After fourteen days the power of routine had asserted itself All that was past was history. All that was to come was surmise. They might have been living so all their lives.
There were, of course, panics. Small panics, as when Goyles found, one morning that his glasses were no longer in his sack, and an hour was spent raking through the length and breadth of the haystack on which they had slept, before the glasses came to light in Byfold’s sack where Goyles must have put them in a sleepy moment the night before. More serious panics – like the sudden, inexplicable meeting with a German officer on a motor bicycle on a mountain ridge near Scai. Without a second’s hesitation or a word said, they had taken to their heels and scampered down the hillside into a wood. The German had sat, sourly unmoving, on his machine. No doubt he was used to Italians running away at the sight of him.
If everything else failed, there were always the four hundred Rumanians. These Rumanians, deserters and killers to a man, were normally reported to be bivouacked in the nearest village down the valley. Sometimes they were Albanians, and on one occasion, Cossacks – but always four hundred. After a time they grew to expect them, and if their presence was not reported by their hosts they would enquire after them. It gave them a feeling of stability that they should be escorted down Italy by this phantom bodyguard.
Goyles had, in his sack, wedged down among the tins of porridge, the khaki pullover, the skeletons of two pairs of socks, the motoring map and the tiny but precious piece of soap, a cheap, black-covered Italian notebook into which he would enter, as he sat over his evening meal, a few words to recall the stages they had made that day. It was both route-card and diary. Often a single word was enough to sum up the events of the last twenty-four hours. ‘Rain’ marked the thirteenth and fourteenth day. It was an exception in that autumn of fine weather, ‘
Castagnacce
’ was their first taste of the peculiar sweet polenta made from chestnuts instead of flour, which was their staple diet for three cloying days to the north of Monte Verdi.
‘Crypto-Fascist’ recalled an uncomfortable night near Norcia when, after trying and rejecting several harbours, they had chosen, against their better judgment, a lonely but pretentious building, more a villa than a farm. The master of the house, a big man, had served them the finest evening meal of their journey, and had sat down to it with them himself, dressed in a neat linen evening coat, and accompanied by two subdued daughters. Over the wine their host’s true political feelings had begun to peep through. Most of what he said went past the elementary Italian of Goyles and Byfold, but Long picked up enough to be cautious, and, that night, after being shown by their host to a fine barn where mattresses and
coperte
were laid out for them, they had rolled quietly off the straw, padded for a mile up the valley, and spent an uncomfortable night in a bean stack.
It was their rule that they moved on every day, and there was only one entry which bracketed two days – the thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth of their journey. It was a time when Byfold’s right heel was causing him a lot of trouble, and he was in some pain that evening when they hobbled down into the courtyard of the monastery of Monte Catria. The monks had dressed the hurt and had prescribed at least a day’s rest. There was, they explained, only one road which led to the outside world, and this was continually watched. They had slept that night, all three of them, with a fourteen-year-old Yugoslav boy, also a fugitive, in a huge bed. They had been further surprised to be woken, in the morning, by a black woman, who told them that she came from Georgia and would be a mother to all of them. She had darned Tony’s socks, and they had spent the day sitting about the monastery and listening to an organ recital by an accomplished young monk from Eritrea. On the second morning they had moved on, refreshed but bewildered.
In the traffic of this unofficial highway they met old and new friends. Stopping for a midday meal at a shepherd’s hut they found before them at the table a black-bearded giant. They knew that he was English, but it was ten minutes before Goyles realised that he was talking to an old school friend, a man he had met perhaps half a dozen times since leaving school, who had made a big name in civil engineering. Goyles knew that he had been constructing airfields in the desert, but had not previously realised that he had been captured. They shared ten years experiences over the lunch table and then parted. The engineer was making for the Adriatic, where he had heard that the S.A.S. was arranging pick-ups from the beaches.
