Wolf on the Mountain (2 page)

‘Ciao, ciao, c’e Gianni. Sono qui, con il capitano inglese.’

Kdmf.

What’s that?

Kdmf. This time he recognises the sound. Kdmf.

Mortars. Nearby. There’ll be no sound of the incoming shells, just the explosions. Then there’ll be a volley of rifle fire, then the rush. The Germans have found the camp.

He turns and runs. The first shell lands on the crest above him, sending stones skipping down the slope, a second, a third in the camp.

The volley sounds, then the rattle of machine gun fire. It happens so quickly.

Then from the top of the scarp a voice shouts ‘
Halt!
’, clearly aimed at the running man, him. ‘
Halt!
’

Should he surrender, or run? I’m running already. Run. The light’s still poor and it’s hard to aim downhill and the slope will put me out of sight in no time at all. Forty yards to the pine forest. Seventy-thirty I’ll make it, maybe eighty-twenty. I’m not giving up now, only have to trust to luck.

He carries on running, rather lifting his feet and letting gravity propel him down and down, spreading a leg to one side and then the other to change his course, racing the stones he has scattered down the hill, dreading the thwack in his back. Once, maybe twice, he falls but his momentum rolls him back to his feet, oblivious to the pain of the tumble. One, two, three, maybe four bullets ricochet off stones around him, and then no more. He must be out of sight by now, but he can’t look back. He can’t even stop. He can only look for footfalls.

–

At last he was in the pine forest again with its soft sure footing of needles and cones, cover of sorts. Now he could pause and look back. There was no-one in sight but the Germans couldn’t be far behind: they’d seen him, shot at him, knew he was down here.

His chest was pounding, his breath billowing in the frosty air. He needed to rest, to wait for his pulse to slow, to recover his composure, but he couldn’t stop here: there was no undergrowth to hide in and even in the half-light the Germans would spot his breath between the trunks of the trees.

He had to keep moving, to find better cover before the sun was up. At least below the forest there was scrub, gorse, broom, patches of baby oaks with brown leaves still on their twigs, boulders, somewhere to hide his body and its betraying breath. He loped down to it, crawled and huddled into a thick patch and waited, as still as the grey rocks and the hoar-frosted leaves around him, for the soldiers to go.

By now the Germans were mopping up. In the clear air he heard groups of them trampling through the forest, their boots cracking the twigs lying amongst the cones and needles, shouting directions to each other as they tried to beat out anyone who’d escaped the raid. They came to the edge of the scrub and fired machine-guns into it. He heard cries of surrender from hiding places above him.

At last the hue and cry was over. He was still safe, alive, but that seemed all. He sat back against a boulder and took stock: his wrist was painful, pulsating despite his numbness from the cold; he could barely grip his stick; his hands and his knees were badly grazed, his clothes torn. But his boots were still intact.

Ahead was a frozen time of not moving - until the Germans withdrew from the mountain. All was now still, except for the cawing of the crows and the distant sounds of what was happening in the partisan camp: the occasional shot, hopefully just to scare, the shout of a soldier who’d lost his temper, a scream of pain and then another. Then the sound of the huts being blown up.

–

‘I don’t like it, Mike.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s too easy.’

‘What kind of a reason is that? The shepherd said it was alright.’

‘But did he
know
it was alright? Or just assume it was, because he’d seen no Germans here? He’s not a soldier. No Germans here when he looked, no Germans here. How many times have the farmers got it wrong before? They’re all meaning well, but they don’t know what to look for. This place feels wrong.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Bobby, what do you want? Proof it’s safe? Our army’s on the hills over there, we’ve come so far, I can’t see anything wrong. It’s nearly dark. It must be at least sixty-forty. Let’s just do it.’

Again the conflict: Mike who could ask the locals complicated questions, understand their answers; he the infantry man, used to patrols in hostile land, used to trying to out-think the enemy plotting his ambush. The obvious way through is the place to put it. You cannot fortify a front-line the breadth of Italy. All you can do is fortify the places where a frontal assault is possible. And in the other parts, in the mountains where you are vulnerable to sneak incursions by foot patrols, you lay mines and set up crossfire points, or you simply send out your own patrols. It depends on the terrain.

