by Tom Carver
Richard was a firm Anglican, a believer not only in Christ but also in the rituals of the Church. He was surprised to find that Donato’s atheism didn’t bother him. One evening he confided in Donato about who his stepfather was.
“It’s better the family does not know this,” Donato said. “It will only make them more frightened and more reluctant to let you stay.”
Richard could see that Donato was having difficulty persuading his brothers that they should continue to look after the two fugitives. But Donato clearly longed to make some contribution to beating the Germans since he was not fighting, and here was an opportunity that fate had given him. He was determined to get Richard and Jim home safely, especially since they had come so far.
Donato professed himself disgusted with his own people who had not had the spirit to rebel against Mussolini’s yoke and he always said that he intended to go out to the Argentine after the war and start afresh. I used to tell him that his duty was to his own people and that he was the kind of man who would be needed to rebuild post-war Italy and personally I think he will stay and go into politics.
On the morning of 21st November, as he accompanied them back through the woods to the cave, Donato said he had told their family doctor, Doctor Cucchini, about what they were doing.
“He has a house in the village but at the moment he is hiding somewhere nearby because he is afraid he will be recruited by the Germans into the army. It’s important he knows about you in case you get sick.”
Richard sensed that Donato was anticipating that they were going to stay for a while. He paused and pointed across the valley at a small white house standing on its own on the road leading out of Roccascalegna.
“Do you see that house? That’s the house of Doctor Cucchini’s mistress. From there she can see anyone leaving or entering the village. If she sees a German patrol heading this way, she lowers a sheet out of that window above her front door. That’s a signal to us to make sure you are back in the cave and not at the farmhouse.”
*
In the third week of November it started raining heavily and did not stop for ten days. The Sangro River swelled to twice its normal size, flooding the fields for hundreds of yards on either side. In places the icy cold river was 100 feet deep. Ten miles away at Paglieta, Monty grilled his meteorologists, desperate for a break in the weather. The pontoon bridges that the Royal Engineers had put in place had all been swept away; all the tracks in the area had turned into treacherous run-offs of mud and icy slush.
A couple of weeks earlier, disaster had struck Monty’s camp. Monty’s artillery chief had been captured while he was reconnoitring possible crossing points on the river. The German patrol had seized several of his maps which showed the points on the Gustav Line where Monty intended to attack. Field Marshal Kesselring immediately pushed more troops into the area to reinforce the high ground on the north bank. Monty realised that he was not going to be able to cross the river on multiple fronts. Instead, he focused all his resources on extending and holding a single bridgehead. But getting even a few units across the monstrous torrent under enemy fire was a long, slow process.
That night the Germans used flame-throwers and tanks to try to prevent the Allies from establishing any kind of bridgehead on the northern bank of the river. But with the help of repeated air raids by the RAF, Monty’s forces slowly dislodged the Germans from the high ground and they were able to establish a permanent footing on the north bank. The Gustav Line was beginning to crack.
“Many were drowned. Eventually we succeeded,” Monty wrote on 27th November.
Unaware of the Allies’ progress, Richard became more and more downcast. The continual rain made it impossible to stay dry in the cave. He and Jim crouched under the overhangs trying to find patches where the water did not come through. They scratched at the growing colonies of lice on their bodies.
Donato said the wireless reported that Allied troops were fighting in the Sangro valley below Altino… Tomorrow we might be free.
But it didn’t happen.
17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd: days pass. 23rd: got rather depressed.
Depressed is not a word my father used lightly. But it seems at this point that he really began to lose heart. He and Jim started to believe they were not going to make it; that they were going to be recaptured right at the finish line. They felt as imprisoned as they had felt in the POW camp – they were trapped in a wood surrounded by thousands of German troops with winter closing in. Occasionally, Richard wondered whether they should try to “disappear” into the countryside, but Jim had no interest in such a plan. He remained as determined as ever to get home.
One morning Richard was sitting outside the cave, encouraging the feeble November sun to dry his clothes from another night of rain, when he spotted four German soldiers coming down the other side of the valley. They were walking purposefully through the bushes straight towards them, a couple of Alsatian dogs straining at their leashes.
The patrol paused and Richard watched as the leader appeared to point straight at the cave. What had happened to the doctor’s mistress and the early warning system? Where were Donato and the others? Had the family been arrested? Richard ducked down and waited until the Germans reached the stream at the bottom of the valley less than 100 yards away where for a few seconds they disappeared out of sight. He ran back inside the cave to warn Jim.
Rather than crouch at the back of the cave, they decided to hide right underneath the small entrance so that anyone peering in might look over their heads and not spot them. It was a forlorn chance and if they were spotted there was no possibility of escape.
They could hear the dogs panting as the patrol moved relentlessly up the slope towards them. One of the soldiers swished at the undergrowth just outside the cave with a stick. It was such an ordinary sound, as if he had dropped something and was looking for it. Any moment now Richard was certain the Germans would look up and notice the curious slit in the rock a few feet away. Then, from right above their heads, he heard one of the Germans call out in a mixture of Italian and English: “Venite, venite, buono Americano, we are your friends.”
