Wolf on the Mountain (22 page)

The captain turns to Vincenzo who smiles, nods his approval of action. He had thought of something in his hours on the mountain, hours of frustration at the Allies’ lack of progress, wondering how to make things more difficult for the Germans without provoking reprisals. Perhaps now is the time. ‘There is something I’ve noticed, doctor, something that could be done at little risk. Every time the bombers come the Germans run for cover; and when the bombers go they come out of hiding and repair the damage. Now what if there was more damage than the bombers had done? More telephone lines down? Vehicles that had only been slightly damaged suddenly burnt to a shell? Sabotage that the Germans thought was bomb damage. All we need to do is collect some shrapnel and leave it at the scene of our work. The Germans won’t have engineers scrutinising the damage; they’re too busy elsewhere. They’ll just clean it up. Partisan action. Partisan success. No risk of reprisals.’

‘Very good, Roberto. I like the idea, but it isn’t a message to the local people. If the Germans don’t know the partisans have done it, neither will they.’

‘I think you’ll find a way of letting them know.’

‘Couldn’t there be the odd German shot by the planes at the same time?’

‘Too dangerous, doctor. No risk if he’s killed, but if he’s only wounded the surgeon will take the bullet out and find it’s the wrong calibre and know it was done by someone local. Ten people shot for nothing gained. We can’t risk that yet, not until the Germans are too preoccupied with other things to detail an execution party. But we’ll get the men trained. Where are the guns, by the way?’

‘You don’t need to know that yet, but there are enough for a hundred men. Ugo’s in charge of that. The Gestapo couldn’t make him talk last time, so I think we can rely on him.’

‘So you want me to train them without guns?’

‘I think it’s better. Some of them would want to be firing them all the time. You wouldn’t want the Germans coming up to investigate the shots, would you?’

‘They’ll be coming up anyway, at least as soon as the weather’s better. They know their workers have been escaping. They’ll suspect they’re up on the mountain, and they won’t want them harrying their retreat when it comes. Besides, they’ve got an Allied radio operator to look for.’

–

The doctor left soon afterwards. The next morning, after a bowl of the cow’s warm milk, they struck up the mountain at dawn.

‘You shouldn’t talk too much to the doctor about reprisals, Roberto. He knows all about them. When the Germans killed a hundred people in that village to the south the doctor’s wife and his baby daughter were there. She was helping a cousin with her childbirth. The Germans burst in with machine guns and killed everyone in the house, even the new-born baby.’

The captain remembered the doctor’s suppressed tears the first time that he had met him. So it was not just political dreams that drove him on.

For the rest of their climb he was lost in thought, trying to remember something the doctor had said the evening before. He wished he knew what he was trying to remember. Was it something that was explained by what Vincenzo had just told him? Or was it something else? Last night his sleep had been disturbed by a sense that he had missed something that was significant.

They were followed up the mountain.

They are on a different mountain watching for bombers. They need to know the pattern to their raids so that they can be in place for their sabotage. A clear cold sun is throwing shadows in the valley still in hibernation. The trees by the river are still bare, their shadows barely noticeable against the bare yellowish soil. On the mountains opposite the brown beech trees, still retaining their last year’s leaves, are stark against the snowfields. There is no traffic on the light grey roads, not even an ox-cart.

Then little white puffs, like cotton wool, appear against the blue sky over the mountains to the south, followed by the lightly drumming sound of anti-aircraft fire. They hold their hands against the low sun and slowly a flock of black wings appears against the sky like crows. The wings get bigger and take the shape of planes remorselessly approaching. The anti-aircraft fire stops. As they reach a town to the south black dots fall from all the planes, all at the same time. The planes fly on. Seconds later it is as if the town explodes as bombs detonate within split seconds of each other, sending mushrooms of smoke and dust into the sky. Then the sounds of the explosions rumble down the valley and up the mountainside towards them.

‘Porca puttana’ says Vincenzo. ‘To be under that!’

‘Carpet bombing,’ the captain says. ‘Maximum destruction.’