‘Mike, this is what I do in the army. We’re just like an infantry patrol coming back from a behind-the-lines recce. If I were on patrol I’d be worried about mines in that little valley down there, machine-gun posts on those bluffs.’

‘But you wouldn’t have been talking to the locals, Bobby, chaps who can walk a flock of sheep through a valley without arousing suspicion and see if there are Germans there. It’s going to snow again tonight. If the snowline comes down the mountain we’ll be seen from miles away tomorrow. I’d rather take the risk of being shot down there than freeze to death up here.’

‘You’re right about the snow, Mike. The further it comes down the mountains the less our chances. We’ve got to make our move soon. Look, why don’t we edge around the bluff and see if we can see any signs of Germans from above? If we can’t, okay we’ll have a go tonight.’

And so they had left on their own reconnaissance before the evening fell. They were shot at and chased. Nightfall had saved them.

What if they’d been more patient then, those few days ago, and risked the cold for the night and tried another place? But at least they knew how the Germans were defending that part of the line, would be better prepared next time. Today was to have been that next time, and it would have been easier with the Germans falling back. Today they were going to get through. What if he’d been here a couple of hours earlier, and they had got away before the Germans attacked the camp? What bloody, bloody, bloody rotten luck.

And what could he do now, today, with the Germans still looking for him? Where could he go?

Most of all he needed to steady himself, to forget the frustrations of the last few days: a flustered man makes mistakes. A break for the lines was out of the question today: it was too late now to get over the high ridge by sundown, even if he could do it with his injured wrist and no provisions. He needed food, shelter, someone to tend to his wounds. Where would he find them? And how could he find out if Mike too had escaped? The village. Could he find it? And the safe house? Would it still be safe? All day these thoughts would clash with the frustration of being thwarted so close to freedom, with his fears for Mike’s safety if he’d been caught with the partisans. Forget that you were both a couple of days from your own troops, a fortnight from knocking on your parents’ doors. Concentrate on finding that house, on not being seen.

–

The rumours began as the clouds started to roll in and settle on the mountains which surround Sannessuno.

A shepherd had heard explosions up near the summer pastures, dull ones, not like the sounds of the artillery barrages two days’ walk to the south. Someone had heard a company of German soldiers marching out of the village in the dead of night. Later in the day hearsay came from other villages: of machine-gun fire on the mountain, the sound of prisoners being shot; another of truck-loads of local men being taken south. A camp had been found. The camp had been found.

All that was certain was that there were more German patrols in the streets, that no-one had come down from the mountain today, that no-one dared go up it. Mothers, fathers and sisters feared for their young men in the partisan camp, prayers were said, everyone dreaded the knock on their door.

–

‘Why did I let him stay in the camp last night?’ she sobbed. ‘I could have brought him down with me.’

‘Wouldn’t it have been more dangerous? Considering who you were bringing down?’

‘I should have known better, after that story about the South Africans the English had sent away. I should have known the air was bad.’

‘Come now, Elvira.’ Carlo Golvi stood up and rounded the table to place his hands on his wife’s shoulders. ‘Hindsight’s an easy thing. You weren’t to know.
We
weren’t to know.’

She buried her tears in her hand. ‘Why did you let him go up there in the first place? He’s only a boy.’

‘He’s sixteen. We couldn’t stop him. Boys of that age are full of dreams of glory. They can’t wait to be old enough to put on an Alpini cap and prove themselves in battle. Enrico was just the same.’

‘People get killed in battles.’

‘Only the enemy gets killed when you’re that age.’

‘I’ll never forgive you if he doesn’t come back.’

‘He will, dearest. He’s just a boy. The Germans will let him go, no matter what they do to the others.’

Carlo Golvi said no more. When your child is in danger the hardest thing is to reassure your wife when you are just as worried. And he wasn’t sure that he believed what he was saying. There would have been an Englishman in the camp, two if the captain had got back in time, and the penalty for sheltering escaped prisoners-of-war was death. Luigi was too young, too likely to panic, to have got away. If anyone had got away he prayed it was the English.