The soldiers were now standing on the boulder directly above the cave, less than fifteen feet from them. Jim and Richard crouched as low as possible. Richard hoped that he had not left any of his clothes drying on the bushes; from that vantage point it seemed certain that they would notice there were signs of human activity around the cave. But after a few minutes, the noises subsided, and eventually they could hear the leader of the section barking orders further down the valley.
Richard crept on his stomach around the boulder and peered through the bush. He could see four grey uniforms retreating into the distance. Immediately, they put all their provisions into their pockets in case they needed to make a run for it.
For the remainder of the day the soldiers stayed at the far end of the valley, watched by two pairs of hidden eyes. They seemed to be waiting for something to happen. When darkness fell, a sentry appeared on the track just below the farmhouse in the same spot where Alfonso had stumbled over Richard’s foot two weeks before. It was as if they knew the route Richard and Jim took to reach the family each night.
Long before midnight I had given up all hope of Donato coming and resigned myself to a miserable night. I shall never forget the feeling of relief and joy when I heard the slight sounds of his approach and saw his shadowy form through the bushes and then the final proof that it was he, his whispered “Dick, Jim”. Ever after that I knew that we could trust him absolutely.
Donato explained how he and Alfonso had attempted to reach the cave earlier, but had run into the German sentry on the track. He led them back on a different path to the farmhouse, avoiding the track. In the kitchen, they found the entire family on edge. Giovanni and Antonio were claiming they could still hear the Germans moving around in the valley.
“If the Germans find out what we are doing, this farm will be burnt down,” said Giovanni. “Even if they
don’t kill us, we will have lost everything.”
“It’s our duty to protect them,” retorted Donato. No one looked at the two prisoners standing silently near the fire.
“For you, Donato, it is easy to say,” replied Giovanni. “Your wife is not here and your house is not here. And what about the little ones? We have to think of them.”
The brothers thought someone in the village had betrayed them, which was why the Germans had searched the woods.
“Otherwise how else would they have known?” said Donato. “They are fully committed trying to fight the British, they don’t have time to look for escaped POWs – unless they know where they are hiding. Someone told them.”
*
Sitting outside the cave a few days later on the morning of 26th November, Jim spotted two German soldiers pulling up the signal line that ran along the valley floor. Finally, this was some tangible proof that the Germans were pulling back. Later that day, Donato arrived to say that the Germans appeared to be leaving Roccascalegna.
Their spirits lifted. That evening, instead of going to the farmhouse as usual, Donato took Richard and Jim up to Roccascalegna to visit his friend, Doctor Cucchini. The three of them entered the village without incident. The doctor described how the Germans had evacuated the entire village within six hours that morning. In the afternoon he had managed to walk back into his own house. They found him in his cellar, complaining about the number of bottles of wine the Germans had stolen in his absence, though he was still able to produce several bottles which they used to celebrate the enemy’s departure.
The doctor bemoans the loss of his best wine, some furniture and even tablecloths and cutlery which the Germans have taken. But he seems to have a good deal left and he gave a very good lunch… From the upper windows of his house one gets a glorious view of the snow covered Majella mountains. I tried to get into the old castello; but in a fit of pique the Boche before they left had shot away the lock and one couldn’t open the gate.
Just to be able to walk around the village made Richard light-headed with euphoria. When they returned to the cave that afternoon, he and Jim got ready for the final sprint, repairing their shoes and making sure they had a few provisions to carry in their pockets. Everywhere the mood began to lighten; people felt that they might survive the war after all. They could even begin to plan a future.
Donato’s brother, Antonio, decided to celebrate the Germans’ retreat by proposing to a girl he had known since school who lived in the nearby village of Gessopalena. He was the only one of the three brothers not yet married and his parents approved of the match, giving him their blessing to go to the village and make his offer.
The next day Antonio set out. Alfonso accompanied him but halfway there he turned around, saying that he had left something behind. Antonio went on alone, his mind full of a future that lay far away from the farmhouse and the war. When he reached the girl’s house, she was standing by the window waiting for him. As they stood talking awkwardly in the doorway, a formation of British Lancaster bombers rumbled overhead. On a map somewhere in Monty’s headquarters, the area around Roccascalegna had been highlighted as a target. The British had no idea that the Germans had left.
There was a deafening roar, and the door lintel fell in, missing the girl but landing on Antonio and pinning him to the ground. Semi-conscious, he was carried back down the track by her family. He appeared not to have broken anything more serious than his leg, but he was delirious and incoherent. It took a day for Doctor Cucchini to reach him. He diagnosed meningitis, brought on by the incident. Without antibiotics there was nothing he could do, and three days later Antonio was dead. Antonio, the youngest brother who had resisted firing at the Germans and who had first extended hospitality to two unknown Allied officers, had been killed by an Allied bomb.