The planes continue down the valley and pass beneath them, lowering their run now that they know they are unopposed. Enormous khaki planes with great engine pods on their wings, red flashes on their tails, silver stars on their fuselages. The nearest one flies so close to them that they think they can see the face of its pilot, a free man on the captain’s side, clinically plying his trade. The planes swing to starboard and out of sight. A minute later the sound of bombs exploding in Sannessuno comes up to them. The ground seems to vibrate below them. Then the bombers appear again over the spur as they climb, still in tight formation, over the ridge to the north to carry on and drop another stick of bombs on the next town or village.

‘Americans’ says Vincenzo. ‘It was as if we could reach out and touch them. So much power.’

‘No anti-aircraft fire except when they first crossed the lines. No fighters attacking them the whole way. It’s so easy for them. Not even a ninety-ten risk.’

–

‘We were on patrol in the desert, sent out to check if the Germans had moved into a particular area. One day you’re in the area, the next day they’re there, and neither of you has seen the other. So I’d been sent out to check if the Germans were there.

‘We’d driven about thirty miles, had reached the area we were supposed to check, driving behind the ridge along the south side of a wadi, one of those channels that suddenly become rivers if there’s rain. It’s hard to believe it ever rains in a place that’s all grey-yellow sand and grey-purple rocks, but it obviously does because those wadis can be difficult to drive in. So we stayed behind the ridge to one side of it, stopping every so often so I could check the horizons with my binoculars for Germans.

‘Once, when we stopped, we caught the sound of a vehicle behind the ridge on the other side of the wadi. Another time we saw it for a split second, a British truck. It seemed strange that our superiors had sent out two patrols on identical missions, but you sometimes wonder what mistakes they’ll make next. The officer on the other side of the wadi must have seen us and was probably thinking the same thing. And looking at our maps we knew that the wadi came to an end a couple of miles further on, the ridges would flatten out and we’d meet up and have a good laugh at the folly of our senior officers.

‘We were in a captured German half-track vehicle, the kind with tank tracks instead of rear wheels, so you can move easily on the sand. In hundreds of miles of desert, with no water holes, there’s no such thing as lines unless you’re in a pitched battle. Vehicles get captured and, because you’ve never enough transport in a place like that, you just paint out the enemy’s colours on them and substitute your own. Or they get abandoned because they’re broken down. If your mechanics can fix one the Germans have left behind, despite the sabotage they’d have done to it, well suddenly you have a British army lorry made in Germany.

‘We came round the end of the ridge at the same time as he did, three or four hundred yards apart. I ordered my driver to stop so that I could check him through my binoculars. He did the same. I saw a black cross painted on his British army truck at the same time as he saw British insignia painted on my German one.

‘Each of us ordered his machine gunner to cock and aim and then held out his arm to hold the fire as he studied the other through his glasses.

‘Then the German officer took his right hand from his glasses and saluted me. I saluted him back. Together we ordered our gunners to relax and gestured our drivers to turn round. Then each of us drove back to his base.’

‘Why didn’t you open fire, Roberto?’

‘That’s just what my major asked when I got back, Ugo. I said that I’d been ordered to find out if the Germans were there, which I’d done. He now had the intelligence report he’d wanted, which he wouldn’t have had if I’d been shot up. That if there’d been a fire-fight and the German had won, then the Germans would have had better intelligence than he had. As it was, both sides knew that the other was only at the stage of recce’ing the area, rather than the Germans knowing the area was free to move into and us knowing nothing.’

‘You mean you worked all that out, Roberto, while you were deciding whether to open fire?’

‘Of course not. All I knew was that I’d been taken by surprise to find out he was German, that therefore I’d no more than a chance of surviving a fire-fight. As it turned out, although I didn’t know it at the time, it was exactly fifty-fifty because he was equally surprised to find out that I was English.

‘That’s what I mean when I say that, if you have the choice whether or not to fight, never take the chance unless it’s at least sixty-forty in your favour.’

