Wolf on the Mountain (7 page)

‘We’re the lucky ones. In one village near the Sangro they just took the old people, the women and the children and shot them all, a hundred of them. It was a good place to try to cross the line, you see. Hundreds had crossed from there. The Germans wanted to make an example.’ A tear runs down the old man’s wrinkled cheek, the woman hugs his grandchildren closer to her, the captain is silent.

–

The captain left a chit and set out down the gorge before dawn. He still had three boiled potatoes in his pockets, but had not eaten yet today. It would be a long dangerous day and it was better to conserve his food. There would be more patrols in the stretch to the next pass into the Sangro valley, and that pass was sure to be guarded. He had to make as good time as he could before he reached the areas where dodging through and between the patches of scrub would slow him down. He had to be at the front tonight, so he could see the minefields by the moon, even before then so that he could spot the German gun positions and their fields of fire before the sun went down.

The track had trees alongside, bare trees, but cover of sorts should he need to hide. He dodged a foot patrol in the half-light, its soldiers huddled in their greatcoats, stretching their rifle-slings, eyes to the ground, wishing they were back in barracks. The morning wore on, he walking as fast as he could as old stone villages on rocky spurs came into view and then receded behind him. Occasionally a flurry of snow swept past him, muffling the sound of the big guns to the south, but the weather was still good enough for his trek. If anything the snow would make the patrols less watchful.

Then a blizzard swept up the new valley towards him. He wound his scarf around his jaw, clamped his blotched hands into his armpits and leant into the wind. Through the blizzard another patrol appeared, too close for him not to be seen. To his left was a slope of scree up to a line of pines. It was his only chance of escape. He leapt off the road and started scrambling up the scree, cascading stones as he went, three steps up, one step back, hoping a squall of snow would hide him. Behind him stones clattered down to the road. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t been seen, that bullets were not once more pinging off the rocks around him. At last he made the pines, stopped to look round for his pursuers, but there were none. The patrol was still tramping unconcerned along the road, faces fixed to the ground. How could they not have seen him, not fired at him, not followed him up the scree?

For the next two hours he was following the stream up the now beech-wooded valley to the last pass, the snow ever deeper under his feet. The snowstorm had passed, but the sky had the yellowish tinge of more to come. The patrol must have seen him, but its soldiers must have been tired, sick of the blizzard, going through the motions on their way back to their barracks and a fire. What would his own men have thought in the same situation? They’d have looked up the scarp and thought: probably only another scared local; Christ knows we’ve done enough to scare them all; reports to file; just make it a routine patrol, so we can put our feet up, with no officer ordering a new search party when we get back. Conscripted soldiers were the same everywhere when away from the battlefront: keep it simple, there are enough risks as it is, keep it easy, give him the benefit of the doubt.

–

But there would be no benefits of doubt on the line. He had half an hour of daylight left, scampering across the snow from one brushwood thicket to the next, looking for a route down the valley side to the river, the last river to cross, still two, three thousand feet below him. Since he’d crossed the last pass he’d once again been alone in the black and white landscape, except for the patrols. There had been no locals to ask for directions; a solitary one had turned his back and walked the other way when he’d seen him coming. It was a valley of people cowed into seeing and doing nothing. Even the church clocks were silent. There was no chance of a guide down to the river, a man who knew the safe paths down the slope and where the Germans were. He would have to rely entirely on his own observations, the way he, if himself defending this position, would dispose his own men and weapons.

He looked down into the valley. It was an easy line to defend: a machine-gun post here, one there, interlocking fields of fire and a minefield in that little pocket out of sight. The umpteenth such position he had looked down on since arriving in the valley, all just as bad. He looked despairingly across to the other side of the valley, where exploding shells showed the equivalent positions of his own army, maybe men of his own battalion, encamped within his sight. He thought of them drinking tea from enamel mugs, warm in their greatcoats, passing cigarettes, eating corned beef sandwiches, speaking English to English friends, maybe whistling carols. How much would he risk tonight when by dawn, on Christmas Day in the morning, he could be over there with them?

