Read Wolf on the Mountain Online
Authors: Anthony Paul
Wolf on the Mountain
About the Book
In December 1943 the Germans attack a partisan camp in the Abruzzo mountains behind the Cassino battle-line. One man, a fugitive British prisoner-of-war, escapes.
There is only one way that Captain Robert Johnson can survive - to become Roberto DiGiovanni, an Italian peasant who can move as freely as the locals in the snowbound mountains and German-garrisoned villages, a man protected by the communist underground and assisting them to reform their partisan band.
Together they have to endure manhunts and reprisals, informers and treachery, political manoeuvring between communists and fascist sympathisers, bombing raids and growing famine as modern warfare takes its toll on a poor farming community whose lifestyle has hardly changed in centuries.
It is not only the English captain who has to change: the families, communist and fascist, who protect him, the daughter of the fascist family who falls in love with him, the doctor who attends his wounds, the village priest and the proud peasants with whom he reforms the partisan band all have to adapt their loyalties in order to survive.
But can these new loyalties endure?
Anthony Paul used the many source materials referred to in the acknowledgements at the back of this book in his attempt to give a realistic impression of the experiences of escaping prisoners-of-war in Italy and of their local helpers.
He is an Oxford graduate who lives in London.
Wolf on the Mountain
was first published in 2007. His second novel
John Doe
was published in 2010.
for Gianni, Brera and Renzo
My father died on the 4th December 1943. Or did he? His entry at the war graves commission states that fact, but what happened on that date is that he disappeared, never to be seen again by his wife or his friends, never to see his son. In 1946 the War Office proclaimed him dead and his name appears on the tablets at Cassino commemorating the soldiers who simply disappeared during the Italian campaign.
He didn’t die in battle, but as an escaping prisoner-of-war. He had been captured near Tobruk, just before I was born, and taken to a prison camp in the Po valley. When the Italian army capitulated in September 1943 he escaped from his camp as the guards scrambled into the hills to avoid the German invasion they knew was coming.
That was all my mother knew for a long time, except that he hadn’t been recaptured by the Germans, because she would have had a letter from him. No, he was somewhere on the run behind the German lines, and like thousands of other women she waited for news. Then when the war was finally over an officer called Peter Cavendish was repatriated from a prison camp in Germany with a story the censors had not allowed him to tell in a letter home. He had escaped with my father and walked all the way down to a mountain behind the Cassino lines, where they had been sheltered in a partisan camp. The Germans had raided the camp and recaptured him, but not my father. But he couldn’t tell if my father had escaped the raid: he had never seen him again. By 1946 all the interviewing of returning prisoners had been completed. No-one else had seen him since. He was presumed dead and the date of his last sighting was the date of his death.
My mother received a letter of condolence from Mr Cavendish, but couldn’t face meeting him. He must have been a good man, because he took the trouble to write for her a very long account, although there were no names of people or places in it, of his and my father’s journey as far as the partisan camp, “so that your son will have a story to remember John by”. I grew up with that story: I read it so many times I could have recited it from memory and my atlas would fall open to the Italy page because of the number of times I tried to trace his journey.
For her part my mother would never give up hope that my father was alive. The army had told her that there were still hundreds of escaped prisoners missing. Many would have frozen to death in the mountains - the winter of 1943 to 1944 had been ferocious - and doubtless been given a Christian burial by the countryfolk of Italy, not knowing that the numbers on their metal tags identified the body and would give a family a grave to mourn by.
She would dread every spring, when the thaw might uncover a body with my father’s number, but in truth she never gave up hope that wandering around Europe was a man so traumatised that he had forgotten who he was. She never married again and she died before her time.
It took a while before I could face going through her private things. I found some official letters about her war widow’s pension and in one of them was a detail not mentioned in Mr Cavendish’s letter: it was the name of the village in which my father had spent the night immediately before the raid on the partisan camp. He had gone down on his own, with a guide, to listen to a secret radio to a broadcast by the BBC specially aimed at prisoners-of-war and resistance groups in Italy. I could see why she had been so optimistic that he had survived the raid. Suppose he had not made it back to the camp by the time it was raided?
