War in Val d'Orcia

by Iris Origo

  APRIL 24TH

  I walk down to the men’s institute, and there meet B.—the real leader of Uragano’s band. He only arrived last night, and was much annoyed about yesterday’s silly performance. ‘You are behaving exactly like Fascists yourselves,’ he told his men, and to me he expresses his discouragement and the difficulty of persuading them to sensible behaviour. We then have a long and (under the circumstances) slightly comic conversation on the theme of the Liberal tradition of moderation, in the middle of which a messenger turns up with fresh news: a mopping-up of the bands is in progress just across the valley, at Vivo d’Orcia, Campiglia and Abbadia. Our young friends of yesterday, he told me, had now moved into one of our farms at the top of the hill, Palazzone—where no doubt those who escape across the valley will now join them. Four lorries of Fascists are also said to have arrived at Chianciano, on their way here.

  On my way home I meet one of the lorries, at the turn of the road, by the nursery-school, bearing about twelve very anxious-looking Fascists, with their guns sticking out on either side. They slow down and I hastily tell the children to go indoors, thinking that we may have some fighting if the partisans turn up. But after a while the Fascists drive on towards Contignano. Ten minutes later another lorry, belonging to the Farmers’ Association of the province, and laden with lambs, comes up the hill, and turns past the Castelluccio towards Montepulciano. But it never reaches its destination: at Pianoia it is attacked by the partisans, who order its driver to go up to the Palazzone. There they help themselves to as many lambs as they require, and then let the lorry and its driver proceed—having thus obligingly made their whereabouts quite clear to everyone. Antonio rather annoyed about this.

  At lunch-time two peasant-women appear, carrying heavy sacks, which contain parcels for their sons, prisoners in Germany, and ask me to take their parcels to the Red Cross in Florence. The parcel-post here has ceased to function, but the poor women continue to get letters from their sons, begging for food. One of the women, not having received from her son the form without which no parcel can be sent off, has borrowed one from a friend—unaware, not being able to read, that the printed address is that of an entirely different camp. I have the greatest difficulty in persuading her that the parcel will never reach her son, and her misery when at last she realises that it cannot be sent is pitiful.

  At tea-time the fattore turns up to say that one of ‘our’ prisoners—Bert the cook—has turned up again with an urgent message. We walk up to our meeting-place in the woods, and he tells us that he and his mates have now joined one of the partisan bands operating on Monte Amiata. He has come to warn us about the mopping-up which has now begun in the district. It began early this morning at Vivo d’Orcia and Campiglia. About four hundred Germans with machine-guns surrounded the villages and arrested some of the civilian population—including the parish priest of Campiglia and about a hundred others. The partisans scattered into the woods, and, though there was some sporadic shooting, so far as he knows very few were caught. The Germans also went to some farms along the road, took some peasants away with them, and helped themselves to some pigs, flour, sheets, etc. Bert had also heard an optimistic rumour that the German line at Cassino has broken, and that this is the beginning of their retreat. We tell him that today’s BBC news in no way confirmed this story, but that the last report from Rome (brought by hand) is that the Allies are expected here before May 10th.

  While we are talking another partisan turns up, bringing the news that the civilians have been released, and that the Germans are now coming in this direction. He is on horseback and is bound for our farm, Palazzone (where a large group of partisans are living) to give the alarm.

  The same young man tells me that Larig was shot, after a trial by the partisans, on the evening after his capture. He was proved to have abstracted over two hundred thousand lire of partisan funds, and to have been in possession of information and lists of names (including ours) which he intended to hand over to the Germans. The poor girl whom he seduced is still expecting his return.

  We spend the evening burying beneath the olive-mill such hams, sausages, oil and sugar as we still have above ground, in preparation for a German visit.