More than a week later, and a hundred miles further south, they came to their night’s lodging at the top of a straggling village, to be told by the priest that there were ‘
due inglesi
’ about a mile further down the valley. Normally, this information would have left them unmoved, but they gathered also that there was trouble, so after eating they walked down and found Captain the McInstalker and Captain Abercrowther. Abercrowther had his hand wrapped in a mountain of stained bandages. He had been carrying water in a glass wine flask and going down a steep hillside to fill it had slipped, broken the flask, and cut his hand deeply at the root of the thumb. The cut had never healed and was now in a very bad way indeed. The Italians had been helpful but had few disinfectants and no drugs. If the hand was no better in a few days’ time it would mean a German field hospital. Meanwhile, the two of them were lying up.
It had been a stupid accident and it was a reminder to them how much they lay at the mercy of the smallest mishap.
That night, not for the first time, they discussed the question of whether they ought to come down from the mountains and risk a quick journey by rail or road. Once more they decided against it. Liberty was too precious a coin to risk on the hazard. Their progress in the hills was mortally slow, but it was certain – or as certain as anything could be in an enemy country. If they walked twenty miles every day, crawling from upland to upland along the spine of the mountains, it might, at a hard day’s end, measure only twelve miles on the map of their progress. But if you advance twelve miles a day, for seven days a week, for week after week, you get somewhere in the end.
For the first two weeks they made very little real headway, for they were working their way into the mountains, travelling at right angles to their eventual course. They followed the Ronco upwards until it diminished from a broad river to a tiny mountain stream which split up and disappeared on the flanks of Monte Falterona. Then they turned south-east and for the next month only the smudged entries in Goyles’ notebook marked their progress. Indeed, they were sometimes hard put to it to say themselves how far they had come. The shepherds and the woodcutters and the charcoal-burners whom they met had little idea of distance. They cared nothing for kilometres. It was ‘
una Mez
’
ora
’ – a half-hour: or something less definite even than that – ‘
una mez
’
oretta
’, which Tony Long translated for them as ‘a dear little sort of half-hour.’
And so, as September passed, and as October lengthened towards November, slowly – slowly as the sun crossing a window on a drowsy afternoon – slowly as the sap creeping down the branch of a tree – they swung east and south-east, and then, as the Gran Sasso rose along their horizon, majestic and menacing under its cap of unmelting snow, they found themselves looking south and even to the west of south.
Under this constant, slow, unremitting effort their bodies grew hard and serviceable again. Mentally, they drew apart. Talking afterwards to others who had had similar experiences, Goyles found that this was a normal result. At the time it worried him. He had imagined that their common experiences, the drive of a common purpose, would have cemented the friendship they had already formed. Instead, it was shaking it to pieces. At the time it was a thing he accepted without speculating about it. Tony Long was more and more silent. Roger Byfold’s humour turned first to cynicism, then to open sarcasm. It was only later that he tried to rationalise it, and came to the conclusion – helped by a hint from the diary of Scott, the explorer – that a party engaged on an uncommon enterprise needed the bond of a leader. The harder the circumstances, the less could you dispense with the discipline which flowed naturally from an established order. Everyday decisions had to be taken – whether to turn left or right – whether to stop or go on. Nor were they light decisions. If the answer was wrong, the most unimaginable consequence could flow from it. Being equals, none of them could lead. So the decision had to be made by the worst of all possible means – by debate and argument. It was like trying to fight a total war with a democratic government, Goyles decided.
The first outward sign of strain was when Goyles found himself addressing Tony formally as ‘Long’. This was so stupid that they almost managed to laugh themselves out of it. The habit nevertheless persisted. Shortly after that Byfold, temporarily defeated in some argument, sulked for a whole day. These spells of childishness were not continuous. There were long periods when they behaved like friends and adults. The symptoms of strain were usually underneath the surface.
On the fortieth day, Long walked out on the other two.
