SOME DAYS LATER Angelo was sitting by the side of an empty road that climbed on the one hand to the pinewoods of Vallombrosa, and on the other descended to the Arno. He was waiting, with considerable trepidation, to play his part in a small but daring assault upon the enemy. About sixty yards away, on the other side of the road where trees grew closely, Captain Telfer and Corporal Trivet lay hidden; and a little farther to the east the partisan Pasquale, who had once been a Guardia Civile, played shepherd to a flock of brown-skinned docile sheep. Also in the vicinity were half a dozen local partisans whom Telfer did not wholly trust. His hopeful intention, and the purpose of the ambush, was to capture two senior German officers, one of them a General.
On the day of the bombing of Pontefiore, Simon and the Corporal had reconnoitred the road, and twenty-four hours later had returned to the village to wait for an Allied agent who for some time had been living in Florence, which the Germans still occupied. They waited a day longer than they had intended, but the agent did not come. He sent a message, however, to confirm the information they already had. The General, he said, drove every evening from Florence to his headquarters in Vallombrosa, and he was usually accompanied by a Colonel of the Schutzstaffel who was organizing Republican resistance in Florence. If they set the ambush for such-and-such a time, he, the agent, would meet them at the appointed place on the road. Simon, though ill-pleased with this new arrangement, and well aware of its danger, had decided to accept the added risk and proceed with his plan.
Angelo, most unusually, had welcomed the prospect and the menace of action. Now that he was on the verge of it he was, indeed, acutely frightened, and wished with all his heart that he was elsewhere, and thought with regret how easily he could have twisted an ankle, or even broken it, in their swift and secret march across the Tuscan mountains. In Pontefiore, however, the idea of a skirmish in enemy country had been a timely comfort. It had rescued him, like a sailor pulled from a stormy sea, from a raging conflict of emotions.
A dozen times a day, for several days, he had fallen violently out of love with Lucrezia, and as often and as violently fallen in again. He had told himself, with a persistent hope of believing it, that her conduct had been as natural as the warmth of summer, even laudable if one could believe her defence of it, and reprehensible only to the most intemperate of moralists; but a little while later he would be sure to see it in another light, in which the betrayal of their love became intolerable, and her unchastity a barrier between them that he could never cross. Her character, he could then perceive, had been vitiated beyond redemption; and a great pity it was that he must also admit she had grown more beautiful than ever.
But what of that, he would cry in quick despair, for what is beauty but a little paint on a rotten house, and paint does not last a lifetime, but withers in the sun and cracks upon the wall and time strips it. Beauty is no argument.
To which another voice would answer, Beauty is everything, and everything is forgiven it.
But how unfair! he would protest. Justice should be a constant thing, and beauty has no right to look for leniency and special terms.
You will find it very pleasant to be lenient, said the voice. It is a fine thing to be magnanimous, and to be magnanimous to a lovely creature like Lucrezia is really quite a luxury. Try it and see.
Then he would remember the child, and see clearly that little Tommaso, yearly growing taller, would forever cast a shadow on his marriage and perpetually remind him that once upon a time – oh, not once, but often, he supposed – Lucrezia had surrendered herself to Corporal Trivet, as now to him. And how could happiness ever live with so noisy a reminder of her infidelity and the rival who had preceded him?
To which the voice would reply: That is nonsense indeed. You have no concern with what is past and over, you are concerned with the present. A man who broods upon past injustice, early hardship, and the youthful vagaries of his wife, is like a nation that cannot forget its history: he has not the slightest chance of happiness. As for the boy, he is Lucrezia’s child, well-built and friendly, and you may become very fond of him. When you have three or four children of your own he will be no more than one of the family, and you will never trouble yourself to think how he came there. Confess now, that when you dried him with the pillowslip in which you had been carrying the head of Piero’s Madonna, you felt your heart already warming to him?
It is true, Angelo would then admit, that I have no animosity against the child, but that is a different thing from forgiving his mother. And if, as you say, beauty is everything, the pillowslip contained a paradigm of perfect beauty, that is now in my possession. One, moreover, that cannot change and grow old, put on grey hairs and fat, and wear wrinkles for its winter fashion. I have Piero’s masterpiece, and with her upon the wall of my room I can live happily enough.
