Wolf on the Mountain (3 page)

He leans back to look at the Englishman’s wasted body, the muscles strong from the physical effort of walking the hundreds of miles from his prisoner-of-war camp, but now they protrude through the shrunken skin with little flesh between. He must have been a powerful man before the war, perhaps even before his long walk, although food had been short in Italy for more than a year. Now he is a refugee, not a soldier, a naked man shivering in the chiaroscuro light.

‘Why on earth did you come back to the village?’ he asks. ‘It’s crawling with Germans tonight, the worst place you could have come. I thought you were setting out for your lines today. Why didn’t you just carry on?’

‘I thought of it, believe me, but everything was against it. By the time the Germans had left there was no chance of going over the mountain and getting down to lower ground on the other side before nightfall, even if I could have done it with one arm. I’d no food. And then there was Mike. He too might have escaped. Coming back here was the only way I could hope to be safe for the night, hope to get news of him.’

‘Safe?’ the doctor huffs. ‘No-one’s safe in this village tonight. Safer for you, maybe, but what about this family?’ The captain, abashed, does not reply. ‘Still, it gives us a chance to find out what happened this morning. All we’ve heard is rumours. You’re the only one who’s made it back to the village so far.’

‘So you don’t know if Mike got away?’

‘No. Or any of the village men. At least your friend stands a better chance of not being shot. One of the rumours is of mass executions.’

‘Dear God! But there were none at the camp. No sounds of a firing squad. The men who surrendered must have been taken away.’

‘That doesn’t mean they weren’t shot elsewhere, somewhere more public, to make an example. But that’s a start. One of the rumours is wrong. It’s something to reassure the families, a start. Now tell me what happened up there.’

‘It’s simple.’ The captain slips into the soldier’s report: ‘The Germans surrounded the camp, attacked it with mortars and then rushed it just before dawn. Textbook operation. It was all over in a couple of minutes. They must have caught at least fifty of the partisans, maybe more. I haven’t seen anyone else who’d escaped.’

‘It couldn’t be worse. All those young men.’ The doctor swallows deeply. ‘So the Germans knew the camp was there. But how did they know? It can’t be seen from below. Even the high mountains don’t overlook it.’

‘That was the problem. What hid the camp hid the Germans when they found out about it. I know it was the only place for miles around where you could hide so many men, where there was water for them all, but it wasn’t a site you can defend. All you can do is post look-outs and scatter when the enemy comes. God knows what those two officers thought they were up to. We told them to post look-outs, but I’d almost reached the camp when the Germans attacked. No sign of anyone on watch.’

‘Yes, those officers. Men from good families, peacocks, the type of leaders who made our army a laughing stock. Do you really think that the Italian working man is such a useless soldier, particularly if he’s fighting for a cause he believes in, with competent officers?’ He sees the captain tensing. ‘I’m sorry, I’m getting carried away. We should never have been at war with anyone.’

‘Have we finished, doctor?’ the captain asks impatiently. He leans back to look the doctor’s threadbare jacket up and down, fixes his eye on his smoking cigarette, drums his fingers on the table.

‘No, we haven’t. There are still wounds to clean. And more you have to tell me.’

‘Can’t it wait ’til tomorrow? I’m dog tired. I need to sleep.’

‘No, it can’t. Isn’t it clear to you that the Germans knew exactly where the camp was and what was happening there? Either they got a spy into it or it was betrayed by someone from the village. Getting a spy into it would have been difficult. We’ve been very careful who we’ve let go up there, as you’ll remember, and if it was betrayed then everyone in the village who was supporting it is at risk. We need to know which it was as soon as possible.’

‘How would I know? I don’t speak the language.’

‘Yes, but you’re a cautious man. You’ve been wondering the same ever since the raid. Can’t you think of anything strange that’s happened in the last few days?’

‘I haven’t had time for that. I’ve been too busy staying alive. Maybe when I’ve slept…’

‘But surely the infantry officer noticed something odd about that raid?’

Infantry officer? How does the doctor know that? He studies him again. The man is so paradoxical: shabby, yet clinical; excited one minute, cold the next; so unlike any Italian he has ever come across; articulate, his English perfect, even the idioms, yet living in such a small, impoverished village. Who is he? Where did he learn to speak English so well? It’s almost as if he is being debriefed by one of his own senior officers.

