The Sword of Fate (19 page)

On the third day an officer of the Gurkhas was brought in, a nice fellow and very different from the garrulous, untrustworthy Malone, whom I could cheerfully have murdered by now. The Indian Army man’s name was Bannister and we soon struck up a friendship, whiling away our time by telling each other about various places at which we had stayed during our travels and our pet theories upon how the war could be won. On numerous occasions when Malone was asleep we discussed the possibilities of escape, but Teddy Bannister agreed with me that we dared risk nothing as long as the Irishman was quartered with us.

I suppose the fact of the matter was that neither Bannister nor I was a big enough fish to warrant our being sent with a special escort to an Italian Divisional Headquarters. Anyhow, nothing was done about us and we settled down to an unbroken routine. Apart from the infuriating fact that we were refused the wherewithal and permission to write letters, we were treated quite decently. They took us out for exercise twice a day and gave us plentiful helpings of good plain food. Those optimists at home who informed a credulous public that the Italians in Libya were woefully short of supplies, and would soon be starved out by our Mediterranean blockade, were the most dangerous kind of wishful thinkers. The Italians had masses of everything and they were quite convinced that it was only a matter of weeks before they would be lording it over the defeated British in the Nile Valley.

Time hung heavily as we had nothing to do, and Bannister and I did not care to talk freely, even about things which had
nothing to do with the war, while Malone was with us; but five days after my arrival at Fort Maddalena he suddenly disappeared and we never saw him again. Either we had grossly maligned him in our thoughts and for some reason known only to the Italians he had been spirited away, or, as we felt convinced, having failed to get anything out of us he had decided that the game was not worth the candle and resumed his freedom until other British officer prisoners were brought in.

It was on the day Malone vanished that while at exercise I picked up a small Italo-Greek phrase book. The guard, who was a very decent fellow, allowed me to keep it. That pleased me a lot, as it had a considerable vocabulary and the study of this enabled me to occupy myself polishing up my Greek. To prevent myself from going mad from frustration I had determined to put away from me the thought that I might be kept a prisoner for months or years, and instead cultivate the belief that any any day an opportunity for successful escape might occur, so that it would not be very long before I was able to marry Daphnis. I spoke some Greek already, but as I was marrying into a Greek family I felt that it was only a matter of politeness to study the language until I could speak it fluently, so the little phrase book was a most fortunate find.

It looked as though it was one of those issued by Mussolini to his legions to facilitate their relations with the inhabitants when they carried out the easy carefree advance down into Greece which had been planned for them. Probably it had been dropped by a specialist or airman who had been stationed in Albania a few weeks previously and since transferred to the Libyan front. So far the opportunities for Mussolini’s blackguards to use such little books had been extremely limited. In the first days of the attack their mechanised columns had thrust as far as Janina, about fifty miles into Greece, but with real military genius General Papagos had trapped their far larger army in the mountains, annihilating one division and badly mauling two others.

From that point on the Greeks had taken the offensive, and in spite of the fact that they had neither the numbers nor the modern equipment of the Italians, by a series of brilliantly-directed blows they had hurled the Italians back over the Albanian border, capturing Koritsa and Pogradec, which were well inside enemy territory.

The only means that Bannister and I had of getting any news was by my straining my ears to listen to a loudspeaker that gave
the Italian bulletins three or four times a day to some soldiers quartered in huts on the far side of the barbed-wire fence. Afterwards I translated such snatches as I could make out.

We had to allow for the fact that the bulletins were mainly faked up by Mussolini’s propaganda chief, ‘Woe! Woe!’ Ansaldo, but there were certain concrete facts about the course of the war which had to be admitted sooner or later. One of these was the action at Taranto which had taken place during the night that I had made my trip out into the desert with Aitken’s reconnaissance party. Rather obscure references to the action kept on coming through for several days after I reached Fort Maddalena. What exactly had occurred I could not discover, but I learned quite enough to be certain that the British Navy had once again pulled off a magnificent feat of work and either sunk or crippled several of Mussolini’s capital ships while they were still lying in harbour.