There had been an argument the night before – not a very serious one – as to where and when they should halt for the night. Goyles and Byfold had wanted to stop early and in the end they had their way. Long had been silent that morning. They were crossing some very difficult country north of Scai; every valley ran perversely across their line of advance, and the undergrowth was thick enough to make walking difficult without affording either cover or shade. All three of them were hot and ill-tempered. They were walking, as they usually did in open country, about a hundred yards apart, and when they came to a small coppice, a tangle of dwarf oak and juniper crowning the divide of the two valleys, Tony went to the right of it; the other two thought the left-hand side looked easier and took it. That was really all there was to it.
On the further side of the wood the valley forked, and the two of them were some way down the left-hand arm before they realised that Long was not with them. They kept on their way, moving up, gradually, on to the intervening ridge from where they were confident they would be able to see him. Sure enough, there he was, well on down the right-hand valley, four hundred yards ahead and going fast.
Goyles and Byfold shouted. First singly and moderately. Then loudly and in unison.
Long kept on. He didn’t even turn his head. Byfold looked worried. Both of them knew that the hills and valleys played strange tricks with sound.
‘Perhaps he can’t hear us and thinks we’re still ahead of him,’ he said. ‘If we run we might catch him.’
‘You can run if you like,’ said Goyles. ‘The pig-headed basket. He can hear us perfectly.’
He sat down on the bank.
‘Then what’s wrong with him?’ said Byfold.
‘He’s been working up to it for days. He thinks we’re slacking. I expect he also figures we’re holding him back.’
‘He travels the fastest who travels alone, that sort of thing, you mean?’
‘That’s the idea,’ said Goyles.
‘Let him go, then,’ agreed Byfold.
After a few minutes they got up and went on. It felt strange at first being only two.
When this happened they were twenty miles north of Vallemare. The next obvious move was to go down into the Sangro road and river loop. The southern and eastern boundaries were the River Sangro and there was talk of a German winter line here, and airfields on the Ventimiglia. The Eighth Army was known to be well north of Campo Basso. They had picked that up on the wireless two nights before, listening to the B.B.C. Italian broadcast. They had felt a tightening of the stomach muscles as they heard this.
All that day, they walked across the uplands. It was high plateau, sheep country, and absolutely open; it was said to be free of Germans. They made good progress and were across the Cocullo road by lunch-time. They crossed carefully, between German Army convoys, and were cheered by the sight of five Spitfires, red and blue and silver, playing in the sky ahead of them.
That afternoon they climbed again and came to a sheep settlement. It was a ramshackle place at nearly six thousand feet, used only in summer and autumn. They were glad of a blanket each in the straw that night, but slept peacefully in spite of the cold. It was to be almost their last undisturbed night.
Next day, they kept to their mountain crest, leaving Cocullo on their left. The going still looked good, but they were uncomfortably conscious that they were walking into a cul-de-sac.
The first sign of this was when they met a party coming back. They had passed stationary parties before – people whose nerve or initiative had given out and who had talked themselves into lying up ‘until the English advance caught them up’. Cold or starvation would drive them down sooner or later into the villages and most of them would be picked up by the Germans before spring set the armies on the move once more.
This party was not sitting still – it was coming back. Possibly this showed more spirit. Nevertheless it was startling. There were three sergeants from the H.L.I. They had come all the way from a working camp near Modena.
‘It’s pretty dead hopeless down there, sir,’ said the leader of the party. ‘First you’ve got to get across the Sangro – that’s a road, river and railway. We did that all right, but then you run into an open bit, about ten miles across, where there’s a battle going on. Not much movement – observation and fire and that sort of thing.’
‘Don’t forget the mine-fields,’ said the small, dark sergeant.
‘All the
casas
are full of parties who’ve tried it and got turned back. They’re the lucky ones. Most of them started out and got picked up—’
Goyles and Byfold thanked them and moved on. They knew that a thing always sounded worse when talked about by someone who had tried it and failed. All the same, they weren’t underestimating what was ahead. They spent that night under a heap of sacks in an empty charcoal-burner’s hut.