Debriefed, or interviewed? A week ago he and Mike had been interviewed in a hut to the north of the village before being taken up to the partisan camp. There’d been an unseen man in the corner that night, asking questions in broken English with a heavy accent. There is something about the doctor’s voice which suddenly seems familiar. A man can disguise how well he speaks a language, but not his tone. Is this the same man?

The doctor reads his thoughts: ‘Yes, perhaps you are too tired if it’s taken you this long to recognise my voice. It
was
me that questioned you in that hut before we took you up to the camp, speakinga inglese bad. Part of the disguise: there aren’t that many English speakers around here. And of course the things you and your friend said to each other when you thought none of us would understand you was what convinced me you were English. So I know you’re an infantryman. And an infantryman knows that you don’t take mortars on a foot patrol, particularly three thousand feet up a mountain, unless you know you have a position to attack. They knew all about the camp, and we need to know how they found out about it.

‘The signora came back last night with a story about some South Africans, said that you and your friend had sent them away.’

Could it have been them? The captain falls silent, allows the doctor to pick at some splinters.

‘It happened yesterday’ he sighs. ‘Two strangers walked up to one of the sentries claiming to be prisoners-of-war, Afrikaaners. Mike and I were asked to go out to interview them. They seemed real enough at first. It was only when Mike and I relaxed and started mentioning the names of some of the South African officers we’d met in North Africa that we started to wonder about them. You never meet a brother officer and not have someone in common, even if only through some crazy anecdote you’ve heard; but these two seemed to know no-one, even in the places they said they’d been. They didn’t seem right, so we told your commandant to send them away.’

‘Did you consider shooting them? Saying you’re an Afrikaaner is a good way of disguising a German accent.’

Why didn’t you? the doctor is asking. The partisans too had wanted to shoot them as spies. The thought still shocks him. ‘Yes. It was discussed’ he replies impatiently. ‘But what was the point? They’d walked up to the camp. Even if they were Germans they must have already known it was there and were on a final recce for an attack that was going to happen anyway. And if they were spies and we’d shot them, what reprisals would have been in store for the village? Twenty people shot?’

‘Suppose they’d just chanced upon the camp? The Germans have been sending men out for months masquerading as escaped prisoners-of-war in order to trap the locals. This is a partisan war. You can’t take prisoners in a partisan war. You don’t have a stockade for them, and you can’t let them go because the whole point is staying hidden. The Germans would never treat partisans as prisoners-of-war. They’d simply shoot them. You may not like it, but it’s a matter of kill or be killed, with nothing in between. Surely the commandant told you that?’

‘Yes, we went through all this yesterday.’ He sighs again, yawns. ‘Mike and I were only suspicious of them, not
sure
they were spies. If they were spies then they’d been very well briefed: their stories were utterly plausible. They might have been who they said they were, and if they were, suppose Mike and I had been in their position and they were interrogating us, not knowing anyone they knew? If we were wrong, I’m sorry. I just don’t think we were.’ He turns his head away, unsettled by the doctor’s stare, turns back and defiantly fixes his interrogator’s eyes. ‘So we sent them on their way, although we made sure they saw nothing in the camp. And, just in case, we decided to hide the weapons and to post extra look-outs last night. None of this would have happened if those bloody officers had done their job properly and posted the look-outs.’

The doctor has finished cleansing the captain’s wounds. He silently collects his makeshift tools and blows out the candle so as not to waste it. The room is now lit only by a small electric bulb set in the wall. His features are indistinct. ‘But then you came into the village with the signora?’

The captain senses another accusation, that if the camp was threatened he should have stayed. ‘To listen to the wireless. She was at the camp yesterday afternoon and offered to bring me down - not Mike, because he’s taller and fairer than I am, more English as she put it to Mike - to listen to Radio Londra. To find out what was going on down at the battlefront, to see if there was anything happening somewhere on the lines which would give us a chance of getting through.’

‘But tonight you came into the village on your own. No-one to usher you in, avoid the houses of the fascists, stop you if the wrong person was on the street.’

