For King and Country

‘We are partisans,’ Enzio said, as if in explanation. ‘We have people in the town.’

‘How did you find us here?’ Farnham asked.

Enzio smiled. ‘You were seen at San Giuseppe, and followed here,’ he explained. ‘By a six-year-old,’ he added, his eyes almost dancing with amusement.

Farnham had the grace to laugh.

‘But you cannot stay here,’ Enzio went on. ‘This is a holy place, and some people will not understand. You must come to the village, dry your clothes, have something good to eat, and then we can talk about your plans. You will be safe there,’ he added, seeing the look of doubt on Farnham’s face. ‘The Germans are not likely to come, but if they do there will be warning. They cannot surprise us.’

Farnham smiled. ‘This is very generous of you,’ he told the Italian, ‘but first I must talk to my men.’

‘Of course,’ Enzio said.

Farnham turned to the others. ‘They say they’re partisans. They’re offering us shelter, food and somewhere to dry out. If they’re who they say they are then they’ll be able to help us get to the sea. And if the others don’t turn up they’ll probably have ways of finding out what’s happened to them. What do you reckon?’

‘Do you think they’re the genuine article?’ Rafferty asked.

‘Yes,’ Farnham said without hesitation.

‘Then why not?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ McCaigh said. ‘Especially the bit about drying out.’

‘We shall be honoured,’ Farnham told Enzio.

The two Italians escorted them back across the rainswept hillside to the village, and as they walked down the only street the doorways seemed full of curious eyes. Their destination was a large barn that had obviously been built to withstand the winter weather, for inside it was dry and relatively warm. Enzio left them for a few minutes, and then returned with a pile of dry clothes in varying sizes. Not long after that two oldish women arrived with a pot of steaming noodle soup and two loaves of freshly baked bread, all of which left the four men feeling truly warm for the first time since their departure from Salerno three nights before.

Every now and then the door would inch open to reveal one or more children staring in at them. One young girl, probably no more than six years old, with dark, saucer-like eyes seemed unable to drag herself away.

‘But where are they keeping the older sisters?’ McCaigh wondered out loud.

‘They’ve probably been locked up for the duration of your visit,’ Rafferty told him.

‘Ah, fame,’ McCaigh said dreamily.

‘We should get some sleep,’ Farnham said, interrupting the reverie. His instincts told him the Italians were trustworthy, but he wasn’t about to lower their guard completely. ‘I’ll take first watch,’ he added, and it seemed only seconds before the barn was echoing to satisfied snores. Farnham sat with his back against a stall, running through the events of the past twelve hours. He couldn’t pretend he had liked Morgan – he’d always thought of him as one of those men who found it hard to imagine a world without them – but there was no doubting that the man had been tailor-made for the SAS.

Life was so easy to snuff out. One moment a whole person, in all his or her bewildering complexity, and the next – nothing. Unless of course you believed in an afterlife, and Farnham was pretty sure he didn’t. It would have been nice to believe that a life in heaven had saved Catherine from extinction, but only for his own sake. She would have found it boring.

The morning went by. Farnham took a brief look around outside – he needed some idea of where they were – but otherwise kept to the safety of the barn. More food arrived early in the afternoon, this time accompanied by a jug of wine, from which he poured four conservative measures. This didn’t seem the time or place for dulling their brains or motor skills.

Soon after dark Enzio returned, a stern look on his face. ‘The Germans have captured them,’ he said without preamble.

Farnham’s heart sank but he wasn’t surprised. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

‘They are being held in the town hall. They have been there most of the day – the story is that they walked straight into a German patrol in the darkness.’

‘Are they being treated as prisoners of war?’ Farnham asked anxiously. Late in 1942 Hitler had ordered the execution of all commandos captured behind enemy lines, regardless of whether or not they were in uniform. In Africa Rommel had ignored the order, but on at least two recent occasions German commanders in Italy had carried it out.

Enzio didn’t know. ‘The Army captured them, but the men in leather coats arrived this afternoon.’ He shrugged.