–

All day Robert Johnson edged down the mountain, avoiding the track, slipping from one area of cover to the next, using every trick of concealment learned in the last three months on the long hunted journey south. He needed to keep moving to keep himself warm, yet every movement might be seen and betray that he was there, invite a manhunt.

By mid-afternoon he was in a pine clump on a spur above the village. The fine weather of the morning had given way to rain. The white peaks and grey crags of the mountains, so clear in the cold morning sun, were now lost in cloud. It was drizzling, his clothes wet and sticking to his shivering body. The same mist enveloped the village, blanketing out the tops of its surrounding hills. His shoulders were shuddering, reacting to the water he imagined slowly dripping from the unguttered roofs onto the moss-covered cobbles in the streets below.

It was the first time he had seen Sannessuno in daylight. He had been there twice before: the time he and Mike had been escorted through it to the tall partisan’s cottage at its edge to sleep before climbing to the camp; then when he had come down with the signora to listen to the wireless. Each had been in darkness. Scurrying from corner to corner, he had only been aware then of a warren of narrow winding streets between tall houses holding each other up, dimly lit by old electric bulbs on the walls above, and everywhere people staying indoors away from the occupying force. It could have been underground, its size and extent unknown, but with armed soldiers and vehicles and electricity it had been a place in the twentieth century.

In daylight the village, crammed between the mountains and the river, looked as it would have done centuries ago, with its walls of undressed stone and its jumbled terracotta roofs hiding the lines of its streets. The old lichened tiles, patch-repaired, spoke of moist decay, of a congested place where damp and germs will muzzle their way into walls, furnishings and lungs, of a place where disease spreads fast, where poor people need an old faith, to believe in an afterlife. Churches with tall towers and square steeples and open belfries rose here and there above the roofs; and their bells, the deep basses and the smaller tinkling trebles and the ones in between he had heard from every village on the way south, here too tolled in different time each quarter-hour.

Snatches of sound reminded him it was 1943. He heard the revving of a motorcycle. A whiff of wind brought up the clash of marching boots on the cobbles in the hidden lanes. He imagined the uniforms, the grey greatcoats, the rifles slung from shoulders, stepping in hobnailed time through streets emptied of people by their fear.

But as the damp afternoon wore on and wood-smoke began to stutter from the chimneys, a pattern emerged in these sounds and with it the thought: wouldn’t the street behind a patrol be empty?

At last it was dark. He limped, as casually as he could, down through the fetid cottages. Dogs barked. He was clearly a stranger, but people turned their heads away. It was the same route he had been taken the previous evening, his escort then a person owed respect. He hid behind the wall from which the signora had checked that the coast was clear. A patrol marched down the street five minutes after the deepest church bell had struck the hour. He sidled behind it and knocked on the door of the house with the secret wireless.

–

tonight we have a strange man in our house

i dont understand a word he says

mamma says i must never never tell anyone about him

just like the wireless

hes covered in blood and shivering

mamma has sent for the doctor i must never never tell anyone ive seen

‘We’re even short of salt, Captain Johnson.’ The doctor’s eyes drop down his spectacles to the tip of his cigarette. He takes it from his lips to stop its ash spoiling the plain boiled water he is using to bathe the Englishman’s cuts, places it on the table corner between their chairs and coughs asthmatically. ‘Cigarettes plentiful, but no salt. Our salt comes from the south, from the other side of the battle-lines.’

He has already manipulated the captain’s wrist, pronounced it in his faultless English merely sprained and strapped it with an old cloth bandage. Apart from the bandage and a towel around his loins the Englishman is naked, shivering on the rushen seat of his chair in the gloomy musty room. The signora is mending and washing his clothes in the kitchen.

The sallow doctor returns his squint to the captain’s wounds. He probes with a needle for grit and splinters by the light of a candle. ‘The danger is infection. You must bathe them often. We’re out of medicines. The Germans cleared out the apothecary’s store for their own wounded months ago. If you get an infection we’ll be back to the old peasant women’s remedies: herbal infusions, special moss poultices. If they’ll tell us their secrets. But they won’t: it would mean giving up something they can barter for food.’