‘I didn’t just wander in. I watched the village for over an hour, working out the patterns of the patrols so I could come in behind one. And I took the same route as the night before, the one the signora thought was safe. The streets were almost empty, except for a couple of off-duty Germans.’ The doctor clenches. ‘Don’t worry. You can’t stay free for three months without learning a few tricks: limp like you’re war-wounded, so they don’t think you’re a deserter; keep your hands by your side; pee in the road if they look at you too long.’

The doctor chuckles. ‘The Germans’ contempt for us sometimes works in our favour. But the locals won’t have been fooled. Even with your hands by your sides you English walk, even limp, differently from us. Country people notice such things, and there are informers everywhere. It’s easy to be tempted when food is short.

‘Then there are the fascists. You know there’s a family of them next door?’ The captain looks to the party wall. ‘Don’t worry. That wall is a couple of feet thick. But their windows aren’t. We’ll have to keep you out of sight for a while, until you’re a bit more Italian. You can’t stay on the mountain. This rain is falling as snow higher up, even on the camp. And you can’t go clambering over mountains until that wrist is strong again. You’ll have to stay in this house for a while.’

‘No, I can’t. I must have another go at getting through the lines before the weather gets any worse. I do have a duty to get back.’

‘Forget your duty. You stand a better chance of surviving if you forget you’re an English army officer. So does this family. You blundered in here this evening. They’ve been waiting for the Germans to raid the house ever since. So presumably whoever saw you has decided to keep it to himself, but you can’t rely on such luck lasting. Next time you leave this house you’ll be walking like an Italian, speaking like one. It’s your only chance. It’s the family’s only chance, and they’ve got more at stake than you have.

‘I’ll come and see you again tomorrow evening, if I can. There’s a lot more I need you to tell me. And when you’ve told it to me, you and I will stop talking in English. The signora has some pasta for you. Eat and sleep as well as you can. Tomorrow you will be two years old again and you will be learning how to talk and how to behave.’

The captain was chased all night, round spurs, up steep scree where the sliding stones kept dragging him back, down them where he was at full pelt to keep his feet, through scrub that tore his face, clearings where he had to stay their width ahead, forever listening for shouts or barking dogs to tell him where his pursuers were. Chased until his lungs gasped, his legs drained, his will wanted to give up, to sink to his knees with his hands in the air, to submit to the fore-sight to his head. Sometimes his dreams cut just before his capture, sometimes he fell tumbling onto the air, into a cold black nothingness.

He awoke at dawn. The sweat from his dreams still chilled him. He huddled the blanket around him, putting off the cold of getting up. The chair with strange clothes on it towered through the cloud of his breath over his lumpy hair mattress. At floor level he felt threatened by the height and size of the room, like a child waking from a nightmare.

He tried to settle his mind for the day. He wanted to bolt into the kitchen and ask if there was news of Mike. Fine if the news was good and he too had escaped: there would be a secret rendezvous tonight and Mike’s Italian would encourage the doctor to allow them both to leave for the lines, but he couldn’t go into the kitchen unprepared for that hope to be dashed, or worse unprepared for the news that he had been shot as a partisan. Whichever, he had to face a day of not being able to communicate except by gesture and the few words he had learned on the journey south. Damn that he hadn’t stuck with the language classes in the prison camp, damn that he’d always left the talking to Mike. If he were Mike it wouldn’t be such a daunting day ahead.

It was useless trying to compose himself. He needed to be doing something. He cast off the blanket and quickly dressed in the clothes that had been left for him on the chair while his own were drying: a collarless woollen shirt, an old jacket which pinched his armpits and patched trousers a few inches too short for his legs, but no boots or socks. He skipped barefoot across the cold tiled floor for the heat of the kitchen.

–

It was a cluttered room, like the kitchen of an elderly couple’s farmhouse deep in the English countryside. Copper and iron pots and pans were suspended from hooks on the walls and dresser, plaits of onions and other vegetables from nails on the ceiling beams. There was a blackened iron stove, a basket of firewood alongside it, a large glass flagon encased in woven reeds to hold the family’s water supply for the day, a wooden chest to hold the flour and other dry stores.