Farnham’s heart sank again. If they were being questioned by the Gestapo, then torture was a real possibility. That would be bad enough in itself, but both men knew the pick-up point at the mouth of the River Chienti. ‘How many men are guarding them?’ he asked Enzio. After all, a town hall was not a prison.

The Italian raised both eyebrows. ‘You are thinking of a rescue?’ he asked.

‘If it is possible.’

Enzio blew a silent whistle with his lips. ‘The town is full of Germans now. Your broken bridge – well, they are like flies around shit. But maybe the town hall…I don’t know…’

‘Could you get us into the town to take a look?’ Farnham asked.

The Italian nodded. ‘Two of you, perhaps. Early in the morning, when there are many carts on the road.’

‘That would be wonderful. Now, I must tell the others what you have told me.’

Enzio nodded, turned away, and then turned back again. ‘And I have other news for you. Better news. Your armies have landed this morning on the coast south of Rome.’ He smiled. ‘You were expecting this, I suppose.’

‘It is why we came to blow the bridge, to make it harder for the Germans to reinforce their armies in the south.’

Enzio smiled again, and left.

Farnham turned to the others. Their grim faces told him they had guessed the gist, but he went through the conversation in detail. This was the SAS, not the regular army, and they needed to know everything he did before a decision could be taken on what to do next.

‘So what do you think, boss?’ McCaigh asked, once all the information had been shared.

Farnham chose his words carefully. ‘If there’s any chance of getting the two of them back without getting everyone – including them – killed, then I think we’ll have to give it a shot. And if that means blowing the boat…’

‘We can always steal a boat,’ Rafferty said with a sniff. Both he and Tobin seemed to be developing colds. ‘The Adriatic can’t be that wide.’

‘Yeah, but Yugoslavia’s on the other side,’ McCaigh said. ‘And I seem to remember a German invasion.’

‘So we sail south,’ Rafferty said. ‘We’re bound to hit Africa sooner or later.’

Farnham did a round of the faces. They all knew that staying where they were was risky, let alone taking a trip back into the lion’s den, but he could detect no real desire to cut and run. They’d rather head for the sea and home – who wouldn’t? – but they wouldn’t desert their mates without a damn good reason.

He felt proud of them. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll give Enzio the good news.’

The cart left the following morning as dawn was breaking, Farnham and Rafferty sharing the back with seven villagers, while Enzio, Giancarlo and a woman called Carmela sat in the front. Most of their fellow passengers seemed friendly, but Farnham couldn’t help noticing the resentment in a few of the eyes. In their place, he thought, he might well have felt the same.

The rain and clouds had vanished overnight, giving the two Englishmen their first real view of the village and surrounding countryside. The twenty or so dwellings of San Giuseppe were perched high on a hillside, above the fields which its inhabitants worked, staring out across the mile-wide valley at a similar-sized village on the opposite slope. About six hundred feet below them the Chienti, exhausted after its precipitous descent from the mountains, was beginning its lazy meander to the sea.

Enzio had explained that by taking a roundabout route they could avoid the usual checkpoint at the eastern approach to the town, and it was almost two hours before the horses toiled across the brow of a bare hill and San Severino came into view below them. The descending road wound through a series of hairpin bends, and it was above the last of these, by the side of an apparently endless orchard, that Enzio pulled the animals to a halt and gave Farnham the bad news. ‘There’s a checkpoint ahead,’ he said.

Looking over the Italian’s shoulder, the SAS man could see the posse of helmeted guards and their motorcycles astride a small bridge at the southern entrance to the town.

‘You’ll have to wait for us here,’ Enzio said. ‘There’s plenty of cover,’ he added, indicating the orchard.

Farnham agreed reluctantly. There was no point in denying that neither he nor Rafferty looked like a local.

They climbed down and headed for the shelter of the trees as the horses resumed their downhill plod.

‘We could try circling round,’ Rafferty suggested, more in hope than expectation.

‘We could,’ Farnham agreed, ‘but we wouldn’t know where to look once we were in. How about up there?’ he said, indicating a shelf of rock some fifty yards above them which looked out across both the orchard and the town.

