An escaped British prisoner-of-war is sleeping in a grassy hollow by the edge of a cliff. He wakes to find a German soldier standing over him, wearing summer battledress, a pistol at his hip. Realizing he has been caught, he says his name and adds, ‘I'm a lieutenant in the infantry, or rather I was until I was put in the bag.'
In the bag – captured. It is one of the many phrases of the time that add to the resonance of Love and War in the Apennines (1971), a vivid memoir of Eric Newby's capture, escape and recapture in Italy's mountainous terrain during the later years of World War Two. The man standing over him will not, though, take him away. Oberleutnant Frick is an education officer who instead proffers a bottle of beer and talks of his love of butterflies, which he has come to collect in the hills, armed with a net. He says his day job is to give lectures on Italian Renaissance culture ‘to groups of officers and any of the men who are interested. It is scarcely arduous because so few of them are.'
This is a book about love, and a book about pain. In evoking his memories of the war, writing 25 years after it had ended, Newby was also evoking his knowledge or recollection at the time of the world he had left behind at home, an era of ‘volunteer ladies dishing out fish and chips to [soldiers], and great squelchy jam sandwiches, and cups of orange-colored tea'. A Special Boat Section operative, he was on the run in Italy from the fascist milizia. One evening in the depths of winter in 1943, he broke down. The previous few weeks had been passed in a cave, blocked in by snow. Christmas was approaching. He was ill and emaciated, traveling ever higher into the Apennines with a sack of rice and other impromptu supplies:
‘That night something happened to me on the mountain. The weight of the rice coupled with the awful cough which I had to try and repress broke something in me. It was not physical; it was simply that part of my spirit went out of me, and in the whole of my life since that night it has never been the same again.'
The admission brings you up short. It has never been the same again. Newby's reserve and good humor, the period English tic that runs through the book of making light of disaster, cover a breaking of the human spirit that altered the rest of his life. The physical and emotional pressure of living in constant danger caught up with him. He was, of necessity, homeless, a beggar, a captive of the frozen mountainous landscape, a vagrant dependent on the goodwill of the local Italian farmers who themselves faced possible execution if they helped a captive on the run. An Allied prisoner-of-war such as Newby could earn his pursuer good money, up to eighteen hundred lire in some parts of Italy.