“And just at the moment he was about to propose,” said Donato. “At least we hope that he died happy.”
Richard felt culpable. It was a heavy burden of grief to carry for a family who had already endured so much. Donato asked Richard and Jim if they would take him with them across the front line. He’d decided to try to get back to his home in Naples which was now in Allied hands. He said he would have to wait for Antonio’s funeral, and Richard agreed to wait with him.
Jim, impatient to get back to South Africa, decided to leave immediately and take his chance of crossing the front line alone. They said goodbye outside the cave and Richard watched him walk down into the valley and up the other side. He had his shorts on once more, confident he would be on the Allied side by darkness. Five months later Richard received a letter from South Africa – he had made it back to Paarl in time for Christmas.
*
On the day after Antonio’s funeral, the rains that had fallen for the past two weeks finally stopped. “It is a glorious sunny day and my spirits are high,” Richard wrote in his diary. The Germans had vanished, and Richard realised that they must now be in a sort of no man’s land between the two armies.
It took him and Donato less than an hour to reach the Sangro River. The signs of battle were everywhere; abandoned trenches, upturned vehicles and artillery guns lay either side of the road, the houses along the river bank had been flattened by the British shelling. Just north of Bomba, the main road to the coast and the railway line crossed the river, but both the bridges had been blown up by the retreating Germans.
Donato and Richard stood despondently on the bank, watching the debris-strewn torrent rushing through the broken arches. They didn’t know it but they had hit the river at a place on the front line in between two battles. Had they walked ten miles downstream, they would have run straight into fierce fighting between Monty’s 2nd New Zealand Division and Kesselring’s forces. The New Zealanders had managed to establish a bridgehead on the north bank of the river, but the Germans were throwing wave after wave of troops against them to stop them breaking out into the coastal plain. A few miles upstream under the Majella mountains, Monty’s 5th Division was also attempting to cross the Sangro and encircle the German positions from behind.
A crossing looked near impossible. And then Richard noticed that, although the railway bridge had been blown up, the track was still intact, hanging in giant loops of twisted iron between the shattered concrete pillars.
“If we sit on one rail and put our feet on the other we might just be able to creep across like crabs,” he said.
Donato looked dubious. It was a long way – they could count at least ten arches in the bridge and at several points the rail was almost touching the cresting water. “What if it gives way while we are on it?”
“We don’t have much choice,” said Richard. He went first, edging out over the river, but Donato stayed on the bank refusing to move.
“I can’t do it,” he said above the noise of the water.
Richard went out a bit further to show Donato that the rails were secure and able to take their weight. Then he came back.
After protesting more, Donato finally sat down on the left rail and put his feet gingerly onto the other. “Don’t look down,” said Richard.
Holding on tightly, Donato began to cross. Richard stayed close to him, encouraging and cajoling him forward. Apart from the distant sound of artillery exchange down the valley, there was no sign of any military, either German or Allied. It hardly felt that they were crossing a front line. As they approached the middle of the river, Richard turned his face up to the sun and smiled – he had done it. He could stop running and hiding. He lifted one hand and cheered to Donato, then lost his balance and nearly toppled over into the foam.
It was mid-afternoon when they walked into an American headquarters on the outskirts of Atessa. The American guards were startled when Richard told them that they were the first Allied position they had reached – they had thought that they were in the rear area and that there was a large number of British troops in front of them. The Americans took them to a corner of a farmyard where other escaped prisoners sat around a couple of ammuni
tion boxes that served as a table. They wore a curious variety of army uniform and peasants’ clothing and the shoes of several of them had disintegrated. The Americans gave them some rations and they celebrated with tea and English cigarettes. They didn’t talk about their experiences, preferring just to enjoy the moment, a private victory in a long war. Richard noticed the other escapees eyeing Donato suspiciously.
“He’s on his way back to see his family in Naples,” Richard said and explained briefly how his family had sheltered him and Jim.
American razors, cigarettes and soap arrived for the POWs, all of which Richard quietly passed on to Donato. He sensed Donato’s nervousness. Crossing the front line had reversed their roles. Richard could see that it was now Donato who was dependent on him. He was a refugee in his own country who now had to navigate his way through the detritus of war. His position was ambiguous; half of his country was on one side of the war, half still on the other. He was afraid of being ensnared by the Allied war machine that was slowly grinding its way up Italy.
A cage of German POWs marched past the farmyard under the watchful eye of a New Zealand military policeman; it was the first time Richard had seen any German prisoners. The balance of war, he reflected, had tipped from this time a year ago when he had been marched by the Germans to the transport plane at Sollum.
Richard asked one of the American officers if Monty’s headquarters were nearby.
“Why do you want to know?” the American asked.
“I’m his stepson,” replied Richard.
The American looked at him coolly and then called over a British liaison officer from the Eighth Army. The officer, who had been in the desert, recognised Richard and confirmed that he was Monty’s stepson.
“You want to go and see him?” the American asked, suddenly smiling.