They reached it just as their cart was drawing up at the checkpoint below. Enzio seemed to be talking to the German for a long time, and for a fleeting moment Farnham imagined the Italian suddenly pointing up the hillside to where they lay, but then the cart moved on into the town and he felt momentarily ashamed of his lack of trust.

Taking out his binoculars, he began to study the town below. Not surprisingly, his first point of call was the bridge they had brought down, and he was pleased to see that nothing much in the way of repair work seemed to have been done since their departure. The bridge sat in the rushing water, and there was as yet no sign of a crane to lift it out. The train which had come so fortuitously between them and the German troops was still standing where they’d left it, and on the track beyond it a later arrival could just be made out, stretching away into the distance.

Flies on shit, Enzio had said, and there was certainly no shortage of Germans in evidence. Troop carriers surrounded the station like a wagon train from a Western, two tanks were parked like book-ends either side of the road bridge over the river and several infantry patrols were visible on the town’s already busy streets. The chances of rescuing Corrigan and Imrie seemed poised somewhere between slim and zero.

He trained the binoculars on the elliptical square he’d noticed two nights before, wondering if this was where the town hall would be. Perhaps it was the sunshine, but the square looked even more beautiful from this angle. The strange shape was pretty enough in its own right, but the colonnaded buildings which lined the perimeter would have looked lovely anywhere.

Farnham was just wondering why the square was so empty when a group of men suddenly walked into view. All but two were helmeted, and it didn’t take Farnham many seconds to realize that the odd men out were Corrigan and Imrie. He couldn’t actually see their faces, but Imrie’s blond hair was a give-away. And in any case, who else could they be? The closest Allied op to Jacaranda was more than a hundred miles to the north.

‘What is it?’ Rafferty asked, sensing the other man’s excitement.

‘Corrigan and Imrie. In the square, but they’re out of sight now.’

‘Did they look OK?’

‘They were walking all right,’ Farnham said. He hoped Enzio would be able to find out where they’d been taken, and that it would be somewhere more accessible than the town hall of a town swarming with Germans. ‘I didn’t get…’

The volley of shots cut him off. A swarm of birds rose squawking into the air above the distant square and the rippling echo of gunfire seemed to bounce from one side of the valley to the other.

‘Oh God,’ Farnham murmured.

‘The bastards!’ Rafferty half cried out.

For the next few minutes they took turns with the binoculars, but there was no visual evidence of what they both knew to be true.

The wait for the villagers’ return seemed endless, but eventually the familiar cart made its appearance on the road below. They went to meet it, thinking that Enzio’s news could hardly be worse than expected, but they were wrong.

‘They have hung the bodies of your friends in the piazza,’ he informed Farnham with a sigh. ‘As an example of what happens to anyone who opposes them,’ he added unnecessarily.

‘What did he say?’ Rafferty asked.

Farnham told him, and watched a single tear roll down the younger man’s cheek. He closed his own eyes, but there in the darkness he could see Corrigan sitting by the broken radio with a silly grin on his face, the anxious smile on Imrie’s face as he sat waiting in the belly of the Halifax. Thousands were dying every day, but a death was still a death.

By the time they arrived back in San Giuseppe early that afternoon Farnham had already decided on an immediate departure. He didn’t want the four of them sitting around brooding over what had happened, and in any case there was precious little time to waste if they were to keep their rendezvous with the Navy at the mouth of the Chienti. They had thirty-plus miles to cover in fourteen hours, but that seemed possible now that the weather had improved. He wouldn’t have fancied their chances in the previous day’s rain.

When told of their plans Enzio offered an unexpected boost. He would take them part of the way, he said. After examining their intended route on Farnham’s map he announced that he would take them down into the valley and up the other side. Then they could follow the small roads that clung to the distant ridge most of the way to the narrow coastal plain. ‘And it is good that you are leaving now,’ he added. ‘A brother of one of the women in the village – he has suddenly disappeared. It may mean nothing, but…’ He shrugged.