There was no more time to find another spot today. This one would have to do. He crouched into some bushes to wait for nightfall. There would be moonlight early on to check the route, then darkness for the passage. The old trick when on patrol in the desert: by moonlight you could always see the wheeltracks, the footprints in the sand that told you the way that was free of mines. Snow would do the same. He ate his last potato.

–

The moon was up and the days-old snow in the dell was glistening like icing on a cake. No footprints that would tell him there were no mines. As white as the snow on a Christmas card, and the gunners in the pillboxes, reading his mind that Christmas Eve was a good time for every Allied prisoner-of-war straggling on the wrong side of the line to try to slip through, were practising their arcs of fire with heavy machine-gun bursts. No faint harmonious singing of
Stille Nacht
or
Tannenbaum
- it was in the firing line. He had picked the wrong place to try to cross the river. There was no hope of getting through here. He would have to find another way tonight, or have to wait another day, here in this valley swarming with troops, with the weather worsening. He could not delay. He had to find another route tonight. He edged to the open ground, looked for the next patch of cover and set out for it.

He moved ever further along the side of the valley, despairing as every possibility turned out to be more hazardous than the last. And then the first puff of snow at his feet, followed by the crack of rifle fire rising up through the silent cold air, told him he had been spotted. Get up this fucking mountain as fast as I can.

Elvira Golvi sits at the kitchen table watching the captain tear and gulp his way through a hunk of dry bread like a hunting dog, starved for days, attacking his prey. Once again he has knocked at her door, frozen and scared, after another escape from a German patrol in the mountains. He had been away for five days, trying to find a way through the German lines, and he had failed again. On the fourth night it had snowed for the first time in the village, only lightly, but up in the passes, where he would have been, there must have been feet of it.

The poor boy. But Europe is full of poor boys. And poor mothers. This boy’s mother hasn’t heard of him in months, worries if he is still alive. Just as she wonders if her own Enrico is still alive. She hasn’t heard from him since March. The war has reached the stage where no-one knows if her soldier son is still alive. No letters, not even from the authorities when they are killed, just as happened when her own father was killed in the Great War. And the snow will be worse in Russia. Maybe a Russian mother, who doesn’t know if her Sergei is still alive, is looking after Enrico even now.

It is only the good mothers and the good sons who suffer like this. If your father was a trusty fascist you got a nice cushy posting at home, like that good-for-nothing Giobellini boy next door. If you’d no connections, or were just poor, ’twas the fighting front for you. Enrico was rushed off to Russia as soon as he reached military age. Always the lot of the anti-fascists’ sons, to be sent off to fight against the mightiest anti-fascist army in the world.

The captain had finished the bread which would have been her breakfast. He looks up to the beam where the sausages had been, but they are gone. ‘The snow has changed a lot’ she says. ‘So many mountain roads are now blocked that the Germans are worried about their own supplies. They’re stealing the people’s food again. We’ve hidden all ours. We’ve got to make it last.’

‘I’m sorry. I go again, soon. News on Radio Londra?’

‘The Allies have taken Ortona.’

He takes the map from his pocket, spreads it on the table and squints at it in the dim light. He cannot find the name but then remembers the dull booming of artillery fire he had heard carrying over the eastern mountains on his trip and looks further north. Ortona. Not fifteen miles from Pescara. He stretches the fingertips he uses to measure a day’s march. ‘One day to walk.’

‘It’s impossible. The Germans have been sending reinforcements down the valley. The doctor says they’ve got to hold Pescara, and that it will be easier in this weather. That area will now be full of them and every step you take will be in snow.’