Try it and see, said the voice. You will need something more than perfection hanging on a wall to keep you happy …
On and on went the passionate argument, till Angelo was exhausted by its double vehemence; and the order to march, the invitation to a brush with the enemy, had come like the blissful ease of holiday. They had crossed the tall ridges of Tuscany, waist-high in bracken, upon which the wind blew gale-strong, though in the dark valleys the air was warm and still, and every mile had strengthened the illusion of release and fortified his frail desire to bid Lucrezia goodbye and forget her forever. She had failed him, she had no claim upon him, he was a free man and henceforth he would enjoy his freedom. So he thought in the fine soldierly spirit of a soldier who is not yet in touch with the enemy.
Though to begin with he had been gloomy in the presence of Corporal Trivet, his embarrassment had been lessened by the discovery that Trivet himself was much perturbed by the claims of Bianca Miretti. She was a stupid girl, as Angelo well knew, but stupidity has never prevented a good-looking young woman from engaging a man’s interest, and thereafter lying on his conscience; and having perceived that Trivet, like himself, was the victim of unruly love, Angelo began to regard him as a fellow-sufferer. He did, at first, feel an occasional wild impulse to assault the Corporal, but because his good sense told him that the sequel might be uncommonly painful, he always managed to suppress this foolish inclination; and when Trivet showed himself to be friendly – he was very generous with his cigarettes – Angelo soon became sympathetic, and from time to time he was convinced that they had both been deeply wronged.
For a whole day, indeed, he had been almost persuaded that he was done with Lucrezia, and would never see her again; but his resolution had weakened in the half-hour he had been waiting at the roadside, and now she returned to his mind very vividly as an image of comfort. Now again he desired her, and admitted his desire. The minutes passed and the time approached when he must boldly break cover, and expose himself to flying bullets, and keep his hand steady to shoot in reply; and in this horrible situation he longed for the shelter of Lucrezia’s arms, the concealment of her hair, and the warmth of her body that would enclose him like the walls of a house. He was just about to take off his hat, to make a solemn declaration that he had forgiven her infidelity, and would go back to her as soon as this dreadful adventure was done with, when he saw that Pasquale the partisan was already driving his flock of sheep down the road towards him.
Angelo, sitting by a bend in the road, had a long view of it in both directions, but Pasquale could see it only as far as the corner, and travellers coming from the opposite direction would not see Pasquale and his sheep until they turned the corner. Angelo’s task was to hold Pasquale in conversation, or give the appearance of doing so, and by clumsy shepherding of the flock help him to block the road about twenty yards west of the corner. The General for whom they were waiting was a person of regular habit, and they knew, within a few minutes, when to expect him. As soon as he saw the car coming from the west, Angelo was to walk down the road to meet Pasquale.
Now, with a sudden feeling of guilt – for he had been sitting with his eyes tight-closed to think more clearly about Lucrezia – he looked westward and saw, not the car, but a peasant riding a donkey and leading another that carried a great load of firewood. Angelo for a moment was puzzled by this unexpected appearance, for he could see two hundred yards down the road, and the last time he had looked that way it had been empty; but now the peasant was barely a stone’s throw from him. He must, he realized, have been daydreaming of Lucrezia for a couple of minutes, and by his neglect might well have ruined Telfer’s plan. Conscience pinched him hard, and in deep remorse he determined to make amends by playing his part in it with high courage.
Before time and the working of imagination could weaken his resolution he saw the car coming, and with a quickly-beating heart and a dry mouth went to meet Pasquale. He turned for a moment to look at the peasant on his donkey, and saw that he was a tall, sturdily-built man, roughly dressed, with an old black hat pulled far down over his eyes.
‘They’re coming!’ shouted Angelo to Pasquale, but his voice cracked and the words were no louder than the breaking of a dry twig in a wood. Pasquale with a long staff was keeping his flock in the middle of the road, and because there had been a thunderstorm in the early afternoon, and their fleeces were still wet, the strong smell of the sheep was like an invisible cloud carried by the downhill wind. They stood stock-still when Angelo was five yards from them. He said again, hoarsely, ‘They’re coming!’ He could hear the increasing noise of the car, and now Pasquale was watching, not only his flock, but the bend in the road twenty yards away. Quite suddenly he made a little jump, all his muscles twitched, his eyes dilated and his hands flew out, like a man who has had an electric shock; and Angelo turned swiftly to see what was happening.
The peasant on the donkey had reached the corner a moment before the car overtook him. As it approached he bent towards the other donkey, and from a funnel in the load of wood on its back swiftly drew a tommy-gun, with which, very calmly and accurately, he opened fire on the car as it passed him.
