrament like baptism and penance. ‘Though indeed,’ he said, ‘I should not be happy if you had to be carried to it, as you were to your baptism, or returned for it again and again, as undoubtedly you will in penitence. Oh no! One marriage is enough for anyone, and you’ll come to it on your own legs or not at all. – Bless you, my child. Our poor church is draughty now, but I dare say it will serve.’
Private Angelo Page 22