–

There was less bread for breakfast the next morning and it was snowing again, although not settling in the village streets. For the first time he could look from the window, knowing that his features would be obscured by the curtain of snowflakes scurrying in the wind. But Anna would not let him look for long: those fascists next door might see him; Mamma would be angry. There was not much to see anyway: even the edge of the village on the mountainside was obscured by the snow driven with the wind, and unlike previous times when the child had described the comings and goings in the street - perhaps with a little elaboration for dramatic effect - people were staying indoors if they could. The old men were not stopping to discuss the matters of the day, and the women in black filling their water-pitchers at the pumps were perfunctory and had no time to trade examples of their men’s uselessness before swinging their pitchers onto their heads and gliding home.

His days were spent learning the verbs. If he’d known them better he could have asked the old man in the cave questions about his route and improved his chances of finding a way through. The thought gave him the determination he needed for the hours of repetition. Tomorrow I will say hello. Yesterday I said hello. Every day I’ve said hello. After he’d said hello, mamma said hello and then I said it. If you say hello I’ll say it. He hopes I’ll say hello. Then you, he, we, you and they. It didn’t matter that it was like being back at school. It passed the time when there was nothing else to do. There was no point in being impatient because he thought he should be going home. Today it was impossible. He might as well spend the day making it more likely that he would make it when it stopped snowing.

In time the verbs improved his days. To tell a story or to understand one you need to differentiate the past tenses. To talk about things that matter you need the subjunctive and conditional moods. As his mastery of the verbs improved he could understand the family more, its tales of the day, its plans for the next, their fears for him and themselves, and the greater understanding meant that new words were being added to his vocabulary all the time. The signora took to stretching him more and more, and the more he learned the faster he learned.

In no time, it seemed, he could understand nearly everything the family said, if they didn’t speak too fast. He trusted them now. Did they trust him enough to let him leave the house again?

–

‘Does it worry you that you don’t know our names, Roberto, that we don’t tell you? It’s strange. Until you came we had so many English soldiers staying with us for a night, before they went up to the partisans and then on their way down to the lines. Our name went on all their chits, but you’ve been here for weeks and to you we still have no name. But that’s the way it is. Half of us in the village connected with the partisans don’t know who else is involved. It’s safer that way. If the party hadn’t arranged things that way it wouldn’t have survived a year under Mussolini.

‘Why are we communists? It’s simple. In Italy being a communist is the only way to oppose fascism. Yes, we are rich compared to most people in the village. Ca…’ she stops herself. ‘My husband… has always had skills… which meant he didn’t need to work on the land, skills he could sell for money to buy as much food as we wanted, to have a toilet in our house rather than having to use the fields in summer, a straw-heap in the cellar in winter.

‘Those skills don’t help us much in a winter like this. There’s no money to pay for them, nothing to buy with it if we had it. All the food the Germans haven’t confiscated is being hidden. The shops, except the ones selling rationed goods, are closed; even if they had something to sell the Germans would just take it without paying. The little bars - the after-work’s we call them - where the farmers used to stop for a glass of wine on the way home and talk about the weather and their crops, have all been drunk dry and broken up by those soldiers.

‘It’s not as if there was that much food before they came. There’s not much fertile land in these mountains, so you have to make the most of what there is. It’s why the villages are all built on rocky land. But there is enough land to feed everyone. The farmers don’t need to be so poor. The problem is that, apart from the pastures on the mountains, it’s all owned by landlords, people who don’t live around here. They conspire to keep the rents too high, and they’ll never rent families fields next to each other. If they didn’t waste time walking from one field to another they might produce more than they need for themselves, sell some of it and save some money, maybe enough to buy some land of their own. That would never do. If the peasants became independent, where would it end? Status must be preserved.

‘It’s a system which perpetuates poverty, one which decent people want to bring to an end. Only the communists can bring that about. They want to introduce farm co-operatives, big farms owned by all the peasants where they can work efficiently, produce more food, have all their hard work rewarded by sharing the plentiful crops the land could produce for everyone if the rotten system was ended.