The shriek of skidding tyres covered the staccato of gunfire, and the heavy car, after rocking this way and that, fell with a deafening bang into the ditch beside Angelo, on the north side of the road, crushing beneath it a couple of small brown sheep. The engine stopped, and the silence that followed was startling in its intensity. The tall peasant, who had dismounted, came running up and, before anyone could stop him, carefully fired three more shots into the wrecked car. ‘That will save trouble,’ he said, and with a smile asked Angelo, ‘How is my friend Don Agesilas?’
Angelo, gaping and tremulous, perceived that the peasant was blind of one eye; but before he could speak, Simon Telfer and Corporal Trivet were beside them, and Simon was asking questions in a loud angry voice.
‘Who the devil are you?’ he demanded. ‘What are you doing here? Who gave you permission to shoot on my ground? You damned poacher!’
The peasant took from an inner pocket a monocle of clouded tortoise shell, which he adjusted over his blind eye, and said urbanely, ‘You are Captain Telfer, I presume? My name is Fest.’
‘You’re Fest, are you? Well, you’re an unmitigated nuisance! You’ve spoiled the whole plan. First of all you leave me in the lurch, you don’t turn up when I expect you, and now when you do come, you get in my way!’
Angelo had never seen Telfer so angry, but Fest was unperturbed. He made a small deprecatory gesture and said in a soothing voice, ‘There is no need to be upset. Our mission has been accomplished and both the officers are dead. So, indeed, is their driver.’
Simon walked to the overturned car and looked into it. ‘I wanted them alive,’ he said. ‘My orders were to take them prisoner.’
‘That would have been too cruel,’ said Fest. ‘I could not, without straining my conscience, have assisted you in that.’
‘Crueller to take them prisoner than to kill them?’
‘Much crueller,’ said Fest. ‘I have been a prisoner myself, and I know.’
Simon, still angry, demanded, ‘Why did you interfere in this affair? I can’t understand you. It seems to me that you have shown a complete lack of responsibility.’
‘I am self-indulgent,’ said Fest. ‘I have nothing in the world but my hobbies.’
‘I admit,’ said Simon, ‘that you did your job very efficiently, though it wasn’t done in the way I intended.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But we can’t stay here gossiping. – Get in and search them, Trivet. See what papers they’re carrying.’
‘I shall help,’ said Fest. ‘I intend to take this officer’s uniform, though it will require cleaning before I can wear it. I have long wanted to dress myself up as a colonel of the Schutzstaffel.’
Angelo, in the meantime, had been staring with a horrified fascination at the other dead officer. He had recognized his old pupil, General Hammerfurter, to whom he had once taught Italian, and though he had detested him when he was alive, he could not help feeling sorry for him now that he was dead. He thought Fest was talking utter nonsense when he said that it was crueller to take a man prisoner than to kill him; for Angelo had such a healthy appetite for life that he could imagine nothing worse than to be deprived of it. In the simplicity of his heart, moreover, he thought it strange and marvellous, an occasion for wonderment and awe, that so great a person as a general could be removed from the grandeur to which he was accustomed by a little piece of lead no bigger than an acorn. A bullet, he had supposed, was a private’s ration. It was monstrous that a general should die of it.
While Angelo was musing in this unprofitable manner, and Fest was busily undressing the dead colonel, and Tom Trivet was searching for documents, they were interrupted by a little squall of bullets from the north, and then by another from the east. Some of the bullets struck and penetrated the car, others flew off it with a wicked whine, and a few scarred the surface of the road within a foot or two of where Simon was standing with Pasquale the partisan. Simon and Pasquale immediately leapt into the cover of some trees on the south side of the road, and were quickly followed by Fest and Tom Trivet; the former carrying the German colonel’s uniform, and the latter a small packet of letters. But Angelo took shelter under the car.
A German patrol, on a periodic tour of the hills, had been attracted by the noise of the smash, and when the non-commissioned officer in charge of it saw three or four men gathered about the car, and a scattered flock of sheep and two donkeys in the vicinity, he immediately assumed that some local peasants had perceived an opportunity for looting. Dividing his patrol into two, and ordering both parties on to nearby hillocks that overlooked the road, he had given the signal to fire as soon as they were in position. When he saw Simon and the others make a dash for cover, he and half his patrol got up and ran towards the car.
‘Angelo, Angelo!’ shouted Simon. ‘Oh, damn him, why didn’t he come with us? Angelo! Get a move on, you fool!’
But Angelo, huddled in the ditch with his head between his hands, stayed where he was.
