by Tom Carver
One of the local farmers invited prisoners to stay in his barn and took the first fourteen who raised their hands. By putting them in the barn rather than the house, he could claim that they had hidden in there without him realising. He promised to bring them food and water when he could. His example was followed by others and throughout the night, small groups were led away by local farmers.
Late that afternoon, de Burgh called his company commanders together for the final time. From tonight onwards, he said, each company was on its own. Each commander was told to decide whether to break up into smaller groups, to stay, or to move off. When the Dean returned with the news, Richard called a vote among his twelve men on what they wanted to do: about one third wanted to head north to the Swiss border, others voted to try to reach the Gulf of Genoa, believing that the Allies might land raiding parties in the area.
During that day as he sat in the wood, Richard had formed his own plan: he had decided he was going to try to walk south down the Apennines to find his stepfather. It was the furthest of all the options and much depended on how quickly the Eighth Army was able to battle its way north – at that moment Monty had only a toehold on the Italian mainland 500 miles to the south – but Richard was sceptical of talk about landing parties and rescuers coming from the sea and he didn’t like the idea of sitting still, hiding in someone’s barn, as many were choosing to do, to wait for the Allies to get to them.
He had enjoyed the life of Fontanellato and had felt the occasional twinge of guilt for not having tried more actively to escape. But to his surprise, once he was out of the camp, he found that he wanted to keep moving. Perhaps there was a desire to show Monty what he was capable of, though he wouldn’t have acknowledged it.
He could hardly conceive how many obstacles lay ahead. He was heading into the eye of the battle. To reach Monty meant having to dodge through the German forces, by approaching them from the rear and breaking out across the front line. If he wasn’t killed by the Germans he stood a good chance of being killed by artillery or bombing by his own forces. Even now, the Germans were building a series of heavily defended lines stretching across the country from Rome to the Adriatic coast. Five of his men decided to join him on the route south:
I took a vote of the remainder of my platoon (Hargreaves, Hartley, Bligh, Lyndon and Clyma) and they were in favour of making a bid for it.
Just then the Dean approached Richard to ask if he could join them. He explained that all bar five of his company had formed their own groups. Just he and his small headquarters staff remained. Richard was reluctant: six people was already a lot; twelve would be much harder to hide. But he felt he could not say no, after all, the Dean was a colonel and Richard was only a captain. Richard assumed that the Dean would take over command, but he showed no sign of wanting the responsibility and it was tacitly agreed that Richard would lead, despite being the junior of the two. He had the compass, the map and a rudimentary grasp of Italian. He had diligently attended a few classes in camp and knew enough words to make himself understood.
Towards dusk, reports started to trickle back from POWs who’d left the night before that there were large numbers of German troops guarding the Via Emilia and the Bologna–Milan railway which ran side by side only three miles away. One party was even rumoured to have turned back. This was something of a blow. Richard knew that the railway and the road lay directly in their path; if they wanted to head south they had no choice but to cross them both.
11.
IT WAS A CLEAR night with a full moon. They walked for six miles, guided by the sound of goods trains shunting through the darkness. Richard had decided to try and find a crossing point some distance away from the place where the others had attempted it. As they drew near, he sent a scout ahead to try to find out where the German guards were, but he returned having failed to get close enough to see. Hargreaves was then sent to try; after twenty minutes, a dog began barking furiously at a nearby farm. Worried that Hargreaves might have been captured, Richard told everyone to pull back. He then sent out a third scout who by luck managed to find Hargreaves in the dark. Hargreaves whispered that there was a German sentry less than twenty yards ahead. Unused to being on the run, it took the two of them a long time to crawl clumsily away.
Just before dawn, the twelve POWs managed to cross the road and the railway line. Exhausted by their efforts, they collapsed into a wood beside a small river near the village of Santa Margherita. They had travelled all of seven miles from the wood at Rovacchia. Like all the others, they had brought minimal amounts of food with them from the camp. As they sat in the wood it was obvious that they would never survive unless they were helped by the local Italians. The first encounters with the locals in Rovacchia had been positive, but how could they tell who were pro-Allies and who were Fascists?
They were desperate for water, but no one volunteered for the job of being the first to find out. Richard was hardly keen but he approached the nearest farmhouse and knocked on the door. “Avete un po’ di acqua?” he asked hesitantly, when a stout-looking woman opened the door.
Without saying a word, she indicated with her head where the pump stood in the corner of the farmyard.
“Grazie.”
Richard went back to the others and one by one the twelve of them went up to the farm to have a drink and wash under the pump, watched through the net curtains by the family. They waited until dark before leaving. Away from the road and the railway line there was little evidence of Germans, so Richard insisted that his group march in formation to maintain as much speed as possible. As they passed through a small hamlet, a group of Italians who had been sitting in the road ran away when they saw them approach, thinking they were Germans. Richard wrote in his diary:
It was only with great difficulty that I managed to coax them out. Then when they realised we were English they couldn’t do enough for us and wine was produced though it was near midnight. Halted at 0130 in a pretty little valley.