From Axis accounts the Luftwaffe was still knocking hell out of England, and in the middle of the month it was declared that they had razed Coventry to the ground; while some days later Portsmouth, Plymouth and Bristol were claimed as victims.

Towards the end of November there was another British naval victory off Sardinia, although once again the Italians strove to minimise the damage they had suffered. A piece of news which pleased me almost as much was that the filthy little Corsican traitor, Chiappe, one of the most venal of the Vichy crooks, had been killed in an aircraft which got mixed up in this battle by accident. He was the French Police chief—Gestapo Boss Himmler’s opposite number—and on his way to take over the Governorship of Syria, which the little swine undoubtedly meant to hand on a platter to the Germans when the time was ripe.

On December the 6th there was terrific excitement owing to the resignation of the veteran Marshal Badoglio from the position of Chief of the Italian General Staff, and this was followed the next day by the resignation of General de Vecchi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Italian forces in the Dodecanese. Badoglio had always been opposed to Mussolini and a King’s man. It was he who had offered to bust the entire Fascist outfit at the time of the march on Rome if the King would allow him to order out a single division of troops; but Victor Emmanuel had not had the courage to back his general and preferred to resign to taking orders in future from a dictator.

It was Badoglio, too, who had pulled the chestnuts out of the fire in Abyssinia. Mussolini first appointed the ancient Marshal
De Bono to the Supreme Command, solely because he was one of the original Fascists; but this elderly goat was so terrified that the Abyssinians would massacre his men in a second Adowa that he hadn’t the guts to advance a hundred miles in three months, although he had a numerous air force, scores of tanks and was only opposed to half-naked blackamoors. The whole campaign would have had to be postponed at enormous cost for the best part of a year through the coming of the rains if De Bono had not been sacked at the eleventh hour and replaced by the non-Fascist Badoglio, who took the Italians to Addis Ababa in a month.

The resignation of Italy’s greatest soldier and numerous other high Italian officers in all three services certainly seemed to indicate that something was very wrong inside the Fascist State; so Bannister and I at least had that to cheer us.

Late on the afternoon of December the 9th, somewhat to our surprise we were ordered without warning to collect our few belongings and hurried out to a big motor coach. We had not been seated in it for more than a few minutes when about twenty British non-commissioned officers and men, including the fellows who had been captured with me, scrambled on board, and it was clear that all the prisoners were being evacuated in one body.

The Italian Intelligence major arrived and addressed us clearly in staccato English. An armoured car would be following immediately behind us during the whole of the journey that we were about to make, and we were warned that at the first sign of any funny business its machine-guns would open fire.

Having passed through the great gates of Fort Maddalena we saw that on the Libyan side of the frontier the desert roads were a very different proposition, with the one exception of the coast road which had been re-made by the British troops, from the miserable tracks, half-buried in the sand, which served for roads in Egypt. From the fort a fine broad metalled highway, with trees planted at intervals on either side of it, stretched away as far as one could see, running as straight as an arrow to the north.

As soon as we were clear of the oasis we caught the sound of distant gunfire. None of us thought very much about it at the time, although, as Bannister remarked, one of our tank patrols must have penetrated unusually far west. We both looked longingly towards the east, knowing that our fellows must be somewhere out there in that trackless yellow waste, but neither of us even contemplated slogging the driver and trying to make a bolt for it, as we knew that, with the wind in the right direction,
gunfire could easily be heard thirty miles away across land which presented no natural barriers.

On that fine road it took us less than two hours to cover over sixty miles, and while there was still half an hour to go to sundown we reached Fort Capuzzo, the great desert stronghold which Mussolini had created to dominate Halfaya Pass, Sollum, and the coast road into Egypt. It was more like a town than a fort and was garrisoned by the best part of the division which had its headquarters there.