‘I can’t wait for him,’ said Simon. ‘He knows the orders, he knows we can’t stay and fight it out. We’re not equipped for fighting.’
‘I’ll go and get him,’ said Corporal Trivet, and before Simon could answer he was running across the road, firing as he went. Simon and Pasquale at once gave him covering fire, and the Germans, one of whom was hit, quickly went to ground. Fest had disappeared, and there was no sign of the partisans who should have been supporting them.
Trivet knelt and looked under the car. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you can’t stay here.’
‘What else can I do?’ asked Angelo.
‘Get up and run. I’ll take care of you.’
‘Oh my God!’ said Angelo. ‘The road is very broad.’
‘Hurry,’ said Trivet.
Angelo, crouching, ran nervously towards the trees, and Trivet, after firing a burst in the direction of the Germans, followed him. He was hit and fell as he reached the other side. Simon pulled him into cover, and found a flesh wound in his left thigh. ‘It’s only a scratch,’ he said, and began to unfasten a field-dressing. A German appeared thirty yards away, and Pasquale shot him through the head.
‘You can walk all right, can’t you?’ asked Simon.
‘I’m all right,’ said Trivet.
‘But your arm’s bleeding, too –’
‘They hit me twice. I’ll tie that up later. It’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Angelo and Pasquale will go with you. I’ll follow in a few minutes.’
The Germans were now moving with more caution, and Simon waited for more than a minute before one showed himself. He was the non-commissioned officer in charge of the patrol, and Simon shot him in the chest. He fell, and another man came to his assistance. Simon hit him also, and running behind some bushes about thirty yards to the right, fired several shots at random, and repeated the manoeuvre from another position still farther away. Keeping under cover, he then followed the others.
The site of the ambush had been largely determined by the useful line of retreat which it offered. Here a little wood concealed him as he ran, and there the slope of a terraced hill and a grove of olive trees whose green and silver leaves were now straining in the evening wind. He soon overtook Pasquale, who told him that he would find Angelo and the Corporal a little farther on.
Pasquale, broadly grinning, was enjoying himself. ‘That was good, that was fine,’ he said. ‘You saw him that I shot in the noggin? Bic-boc! like that, and he’s bottom-up. A big Tedescho, six feet high. Oh, I’m good, but I was better still when I was a young man. We are all right now?’
‘Yes, I think so. Will you do rearguard while I go on and see how Corporal Trivet is?’
‘Have no fear,’ said Pasquale. ‘I will protect you.’
Tom Trivet, with one arm round Angelo’s neck and the other hand tucked into his shirt, was keeping a good pace, but his cheeks were as white as a bone, his nose waxen, and his right sleeve drenched with blood. He was unwilling to stop, but when they came to a small stream Simon washed and examined the wound, and discovered that the tip of his shoulder-blade had been broken. He dressed and bandaged the wound as well as he could, and they continued their march to the south. Before it was dark they had reached a friendly farmhouse on the east bank of the Arno, where they waited for Pasquale and the cover of night.
Pasquale arrived about two hours later, still in high spirits, and said that the German patrol, now reinforced, had apparently picked up a false trail; the Tedeschi, he said, were watching the road and the river-bank in the neighbourhood of Rignano, well to the north of where they were. He himself had had no trouble.
Simon was a little worried and considerably annoyed by the disappearance of Fest. It was ridiculous, he told himself, to suppose that Fest would betray them; he had a long record of hostile acts against the Germans, and his assassination of a General, a Colonel, and their driver seemed to indicate, if not sympathy with the Allies, at least a genuine antipathy to their enemies. But from the military point of view his behaviour was most unorthodox, and his loyalty – well, loyalty was a difficult word to define, but even were it given its broadest definition, Fest would still appear to be deficient in it. He was fundamentally selfish, Simon decided. It was a vice that foreigners, and foreign countries, were much addicted to. They were selfish and irresponsible, and there were far too many of them in the world. – So thought Simon, brooding over Fest’s unloyalty, and his mind discoloured by it.
His mood softened, however, when he turned to Pasquale, for Pasquale, his leathern face creased with delight and his broad hands filling the air with gestures, was describing for the tenth time how he had hit a giant Tedescho in the noggin, and laid him like a dead ox on the grass; and their hosts, a sturdy black-browed farmer and his broad-built wife, who were known for the help they had given to many British and American airmen who had been shot down and gone into hiding, were encouraging him with great exclamations of pleasure; and the farmer was filling, brim-full and spilling over, everyone’s glass from a new flask of wine; and four children in the doorway, wide of eye and sucking their thumbs, were listening as though it were the first fairy-tale they were hearing; and the farmer’s wife, without a thought for the morrow, was cutting for her guests’ entertainment her last loaf of bread and the knuckle-end of her last smoked ham.