  APRIL 25TH

  The nurse comes to tell me that Giorgio, the young Venetian partisan who had pneumonia at the Sassaia, whom we had nursed back to health, and who had joined the local partisans, turned up here this morning with a violent haemorrhage. What are we to do? We dare not take him into the clinic, where he would immediately be captured, and he is not fit to walk. Finally, after the nurse has given him an injection to check the haemorrhage, we decide to send him up the hill to Palazzone in the pony-cart. There, among his friends, he will be safer, and yet not out of reach of nursing.

  In the afternoon a German sergeant, looking for billets for a ‘Pferde Lazarett’, comes to inspect the Castelluccio; he thinks it will probably suit him, and says that his C.O. will come tomorrow to decide. The news spreads fast, and grows in the spreading, so that before he is well out of the house everyone on the place has already heard that the Germans are coming to mop up this district, too.

  APRIL 26TH

  A German officer comes up, and inspects the Castelluccio. Antonio points out (1) that it has already been reserved to store the goods of the hotel-keeper of Chianciano. (2) That there is insufficient water. (3) That there is no stabling. To which the German—a Prussian of the worst type—merely replies that he will require the whole of the castle for his three hundred men, stabling for eight hundred horses in the farms, and quarters for his eight officers in our house. As to the refugee children, we must find lodgings for them ‘elsewhere’. He then goes off, saying that he will let us know his decision in three or four days.

  Antonio drives down to Chianciano to get in touch with the Kommandantur there, and lodge a protest, but on arriving at the village he is stopped by a sentry who, pointing a pistol at him, orders him to report himself at once to the Albergo Centrale. Meanwhile the Maresciallo dei Carabinieri comes up and advises Antonio to go home. Someone has been killed—the Maresciallo does not know who or why—Germans and Fascists are searching all the houses, and several arrests have been made.

  Antonio returns home, and together we hurry off to warn B., the leader of the partisans, to move his men farther away.

  Meanwhile the fattore has had an account of what has happened on Monte Amiata. It appears that two German S.S. men, who pretended to be Austrian deserters, have for some time been wandering from farm to farm in the district of Vivo d’Orcia, Abbadia and Campiglia, saying that they had lost touch with the band to which they belonged, and asking for help. From one farm they were handed on to the next, until they had discovered the whole network of the farms in touch with the rebels. Finally they went to the old parish priest of Vivo d’Orcia—and, under false pretences, succeeded in extracting from him some more information including the whereabouts of the partisan command. Whereupon, last Monday, German troops appeared, surrounded the three villages and the outlying farms, and arrested all the men whom the two spies pointed out, including some women and the priest. About a hundred of them are still shut up in the school of Abbadia, with German sentries—and some of them are to be shot.

  This is the second local instance of such spying by alleged partisans—so we warn everyone on the farm to be careful. Nothing is more likely than that a similar attempt will be made here, too.

  In the afternoon we hear that the man who was killed at Chianciano this morning was one of our workmen, Mencatelli—a quiet, peaceable, hardworking fellow, totally unconcerned with politics, whose murder seems to us inexplicable. His wife rings me up, and implores me to go down to her. I drive down, and find two German sentries barring the road. They let me pass, and, as my car drives up the empty street, terrified faces appear at the windows. What new danger, they think, is coming now? In the dead man’s little house, which, after thirty years of hard work and self-denial, he had at last succeeded in owning, the widow is hys
terically moaning and sobbing beside the bed of her boy of eleven, who saw his father killed. The child is in a queer state of coma, from which he awakes at intervals to a fit of shivering and sobbing, then sinks back again. His mother and some other women continue moaning and crying, repeating the miserable story over and over again. It appears that, when the German and Fascist troops began to search the houses nearby, poor Mencatelli, terrified of being taken off to a labour camp, hid in his little attic. The boy, hearing that the attics in other houses were being searched, shouted to him to come down, but he was too panic-stricken to do so, and crouched there, in frozen terror, waiting. Finally the soldiers, a German and a Fascist, came tramping up the stairs and, throwing aside the weeping woman and child, climbed up the attic ladder. As soon as they saw the defenceless little man crouching there, the Fascist fired, hitting him in the head. He was killed instantaneously, before the eyes of his wife and child. When I saw him, already laid in his bed, his head swathed in white bandages, and a few faded stocks scattered on his pillow, his tired, drawn face still had a look of terror.

