Naples '44 (5 page)

It now came out that several days before the Germans abandoned Naples, Colonel Scholl, the officer in command of the garrison, reported to have been unable to accept Italians as even honorary Aryans, had given an order that an area to a depth of three hundred metres from the seafront be evacuated by the civilian population. The Italians had been led to believe at that time that a naval bombardment, followed by an Allied landing, was expected in the city itself. The supposition now was that the real motive was to clear the area to enable this to be secretly mined, and that a large number of seafront buildings had been mined in this way, and might blow up at any time.

Our most urgent preoccupation is the fact that our palazzo may have been included, and this demoralising possibility strengthened to probability when our
portiere
told us that, returning after four days' enforced absence with relations living near the Porta Capuana, he had found a number of lengths of wire strewn about the courtyard. The Engineers, who are running round in circles trying to deal with this situation, will go over the place as soon as they can, but their Captain, contacted by the FSO, wasn't hopeful. The foundations of an old palazzo like ours would be honeycombed, he said, with sewers, cellars, and disused well-shafts. Even if there were mines, the odds were ten to one they'd never be found. His advice was to get out of the place for a few days, and wait until buildings stopped blowing up.

This evening, after a day so full of alarms, the city was plunged into even deeper misery by the first German air-raid. Many bombs fell in the port area, and the nearest explosion caused our old palazzo to teeter hideously. As soon as the all-clear sounded I went out to inspect the damage, finding very little of consequence in the port itself but
devastation in the narrow streets to the rear of it. Apocalyptic scenes as people clawed about in the ruins, some of them howling like dogs, in the hopeless attempt to rescue those trapped under the masonry. In
Pizzo-Falcone
a team of roadsweepers were working by lamplight clearing up what looked like a lake of spilled stew where a crowded shelter had received a direct hit.

There is no relief in sight to the near-famine conditions in the city and surrounding country.

Friday, at least ten jobs came up, among which was the visit to a peasant house near Aversa where the people had been assaulted by deserters. Having found nothing lootable, they had molested all the womenfolk, subjecting them to every conceivable indignity, including attempted buggery. The women were evidently spared from outright rape by the fear many of our soldiers share of contracting syphilis. One of the girls involved in this nightmarish business was outstandingly pretty, although spoiled by a puffiness – a sogginess of the flesh showing particularly about the eyes. This I've noticed so often in people close to starvation. I did my best to pacify the sufferers with vague promises of redress. There was nothing else to do.

Today the same girl appeared at HQ, eyes downcast, and shaking. She brought a letter from her father, which, from its unusual literacy, I suspected might have been put together by the village priest.

A tremendous scare this morning following information given by a captured enemy agent that thousands of delayed-action mines would explode when the city's electricity supply was switched on. This was timed for two o'clock today. An order was given for the whole of Naples to be evacuated, and within minutes army vehicles were tearing up and down the streets broadcasting instructions to the civilian population.

The scene as the great exodus started, and a million and a half people left their houses and crowded into the streets, was like some Biblical calamity. Everyone had to be got away to the safety of the heights of the Vomero, Fontanelle and the Observatory, overlooking the town. This meant that the bedridden, the dying, and all the women in labour had to be coped with in some way or other, not to mention the physically and mentally sick persons in clinics all over the town. The agent had specifically mentioned that five thousand mines had been laid under the enormous building housing the 92nd General Hospital, packed at this time with war casualties, all of whom had to be moved to a place of safety. Our own move took place shortly before midday when streets were beginning to clear of the last of the desperate crowds. I saw men carrying their old parents on their backs, and at one moment a single, small explosion set off a panic with women and children running screaming in all directions, leaving trails of urine.

At the Vomero we took up positions at a spot on the heights where the road had been intentionally widened to assist visitors to appreciate the view, which was splendid indeed. All Naples lay spread out beneath us like an antique map, on which the artist had drawn with almost exaggerated care the many gardens, the castles, the towers and the cupolas. For the first time, awaiting the cataclysm, I appreciated the magnificence of this city, seen at a distance which cleansed it of its wartime tegument of grime, and for the first time I realised how un-European, how oriental it was. Nothing moved but a distant floating confetti of doves. A great silence had fallen and we looked down and
awaited the moment of devastation. At about four o'clock the order came for everyone to go home.

The FSO called me in this morning to say that yesterday's great fiasco was the result of a carefully organised plot, designed to cause the maximum disruption to the life of the city. A young German soldier named Sauro had volunteered to stay behind when the troops pulled out and then, as soon as the mined buildings started to go up, to turn himself in with this story of the whole of the town having been mined. The General, exasperated, was of the opinion that this soldier should be treated as a spy, and shot. My instructions were to go to see him at the civilian prison at Poggio Reale and report on all the circumstances of the case, to help decide whether his execution could be legally justified.

Never having been in a prison before except the famous hole in the ground in Philippeville, into which dissident Arabs were flung, to be kept in total darkness, Poggio Reale came as a surprise. I stated my business at an office sited between the outer and inner walls – this was surrounded by weeping women – and a man appeared carrying an enormous bunch of keys, to walk with me to the inner gate. The man made some comment in Neapolitan dialect which I did not understand, and then burst out laughing. He gave me the impression of being insane. When we got to the gate he turned his back to it, and then, still giggling and chatting incomprehensibly, with his hands behind his back, selected the right key on the bunch purely by touch, thrust it unerringly into the lock and turned it. This was evidently a macabre piece of expertise to which all visitors such as myself were treated.