Suddenly regretting the ungenerosity of his thoughts, Simon raised his glass to Pasquale and said, ‘You’re a good fellow, Pasquale, and you’ve done well.’
‘Right in the noggin,’ said Pasquale happily. ‘A Tedescho six and a half feet high, the biggest I ever saw, but bic-boc! and down he goes, arse over tip.’
‘When the war is finished,’ said Simon to the farmer, ‘I shall come back to Italy.’
‘Why not?’ said the farmer. ‘Before the war, all you English used to come to Italy. Italy is very beautiful. Naturally you will return, and perhaps quite soon.’
‘Speriamo,’ said Pasquale.
‘But the war’s not over yet,’ said the farmer’s wife.
‘Pazienza,’ said the farmer. ‘Even wars come to an end.’
A few minutes later Simon left them to reconnoitre the river-crossing, and when he came back, with the news that all was quiet, Angelo went to wake Tom Trivet, who had been sleeping in the farmer’s bed. Trivet woke in a fright and began to talk with rambling excitement; but a glass of brandy seemed to calm him, and presently they set out with Simon in the lead, Angelo and Trivet a hundred yards behind him, and Pasquale in the rear. The night was dark but clear, with clouds like black continents dividing a grapeskin sky, and the Arno running noisily, flushed with the day’s rain. They had no great difficulty in fording it, however, and two hours later they were in the upland country to the west. Then Trivet collapsed, and they found that the wound in his leg was bleeding again.
They carried him into the shelter of a nearby copse, and Pasquale went in search of a neighbouring friend of his, another farmer who had, from time to time, succoured Allied soldiers who had escaped from their captors. He returned before dawn with a short ladder, half a dozen eggs, and a disconcerting account of the increased number of German troops in the neighbourhood. The farm where they had hoped to leave Trivet, in comfort and reasonable security, was occupied by the enemy.
All day they lay hidden, listening to the not-far-distant noises of an intermittent battle, and fed thinly on biscuits, chocolate, and raw eggs. For most of the time Tom Trivet slept, and when evening came he seemed better, though he was still too weak to walk. Both Angelo and Pasquale knew the country they were in, and after long discussion over a map Simon had come to the conclusion that by keeping to the higher slopes of the Chianti mountains they might break through the German lines and reach the nearest troops of the Eighth Army before another dawn.
‘I don’t think they’re much more than ten miles away,’ he said, ‘and if we can average a mile and a half an hour, carrying Trivet, we can do it in seven hours, and that gives us a little margin of darkness for safety. What do you think, Pasquale?’
‘By myself I could go through quite easily,’ said Pasquale. ‘Carrying the Corporal, it will be more difficult, and hard work. But not impossible.’
‘Angelo?’
‘We must do everything we can for him,’ said Angelo very earnestly. ‘He should be in hospital now, and delay may be dangerous.’
Angelo had spent the day keeping flies off the Corporal while he slept. His heart was full of gratitude, and devotion, and self-reproach. Not only had Tom Trivet saved his life, or saved him from captivity, and suffered grievous wounds in consequence; but he had set Angelo an example in generosity which he now saw as a great and humiliating lesson. He, Angelo, had committed a fault unpardonable in a soldier: he had sought safety in a ditch when his plain duty was to stand up – for the short time it would take to cross a narrow road – and thereafter fight or run as he might be ordered. He had failed in his duty, he had sinned against discipline. But Tom had forgiven him and proved his forgiveness by risking his own life to rescue him. How much more, then, should Angelo forgive his dear Lucrezia, whose fault he could pardon at no cost to his skin, but only a little wound to his pride? Yes, Tom had taught him a lesson. A man should be generous always – and the mere thought of his coming magnanimity filled his mind with the anticipation of its pleasure.
‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘Corporal Trivet needs medical attention, and though it may be difficult to carry him through the German lines, I do not think we should be deterred by that.’
‘Good for you,’ said Simon.
‘And afterwards, I very much hope that you will allow me to return to Pontefiore.’
‘For any particular purpose?’ asked Simon.
‘I have set my heart on being married at the earliest possible moment,’ said Angelo.