  Of all the Fascist crimes that I myself have seen this is the ugliest, meanest and most purposeless. But we are all guilty. ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’

  I drive in to Chianciano, to try and make arrangements for the funeral—and find the streets entirely empty, and on the walls a notice stating that, while the German authorities deplore what had occurred, they consider it to be the fault of the local population, owing to their unco-operativeness and general hostility. In consequence, there will be a curfew at eight-thirty p.m., and the population is warned that any further attempt at sabotage will be followed by the arrest of ten hostages.

  When I get home the nurse is waiting for me. She has been up to Palazzone to see Giorgio, and there has found him lying on some straw in the stable, in foul air, with eighteen other men. She and B. carried him upstairs to the only available room, where another boy was in bed with pneumonia, but the effort of moving caused another haemorrhage. When she got up to leave, slow tears poured down his face. He is only twenty-one, away from home, and probably dying.

  We discuss what is best for him. What he needs is proper nursing at the clinic, but it is at the cross-roads, the first place Germans would search. In the end we decide to leave him where he is.

  And so I go to bed, my heart full of the murdered workman, and of the young partisan who soon must die.

  MAY 1ST

  Yesterday an uncomfortable little episode. Two German soldiers turned up in the farm, one in plain clothes and one in uniform. They immediately inquired whether there were any Fascists here, and then asked to see Antonio, told him that they were deserters, and asked for food, money and plain clothes for the one in uniform. Antonio, feeling something fishy about them, firmly refused, whereupon they professed great astonishment. ‘But,’ they cried, ‘haven’t we come to the right place? Aren’t you the gentleman who speaks German and English—and his wife too—and who have helped thirty-three British prisoners to escape? Didn’t you give civilian clothes to two Austrian deserters? Why won’t you help us, too?’ Antonio firmly denied it all. And now they became threatening: ‘You’ll live to regret it—the Cassino line can’t hold—and you’ll see what will happen to you afterwards!’ But in the end they went off—grumbling. Later on we discovered that they came here with the two so-called Austrian deserters, who have been wandering about the country for some time, and presumably got this information from them—that they lunched today at one of the farms, called and asked questions at the clinic and workmen’s club (where they forced the men playing bowls to buy them some socks) and eventually asked the farmer, in whose house they had lunched, for arms, saying: ‘Two hundred Germans are at the Castelluccio, and we must defend ourselves!’ The farmer fortunately said he had none, and they went off. We still have no idea whether they were spies or genuine deserters.

  Today another incident of the same kind. While Antonio is out on the farm, I meet a young man in the courtyard who insists on speaking to me alone, tells me that he is a partisan, and says that he has got three wounded men hidden in the wood, for whom he needs bandages and medicines at once. Something about him makes me feel sceptical, and my doubts increase when he goes on to state that his men are three hundred in number, and are in hiding in a part of the woods which I know to be already inhabited by B.’s band. He then proceeds—in an increasingly truculent tone—to demand money and food for his men. I refuse point blank, but he insists in waiting for Antonio at the edge of the woods. I accordingly send out the fattore to him (first explaining my suspicions)—and the latter, unfortunately, has a bright idea. While they are standing talking, he sees one of ‘our’ partisans coming down the wood road (on his way to the farm to fetch some food), and signals to him: ‘This man seems to be looking for you.’ The partisan asks a few questions—takes in the situation—and, pulling out a pistol, points it at the young man. ‘If you really need help and bandages, you’ll find everything you need with us. Come along!’ And, with his pistol in the small of the stranger’s back, they disappear into the woods.