Ten minutes later they were on their way, perched on the same cart but pulled by fresh horses. Most of the villagers came out to give them goodbye waves and smiles of encouragement, and Farnham silently vowed that if he survived the war he’d return and thank them properly.

Enzio, it turned out, had more immediate gratification in mind. ‘We need guns,’ he told Farnham as the cart wound down the hill. ‘The Germans think that things like they did today will scare people, and maybe they will scare a few, but things like that will also make more people willing to fight them. The people here never wanted to fight with them, but there’s quite a few who can hardly wait to fight against them. But we must have guns. And explosives. And when they rebuild your bridge, we can blow it up again.’

Farnham promised to do what he could.

‘You could drop them in the field where we found you in the rain,’ Enzio added with a twinkle.

They reached the valley floor, and for the next ten minutes, as they drove along the dangerous stretch of main road beside the river, neither man spoke. But no enemy motorcycle or lorry hove into view before they turned off it once more, rattling across the Chienti on an old stone bridge and starting up another small road into the hills. As they climbed the winding track the sun was sinking swiftly towards the line of the Apennines, casting the valley behind them in a gorgeous warm glow, and Rafferty was taking one last look at this panoramic scene when he spotted the plume of smoke rising in the northern sky.

‘Ask Enzio what that is,’ he said to Farnham, hoping he was wrong.

The Italian looked back, and the change which came over his face in that moment would long remain in the Englishmen’s memory. The eyes seemed to soften with sorrow as the features hardened with rage, as if the mind behind them was stretching to encompass the war.

‘They are burning our winter feed,’ Enzio said flatly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Farnham said, hoping that the Italian was right, and that feed was all the Germans were burning. ‘You’ve brought us far enough,’ he added. ‘Get back to your people.’

Enzio shook his head, and jerked the horses back into motion. ‘I will take you to Urbisaglia,’ he said, and Farnham knew it would be useless to try to get him to change his mind.

An hour later, with the darkness almost complete, the Italian drove through the small village and brought the cart to a halt. ‘Follow this road,’ he told them, pointing to a track which led higher into the hills. ‘And send us guns,’ he told Farnham once more, after shaking hands with each man and climbing back on the cart.

The SAS men started walking. According to the map they now had only twenty-five miles to cover, but the roads were neither as straight as the map suggested nor as flat as the paper it was printed on, and Farnham reckoned they would need every minute of the hours remaining to make the rendezvous on time.

The track switched from side to side of the ridge, offering intermittent views of the valleys to north and south, and as the evening wore on the pinpoints of light in the distant villages flickered out and the glow of a waning half-moon flooded the winter fields. There was little traffic on the road – only a few solitary locals who gave them uncertain smiles and hurried on by – and not much more on the main roads which followed the valley bottoms. The railway line which paralleled the road to the north was definitely out of use, which at least offered some satisfaction to the four men.

Soon after midnight, with almost two-thirds of the journey behind them, they stopped in a convenient wood for food and a fifteen-minute rest. There had not been much conversation on the march and there wasn’t much now. When not focused on the task in hand, each of the four men was prone to find himself wondering about the vagaries of fate.

It could so easily have been two of them who had been blown to pieces under the bridges, two of them who had been executed by the Germans in the town square. This war in Europe was not going to be like the war in North Africa, Rafferty thought to himself, and he supposed he’d been a fool to ever think it would. Armies fighting each other in deserts could afford to be chivalrous – in such circumstances war was a man’s game in which only men got hurt. But Europe this time round…well, there were already enough rumours about what the Germans had done and were still doing to innocent civilians on the continent they had conquered, and now the RAF and USAF were doing to German civilians what the Luftwaffe had done to London and other English cities. The rules had broken down, and no one was safe.

In his mind’s eye Rafferty could see Enzio’s face as the Italian turned to see the smoke rising from his village.

Shortly after half past four they slipped across the empty coastal road and railway and walked the last half a mile across the empty dunes to the river’s mouth. The moon was down, the sea dark and apparently empty, but at precisely five o’clock the hump of the submarine broke surface some three hundred yards from shore, and within minutes two dinghies was being lowered into the water.