The next day, they decided to start walking in the late afternoon. Despite the nervousness of the locals the previous night, there was little sign of enemy presence away from the main roads. Marching briskly along the lanes, they grabbed bunches of grapes off the vines as they passed. They began to relax, savouring the joy of being on an open road and no longer in captivity. The warm September sun browned their arms and they pointed out to each other the distant medieval castles and the teams working in the fields who waved occasionally as they passed. It almost felt as if they were on a walking holiday.
About nine o’clock that evening, as they were passing a house, someone yelled out a greeting in English. They stopped and found that the owner of the house was an American woman. She advised them to head towards a small village called Contile which she said was friendly. It sat atop a precipitous hill and it was nearly midnight when they entered the cobbled streets which wrapped themselves around the church in the centre like the tail of a snake. Richard saw a light on in a workshop and knocked on the door.
Inside, several men were trying to mend a piece of machinery. Richard asked if there was a barn they could spend the night in. As one of the workers led them out to his farm, most of the village trailed after them in the warm darkness, fascinated by the sight of twelve Englishmen on the run.
They sank into the hay, relieved to be no longer lying on the stony ground. The next morning, being a Sunday, the Dean, who was a catholic, decided it was safe enough to attend mass in the village church. It was in Latin, which the Dean understood better than Italian. Afterwards, outside the church, an elderly widow approached him, clutching a postcard her son from England. The Dean gathered that he was in a POW camp outside London. She had heard from him only once, she said.
She insisted that the whole group go to her tiny cottage to view her son’s picture.
“How is he being cared for? The postcard says nothing,” she said, her voice full of the pain of separation.
“He will be properly treated,” Richard assured her.
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They told the villagers that they were going to lie up for the day in a nearby beech wood; by the time they got there, a number of villagers had already arrived with pots and pans and had begun to build a fire for them. Children came to gaze at the unusual visitors bringing with them gifts of bread, fatty bacon and eggs from their parents. One man brought his axe and showed them how to chop up wood into small staves to make a proper outdoor stove for cooking.
Spent the day in a field outside the village where we “received” visitors. Listened to the wireless which was depressing. No mention of any landings further north than Salerno and things don’t seem to be going too well there. We must split up tomorrow.
They wondered where all the other prisoners were and whether any of them had been captured. They were surprised not to have come across anyone else; it was as if the countryside had swallowed them up. They leant back against the trees and discussed what to do, watched always by an outer ring of curious onlookers. Everyone agreed that the further south they travelled, the more concentrated the German forces would become. It was clear that twelve was too big a number for a group in hiding, and it was decided to split up into twos and threes.
Richard offered to go with the Dean. He could tell that no one else was keen to travel with him; they were worried that his age would slow them down. Moreover, the temptation for someone to betray them was much greater because the reward for handing in a senior British officer like a colonel was considerable, and the punishment for sheltering one grievous.
The next morning, they pooled the money that they had each been given before leaving camp and then divided it equally between everyone. It came to 147 lire each. Someone divided up what was left of the Red Cross food, which worked out to one tin of meat and one packet of biscuits each. They made copies of each other’s maps and those who could not speak Italian hurriedly wrote out lists of useful Italian words.
At 2 pm, after one last meal together, Richard and the Dean said goodbye to the others and moved out. In the next village they came to, they exchanged their British uniforms for civilian clothes. For some reason the only clothes that were on offer were two thin blue suits; Richard’s was too short in the leg and the Dean’s didn’t button up at the front, but they both held onto their army boots and Richard kept his thick battledress jacket. The Dean acquired an Italian army haversack and Richard made a backpack from an old grain sack.
They made an odd pair; the Dean twenty years older than Richard, puffing up the hills with his walking stick, always hoping that around the next corner would be a little farmhouse where he could sit beside the fire in the farmer’s kitchen and have a cigarette and always hoping that a cup of wine, some bread and cheese and possibly a bowl of pasta might come his way. Richard, earnest and energetic, was constantly checking their route, worrying about the progress of the war and trying to ferret information out of the farmers’ families about the dangers ahead. Their accounts of their journey together are markedly different in style: Richard’s is low key, succinct and practical, clocking each passing day with a minimum of flourish. The Dean’s, written shortly after he returned home but based on the notes he kept on the run, is full of detail about the places that they travelled through, and particularly the food they ate and the places in which they slept. For him, the pro-gress of the war itself was no more than a background nuisance, like inclement weather on a camping holiday.
Richard asked the Dean to tell everyone they met that he was a captain, not a colonel, to attract less attention. The Dean, who wore his colonelcy lightly, was happy to oblige. The differences in their age and temperament were what made the relationship work. As Richard shrewdly noted, he might well have quarrelled with a man of his own age, “whereas the Dean practically always agreed to what I proposed”.