I packed a knapsack and headed to Italy and the village, blundering around with my Latin vocabulary and French grammar, finding out what I could. Yes, the older ones remembered the raid on the camp. Yes, an English prisoner had been recaptured, or was it two? No-one had been killed in the raid. No-one knew which family my father had stayed with - people kept silent about these things, there was a great fear. Things had been bad after the war and many families had moved away to the new world; maybe his protectors had also gone abroad.
They were nice people and I went back to the village a few times over the years, my Italian improving with every trip, and each time I went on to Rome to stay with an old school friend. Two years ago he had another house guest, a publisher from Milan. Over dinner the publisher asked me my business in Italy and I told him. He was intrigued by the story. He described it as oddly familiar, although he could not think why, and conversation passed on to happier things.
A few months later I received a letter from him. He reminded me of our conversation and his remark about the story being oddly familiar. He continued:
“
Some years ago I received a fiction manuscript from a writer in the Abruzzo telling the story of an English prisoner who spent that winter hiding in the mountains and villages there. I was convinced that it must have been based on a true story.
“I wrote back to him expressing my interest in publishing the book, but making some suggestions for its improvement. I did not receive a reply for some months, when I was informed that the author had died, leaving no family. The manuscript, therefore, can never be published.
“The reason why it is of interest is because it begins by describing a raid on a partisan camp exactly like the one you described. Not only that, but the main character had been down to a nearby village to listen to Radio Londra the night before.
“Do not be too excited. The Abruzzese mountains were full of Italian soldiers who had deserted their posts at the time of the Armistice and were hiding from the Germans, and they all called themselves partisans. And there were almost as many British prisoners-of-war, all of them trying to find a radio so that they would know where the battles were going on and so be able to find a way through the lines. Further the man whose story it tells was clearly unmarried.
“Nevertheless I present the story to you because it will give you some idea of what your father would have experienced if he had escaped the raid on the partisan camp.”
It took me months to translate the manuscript. Italian verbs are fiendishly difficult and I was having to learn their arcana as I went along, but I had an all-consuming desire to finish the project, particularly since I could see so much of myself in the man: his attitude to so many things, his reactions to frustrating events, and his description of his experiences learning Italian could have been mine. I cannot read it without wondering if it is, at least in part, my father’s story. And at what stage it turns into the fantasy of its author.
1
So many good days start badly for the travelling man, so many bad days well.
The captain had set out in such good spirits. He had eaten his fill of gnocchi and slept well in the house with the secret wireless. The news on Radio Londra was good: two towns to the south had been taken by the British army. The Germans would be falling back, still establishing their new positions. There couldn’t be a better time to slip through their lines. His guide, a lad from the village, caught his mood and lengthened his own stride up the steep mountain track.
It was a frosty night, the sliver of moon and the stars still bright enough to show the snow on the higher peaks, but the clear sky promised a sunny morning, a good morning for setting out on the last stretch of the journey.
Just before dawn they would reach the partisan camp, he’d rejoin Mike and together they would set out over the mountains to try to cross the German lines, better prepared than on their last attempt. They now knew the way and how the Germans were patrolling it. It would only take a couple of days, and it would be easier this time with their army falling back. If they were lucky, if they could find a guide or chanced upon troops in retreat, they could slip through at night to the British lines.
To slip through to freedom, to be amongst their own again. To escape from the exhaustion and squalor of the last three months as he and Mike had hiked their way down the mountain spine of Italy, dodging the patrols, living as tramps, begging for food at farmers’ doors, sleeping in barns, doing their ablutions in fields and streams. How many times, sleeping with the rats, had they dreamt of their first night back with their army, a bath and a shave, dreamt of English food, a bed, of feeling safe rather than waiting to be betrayed? With two or three more days of care and luck they could make it. They could even be home for Christmas.
The track grew ever steeper, its stones larger and rougher, and shortly before dawn they left it to climb through the pine forest that collared the mountain. Soon the distant sound of the artillery barrages across the battle-lines to the south would begin again. They would be the reveille call to the partisans in the camp. It wasn’t the best time to arrive, just before dawn: the sentries would be edgy, squinting for threatening shapes in the grey half-light, but they were looking forward to company, to the warmth of the huts, some bread and ersatz coffee to revive them after the long cold climb. They left the pines and started up the last, steep, boulder-strewn scarp to the camp, the lad hurrying ahead to reassure the sentries.
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