‘I can’t believe a German did that’ says Ugo. ‘They like killing. You’ve only got to look at what they’ve been doing round here.’

‘It’s different around here. Out in the desert there’s no place for partisans, no civilians who might be carrying arms or supplies or information to them. There aren’t even any civilians. There war is fought to the old rules, like a game of chess with guns. Here the Germans see every civilian as a threat to their ability to fight. And he is.’

‘Why are you sticking up for them, Roberto?’

‘I’m not. I’m telling you how they think. If you don’t know how they think, how are you going to outwit them? And my story tells you something else as well. The Germans work to the same rule of sixty-forty. They don’t want to die. And now that they can see they’re going to lose the war, the ordinary German soldier wants nothing more than to be at home with his family again, or back on his farm. That will work in our favour as well if we remember it.’

–

There is still snow in the beech forest above them. They are killing time. In the mornings the captain teaches them the tricks of mountain war: retreating at a signal and leading one’s pursuers into a barrage of fire over the next ridge; using a single sniper on the far side of the valley until the enemy takes up his positions to fire back and then firing down into his ranks from behind; making sure both sides of an ambush are firing down, to stop you shooting each other. The tricks of sabotage: always leave something behind to suggest that it isn’t sabotage, shrapnel from a bomb. Always make sure that the enemy’s field-telephone lines are cut, so that he cannot summon help.

In the afternoons the men play cards while the captain scouts the mountains and Salvatore slowly cooks their food on the fire they will stoke up for warmth as the cold moist evening falls.

Animal tracks have started to appear in the snow in the runs through the forest as the animals slowly rise from their hibernation. Salvatore and Bruno are hunters from childhood and trap the occasional squirrel or rabbit for the beanpot that simmers for days on end. In the evenings they exchange hunters’ tales of deer and foxes and wild boar. ‘Oh yes, there are wild boar on the mountain. They’re big things, and fierce, and they move fast, faster then you’d imagine for something so big. My father came upon one once. He couldn’t turn and run because it would have run him down and thrust its tusks into his backside. He had to stand still and wait for it to lose interest. It took ages, and did he need a drink when he got home! Wouldn’t it be good to find one now? It would be worth a rifle shot, even if the Germans heard it. It would feed us all for days. Good meat too. Better than these squirrels for giving a man his strength again.’

Vincenzo has found a second hut to rebuild for the more young men who are sure to come as the weather improves, but the captain remains concerned about too many men being in the same place. As often or not he slips back to his hide to sleep, fearing another German dawn attack. It is far colder in the hide, but his feet are warmed by the Golvis’ cat. Dismayed as only cats can be at not being fed, it had left the family that had sheltered it as a kitten and set off in search of better service. It had seen the captain on his leaving of Vincenzo’s house and followed him up the mountain. Once again his feet are warm at night.

–

‘When will this god-forgotten spring come?’ sighs Vincenzo. ‘You’ll see the change in these lads when the trees are out in leaf. It’ll be easier to hunt, easier to hide on this mountain, easier to fight, and the Germans will be on the run and we’ll be free again.

‘You’ll see, Roberto, they’ll all be starting to look at the girls again. They’ve no time or energy for it now. Too much of a distraction. They’re too busy concentrating on staying alive. But as soon the Germans are gone they’ll all be wanting to get married, to have babies to bounce on their knees. So will the girls.

‘But how many of them will be able to have children after a winter like this one?’

Sometimes when he looks down from one of the higher spurs to the village in the sun the area around and beyond the bridge looks like an ant colony. The bombed buildings in the distance are yellowish-grey cones rising from a base of the same colour, edged by the green of the water-meadows. The villagers are black dots scrambling around, in and out of the ruins.

Today a column of ants is moving across the bridge to the railway station. More ants are moving from their hills on the far side of the bridge, all converging on the station. In the siding are some goods wagons, like a child’s model, surrounded by black specks.

A wagon is separated from the train and pushed backwards down the track by the seething black mass.

Then the ants suddenly radiate outwards like the rings on a pond into which a stone has been thrown.