In those opening days when the weather was still warm and there was little sign of danger, my father’s diary conveys the impression of a young man delighted to be free, someone open to adventure. The two of them carried nothing in their backpacks, except a few articles of clothing, chunks of bread, the occasional bunches of grapes, dried figs or hard-boiled eggs if they were fortunate enough to be given them. My father also carried the bible sent to him in camp by Aunt Bulley. They relied from one day to the next on the hospitality of others.
Richard clearly enjoyed the process of talking with the locals and choosing the route. They soon gave up trying to work out who the Fascists were – it seemed like no one was nostalgic for Mussolini, or if they were, they kept it well hidden. Starved of company and distractions in the countryside, people would walk alongside the two British men every time they entered a village, peppering them with questions.
“Where is your family and your casa?”
“How long will it take to walk to Inghilterra?”
“Poveri ragazzi!”
Then would come the invitation to have a drink, which the Dean was always quick to accept. Extra chairs would be brought and a circle would form around them in the street while the shy stood and stared. The men who had fought alongside the British in the First World War and those who had worked in America were the most willing to talk. The villages of central Italy were well used to the presence of conquering armies. The contadini – the Italian peasant farmers – had often lived under the rule of distant powers. They had a fierce independence and a lively sympathy for anyone who bucked the system; had it been the Allies who were winning, they may well have helped German prisoners to flee in the opposite direction.
*
On 20th September, twelve days after they had left Fontanellato, Richard and the Dean entered a small village near Busana. At first everything seemed normal. The locals said they had seen large numbers of Germans passing through the area heading south but none had stayed. They were invited to an inn where they were offered some eggs. They asked if they could be boiled and while they waited, two glasses of Marsala appeared. As they sat drinking in the tiny front room, the doorway crowded as usual with curious faces staring in as if they were zoo animals, an argument began between some communists and monarchists. The communists said that the British and Americans were only playing at war and claimed that the only true fighters were the Russians. Suddenly a woman broke through the two camps yelling, “Tedeschi! Tedeschi!”
There was panic as the inn emptied into the street while two German soldiers tried to force their way through. Richard and the Dean grabbed their sacks and raced out the back door of the pub, through a garden and over a low fence. The Dean, slower and older, tried to jump the fence and failed. One of the Germans emerged from the inn and yelled at him to stop. But he managed to get up and half fall, half clamber over the rickety wooden structure to run down the slope after Richard. For several hours they lay on an island in a dry riverbed listening for sounds of pursuit but none came. It was their first brush with the Germans – a sign that life was going to become more challenging.
After that, they decided to stay on the high ground, following the backbone of the Apennines which ran down Italy, where there were fewer roads and centres of population and which the Germans had little interest in occupying. Food in the hillside farms was still fairly plentiful. At every stop they would be given bread and cheese and often polenta, which the Dean ate only with the greatest reluctance. Eggs and tomatoes were more precious, as was pasta, which had to be made by hand. If they were hungry as they walked, they would pull blackberries off the bushes, and the roads were lined with vineyards full of ripe grapes.
Every night they slept in barns rather than in the open – and occasionally, when luck was on their side, the farmer invited them into his house if he felt sure that there were no Germans nearby. The children would usually be turfed out of their beds to make way for the guests and in the morning there would be a cup of coffee and a piece of fresh bread. Usually they would be expected to leave when the farmer went out to work in the fields; Richard learnt not to ask to stay more than one night.
During the final week of September, the weather started
to deteriorate. The long bucolic summer evenings were replaced by several days of slanting rain. Their thin Italian cotton suits were quickly soaked through. They crossed the main Bologna–Pistoia road, narrowly missing a convoy of German trucks that sped past full of soldiers. There were lots of rumours that the Allies had landed nearby on the coast at Livorno, but when Richard finally managed to listen to the BBC in a house, the news was disappointing. On the east coast, Monty had moved quickly up as far as Bari – the port where Richard had been interned nearly a year earlier – but was now encountering strong resistance, while the Americans were still trying to fight their way out of Naples after landing in Salerno.
On Friday 1st October, hidden in the middle of a huge beech wood, the trees still thick and green, they came across the Eremo dei Frati Bianchi, the Hermitage of the White Friars, which had been built by the followers of St Francis in the thirteenth century. They could see the huts of the hermits on the slopes behind the main building as they approached.
Richard rang the bell, while the Dean waited around the corner in case of an unfriendly reception. The door was opened by a well-fed monk who laughed at their caution and waved at the Dean to come out of the shadows.
“We have another British officer resting here who is sick,” said the monk.
“Can we see him?” asked Richard.
They were shown into a monk’s cell where they found an Englishman dressed in pyjamas and lying in clean sheets looking perfectly healthy.
“Good afternoon. I’m the 6th Earl of Ranfurly.”
The Dean recorded the moment in his diary:
We saw Lord R. in almost forgotten luxury, sitting up in bed with the remains of a very good lunch of mutton and wine on a tray by his side, and although one could hardly complain of the cold, a nice fire in the grate completed the perfect sick room. Lord R. looked far from death sitting up smoking a cigarette. He told us he had come in the previous day suffering from a slight cold.