Farnham flashed the light again to assist the vessel with its navigation, but there was no way of telling it that now only one dinghy was required.

2

United Kingdom, April 1944

The spring sunshine lay across the Dumfries railway yard. Staring through the grimy carriage window at the arched façade of the engine shed, Farnham found himself momentarily back in Italy, and almost expected a wave of Germans to materialize across the tracks.

Ten weeks had passed since Operation Jacaranda, the first four of them spent waiting in Salerno for new orders. Anzio had been a failure, the frontal assault on the Gustav Line had bogged down around Monte Cassino, and no one seemed to know what to do with those elements of the SAS still in Italy. At the end of February they had been shipped home to a cold and damp England, then sent north to the colder and damper Ayrshire hills, where the rest of the Regiment was already in training for the invasion of France. By now Farnham and his companions in the crowded compartment thought they knew every muddy trail in the Glentool Forest.

Neil Rafferty had the same ready smile as always, but Farnham was certain that the newly promoted sergeant had been more affected by the experience than any of them. He was more serious, less inclined to scoff at others’ cynicism, and occasionally seemed remarkably on edge for someone previously inclined to sail through life so blithely.

The change in Mickie McCaigh was not so noticeable. He had always been cynical in a witty sort of a way, but nowadays an edge of bitterness sometimes showed through.

Ian Tobin seemed the least affected. Maybe there was a lack of depth to the Welsh lad, but Farnham felt fond of him nevertheless. He had that sort of dogged desire to do the right thing which some found intensely irritating, but which Farnham’s own family history had taught him to value.

As for himself, he had spent most of the past few weeks with the feeling that he was sleepwalking through the war. The days and nights in Italy had been intense, and the sense of anticlimax had been correspondingly profound. He couldn’t wait for France. Though at this rate, he thought, as the train reluctantly dragged itself free of Dumfries station, they would be lucky to reach London this year. These days there were many stories of soldiers spending their entire leave on the seriously overcrowded trains, arriving home just in time to set off again.

Still, Farnham thought, if it wasn’t for his sister he would just as soon spend the time on a train. He certainly had no wish to spend it with his father and stepmother.

A game of pontoon occupied the four of them until they reached Carlisle, where they had to change trains. The relevant platform was thronged with people waiting for the next London express, which was apparently already running half an hour late. This at least gave the SAS men a chance to stock up on food for the night ahead – the chances of a restaurant car were thin indeed – so, while Farnham and Tobin guarded their bags and a spot dangerously close to the platform edge, the other two purchased a mound of dubious-looking sandwiches from the station buffet. Chewing on an unidentifiable selection from the pile, Farnham gazed thoughtfully at the line of clapped-out locomotives stabled alongside a disused platform. Everything was wearing out, he thought. Germans or no Germans, this war was going to be around for a long time.

The train eventually arrived, and for the first two hours they had to make do with a crowded section of corridor, but at Preston a group of Engineers in the adjoining compartment got off. Night had now fallen on the outside world, and they had to read the names of the passing stations through the small diamond cut in the blackout screen. Inside the carriage visibility wasn’t much better, thanks to the ever-thickening fug of cigarette smoke.

It was midnight when they reached Crewe. Tobin left them there, hoping his connection to Swansea was also running late. The others watched as he was swallowed by the unlit station, feeling more than a little envious. He might not find a train but at least the buffet would be open.

Their train continued south, stopping more and more frequently, or so it seemed to Farnham, who alone in the compartment seemed unable to sleep. He woke the snoring Rafferty at Bletchley, and watched him stumble off in search of a Cambridge train, hoping that a week with his wife and baby son would restore him to his old carefree self.

An hour or so later the train finally rolled into Euston, leaving him and McCaigh to emerge, somewhat bleary-eyed, into the pale grey light of a London dawn. They breakfasted together in a crowded greasy-spoon in Eversholt Street, and then went their separate ways, McCaigh heading down into the Underground while Farnham, suffering from too many claustrophobic hours on the train, waited for a bus.