The bus drew up in a small square which appeared to be the centre of the place, and as we got out of it I was vaguely conscious of a subdued excitement in the air. Italian soldiers do not as a rule jump to obey their officers. They are docile enough but decidedly lethargic by habit; yet here officers and men were hurrying in all directions as though their business was of the utmost urgency.

Before I had a chance to try to find out the cause of this bustle and excitement my attention was caught by two Black-shirt officers who were walking swiftly across the square and about to pass within a few yards of us. The figure of the nearest of them was vaguely familiar. At that moment he glanced casually at the dejected little crowd of British prisoners among whom I stood. As his glance met mine recognition was instantaneous and mutual. Stopping dead in his tracks he swung round and glared at me. I knew then that I was in for trouble. It was Daphnis’ ex-fiancé—Paolo Tortino.

“
Sapristi
!” he exclaimed. “If it’s not the ex-diplomat who now calls himself Day! I have a bone to pick with you, my friend. We must have a little talk together.”

He was speaking in Italian and I replied in the same language, “If you want to talk to me I can’t stop you.”

“You certainly cannot.” He nodded his head up and down, and smiled in a self-satisfied manner. “How long have you been a prisoner?”

“Twenty-eight days.”

His smile broadened into a grin. “That is no time at all. No wonder you still look so stiff-necked. It will be different when you have done twenty-eight months in an Italian prison.” He turned to speak to the officer in charge of us and I heard him mutter: “Good. Then I will come over to see this fellow after mess.”

As he stalked off we were marched away to a large white building that had heavy bars across all its windows. It was the fortress prison which was being used now both for Italian soldiers who had been sentenced by courts martial for various offences and the comparatively few British prisoners of war. The place was thoroughly up to date and had been built on American lines in which galleries of cells run one above the other and the door of each is not solid but a gate of bars through which the warder can see the prisoners the whole time.

The cells were quite roomy with two bunks in each, and I managed to get put in with Teddy Bannister. We had not been inside for five minutes when a bell clanged; all the cell gates swung open from an electrically-controlled lever having been thrown over and we were shepherded down to a big dining-hall. I don’t think that there was any difference between the food served to the officers and men or the prisoners of war and the Italians, but we were segregated to different parts of the hall.

There were five other officers besides Bannister and myself, and it was from them we learned the reason for the signs of unusual activity which we had observed on entering Fort Capuzzo. The British had attacked along the whole front at dawn that morning.

The others had all been taken while on patrol before the attack had started, so they knew nothing of the details. It might be an attack in force with the objective of throwing the Italians right back to the Libyan frontier, or it might only be a powerful demonstration to cover large-scale raids designed to destroy certain of the preparations which the Italians had been making for their own projected offensive.

Naturally we were all thrilled by the news and Bannister and I agreed that the distant gunfire we had heard soon after leaving Fort Maddalena must have been part of this operation; but we did not feel that there were any grounds for hoping that the British attack would alter our own situation. Even if the Italians were driven in it was quite certain that they would remove their prisoners further to the rear before there was any chance of their being rescued, and it was doubtless because Fort Maddalena,
although no further to the east than Fort Capuzzo, was in a much more exposed position that we had already been transferred to the larger fortesss.

My own delight on hearing that our people were at last slapping into the Italians was to some extent overshadowed by the knowledge that Paolo Tortino had announced his intention of coming to see me after dinner that evening. What exactly he could do to me I had no idea. From my own experience and that of the other captive officers that I had so far met it seemed that the Italians treated their prisoners very decently, and to date there was no act of mine which the authorities could pick on as an excuse to single me out for special hardship.

On the other hand, since he had held a post in the Italian Diplomatic Service, Tortino must be a member of the Fascist Party, and in a totalitarian State there is never any knowing what the limits of the arbitrary powers of an official of the ruling party may be. I did not think that I need fear being beaten with steel rods or rubber truncheons, as might have occurred had Tortino been an influential Nazi and myself a prisoner in Germany, but all the same I had an uncomfortable feeling that he might be able to make things extremely disagreeable for me.