The gate opened; the screw, grinning with pride, waved me ahead and I stepped forward into the blue twilight of the prison, took its wornout, fungus-smelling air into my lungs, and its resounding steel echoes into my ears. Next came the Ufficio Matricola, the records office, begrimed and gloomy – windows painted over against air-raid attacks – and staffed with unshaven, muttering clerks, looking hardly better off in their terrible version of freedom than the prisoners who dragged
themselves about the place doing odd cleaning jobs. Here Sauro's whereabouts was established, and a warder with a face the colour of a newly unwrapped mummy took me to his cell.

I had expected a gigantic pale-eyed Teuton, but what I found was a small, dark boy who gave me a limp Hitler salute, and asked whether I'd brought any food. He said he'd had nothing to eat for two days. I found this believable at a time when the whole civilian population of Naples was still on the brink of starvation, and to the afflictions prisoners of Poggio Reale must normally have expected to suffer had been added the burden of an American master sergeant, attached as adviser to the office of the Warden, and engaged in the private sale of prison equipment.

Sauro told me that he was not a German at all but had had an Italian father and a German mother. His father had been killed at Tobruk, after which he had been taken to Germany by his grandparents, and there the rules had been bent a little in his favour to allow him to enter the Hitler Jugend. Although he was now seventeen years of age, he looked fifteen, with emaciated boyish good looks and fine dark eyes fixed with evident complacency on the vision of martyrdom. He had committed himself to this fate, and was prepared, virtuously, to avoid any compromise, or any kind of a deal that would help us to find an excuse not to shoot him. He preferred his death to be on our consciences, and refused to consider anything by way of an excuse that might have mitigated the severity of retribution. ‘I did all the damage I could. I'm only sorry it couldn't have been more. Whatever I did was for the Führer. You can shoot me whenever you like.'

This was a dilemma. Much as generals may like to be thought capable of ruthless action, they often seem eager in practice to pass on moral responsibility for decisions of this kind. A Major Davis had been put in charge of this case and I sensed in the Major a reluctance to give the order for Sauro to be shot. I felt, too, although no positive lead was given, that the Section would not hold it against me if I found a loophole by which the firing squad could be avoided. This entirely suited my book, as I had no intention of being responsible for the death of a seventeen-year-old fanatic. I therefore reported that Sauro was mentally
unbalanced. This verdict was accepted without comment, but probably with secret relief.

It is astonishing to witness the struggles of this city so shattered, so starved, so deprived of all those things that justify a city's existence, to adapt itself to a collapse into conditions which must resemble life in the Dark Ages. People camp out like Bedouins in deserts of brick. There is little food, little water, no salt, no soap. A lot of Neapolitans have lost their possessions, including most of their clothing, in the bombings, and I have seen some strange combinations of garments about the streets, including a man in an old dinner-jacket, knickerbockers and army boots, and several women in lacy confections that might have been made up from curtains. There are no cars but carts by the hundred, and a few antique coaches such as barouches and phaetons drawn by lean horses. Today at Posilippo I stopped to watch the methodical dismemberment of a stranded German half-track by a number of youths who were streaming away from it like leaf-cutter ants, carrying pieces of metal of all shapes and sizes. Fifty yards away a well-dressed lady with a feather in her hat squatted to milk a goat. At the water's edge below, two fishermen had roped together several doors salvaged from the ruins, piled their gear on these and were about to go fishing. Inexplicably no boats are allowed out, but nothing is said in the proclamation about rafts. Everyone improvises and adapts.

Tonight I dined for the first time in a civilian house at the invitation of a Signora Gentile recently released by a member of the section from the Filangieri gaol, where with a number of other women she had been imprisoned by the partisans on vague charges of collaboration. Here the mood was one of escapism, even of nostalgic frivolity. Our friends had made a huge effort to cast out of mind the unpleasantness of the immediate past. Several beautiful women were present – one in a blouse made from a Union Jack; all the old-style airs and graces banished by Mussolini were back again. The men kissed the ladies' hands, called each other ‘egregious sir', and everybody used the polite form of address
lei
instead of the Fascists' forthright Roman
voi
.

We ate wurst, sipped schnapps, drank wine from glasses of the right shape and colour, somebody strummed a mandolin, and we talked about Naples and its traditions – the city that had ignored and finally overcome all its conquerors, dedicated entirely and everlastingly to the sweet things of life. Other wars were mentioned in passing, but this one was not. Neither were politics, Mussolini, food shortages or the rumoured outbreak of typhus.

All too soon the pleasant unreality of the evening was over, brought to an end by the curfew. As we were about to leave our hostess drew me aside and, showing a little hesitancy, said she had a favour to ask. She had a German soldier, she said, buried in her garden, and wondered what could be done about it. The story was that about two days before our arrival, when the partisans and the Germans were fighting on the streets, a German chased by armed Italians had knocked on the door and asked her to shelter him in the house. This she had felt unable to do, and next day, finding the soldier's body lying in the road outside, she had dragged it into the garden, taken a spade and buried it. What she was hoping now was that someone could be found to help in the task of digging this corpse up and smuggling it away, because it occurred to her that one day – perhaps even in years to come – she might want to sell the house, and she could imagine an embarrassing situation arising if the buyer happened to find a body in the garden. I told her that I could inform whatever authority it was that dealt with this kind of thing and leave it to them. She seemed disappointed, and said she wanted the thing done discreetly, and perhaps it would be better to leave things as they were. A mysterious business.

Neapolitans take their sex lives very seriously indeed. A woman called Lola, whom I met at the dinner-party given by Signora Gentile, arrived at HQ with some denunciation which went into the wastepaper basket as soon as her back was turned. She then asked if I could help her. It turned out she had taken a lover who is a captain in the RASC, but as he speaks no single word of Italian, communication can only be carried on by signs,
and this gives rise to misunderstanding. Would I agree to interpret for them and settle certain basic matters?