  The fattore returns triumphantly to me—‘That’s settled him!’—and is somewhat downcast when I point out that, on the contrary, if the young man succeeds in escaping from the partisans, and really is a Fascist spy, it is we who are up a tree: for the fattore has thus clearly shown that we are on the best of terms with the partisans. Nor are our anxieties diminished by the information proffered by one of our workmen (who happened to have been in the Army with my visitor) that he is the brother-in-law of the Segretario del Fascio of Chianciano.

  After dusk the partisan leader, B., comes to tell us: the young man, he says, is still being questioned, and they cannot make up their minds whether he is a spy—in which case they know how to deal with him—or whether he was merely trying to get some money out of me on false pretences. He is now in tears, imploring the partisans to accept him as a recruit.

  MAY 2ND

  Drive to Montepulciano, where I am shown an unpleasant little article against me in the official Fascist paper of Siena, the Repubblica Fascista. It says: ‘For four years of war it has been tolerated by everyone (first by the Fascist Party, then by the forty-five days’ carnival, and now even by the Republican Fascist Party) that an Anglo-American woman, rolling in wealth (straricca) should comfortably live as she pleases in her own domain, under cover of large donations to public charities. But charity is one thing: the spirit behind it another.

  ‘First the fifty British prisoners, who were sent to work on her land, and who, on September 8th, took refuge in the surrounding woods, called her their “loving sister”; then the refugees of Badoglio, on their way home, called her their “generous mother”. Now her lonely property, alone out of the whole of this province, where rebel bands are committing deeds of violence of every kind, has not been included in the official reports of robbery and violence suffered by all the surrounding villages and farms. These are symptoms that cannot be neglected. All our enemies, male or female, rich or poor, must be isolated and put under guard, all of them!’

  This virulent little note, clearly springing from some personal spite, would not in itself be worth our attention—were it not that the paper in which it appeared is under the direct control of the Prefect. Moreover, its appearance at the same time as that of our recent visitors—if indeed they were spies—may be something more than a coincidence. We accordingly decide that it is better to take the bull by the horns. Antonio will go tomorrow to Siena, and tackle the Prefect about it—and I will go on to Florence, take a report of our situation to the German Consul, and perhaps stay there for a few days until the storm has blown over.

  At midnight, as we are sitting discussing these plans, there is a false alarm. We hear, in the silence of the night, a lorry driving slowly up the hill, and it stops at our door. Antonio says: ‘Get your hat and coat while I go out to meet them—and go out by the garden door into the woods’—I get m
y things, and then stand in the hall waiting—until a few minutes later he comes back: ‘They’ve gone on again.’ We then laugh at ourselves. But it’s a tiring way to live!

  MAY 3RD

  Leave at three-thirty a.m. for Florence to avoid machine-gunning on the road. Deep fog in the Val d’Arbia; we meet long German horse convoys, which delay us. Otherwise the journey is without incident, and I arrive in Florence at seven a.m. My friends there are inclined to take the newspaper article and our situation very seriously—since it appears that there have been several recent arrests on much slighter foundation. At the German Consulate the vice-consul, Wildt, too, is not inclined to make light of it, and both he and the consul, Wolff, say that we have done well to go to them before there was serious trouble. They advise me to send them a written report of our situation, and say that Antonio should send in a similar report to the German C.O. at Siena. If we should be arrested later, they will show this document (or part of it) to the S.S., and it may help to get us out again. But they themselves confirm my anxiety not to show it to the S.S. now, for fear of arousing an inquiry into the affairs of this district. In the Casentino and Mugello, the punitive expeditions of the S.S., and especially those of the Hermann Goering division, have been indescribably brutal. At Stia (where German troops had been fired upon from a window) every member of the male population has been shot; in the Val di Chiana the village of San Pancrazio has been burned to the ground; at San Godenzo, women have been raped and a child killed. Everywhere farms have been plundered and burned. There is no reason to suppose that this district would be treated with any greater leniency. Finally the consul, with a certain humour, warmly implored us not to get arrested both together! He is spending his whole time, he said, in getting innocent Italian families out of prison—but it is so much more convenient when at least one member of the family is free to take some steps about it himself! [6]