| Love and War in the Apennines | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Eric Newby |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Autobiographical novel |
| Publisher | Hodder & Stoughton |
| Publication date | 1971 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 224 pp |
| ISBN | 978-0-330-28024-2 |
| OCLC Number | 36408373 |
Love and War in the Apennines is a 1971 Second World War memoir (with some changes of names and people and places, and some composite characters) by Eric Newby. It was dramatised as the film In Love and War.
Contents |
After the Armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces in 1943, the author left the prison camp in which he had been held for a year and evaded the Germans by going to ground high in the mountains and forests south of the Po River. In enforced isolation, he was sheltered and protected by an informal and highly courageous network of Italian peasants. Newby writes a powerful account of these idiosyncratic and selfless people and also of their bleak and very basic lifestyle. He undergoes a series of bizarre, funny and often dangerous incidents, and in the process meets Wanda, a local girl who later becomes his wife.
Newby takes part in a Special Boat Service operation, an attempt to blow up a German airbase by the Bay of Catania, on the east coast of Sicily. This is an ill-conceived effort to destroy some of the Ju 88s that were to be used in the bombing of a convoy bound for Malta. He and his colleagues fail to make their rendezvous with a British submarine and are plucked out of the sea by the crew of a fishing boat.
Newby is eventually imprisoned in a large camp in an orphanage at the village of Fontanellato in the great plain of the Po river. With the Armistizio, the Italians decide to let the English prisoners escape once the news gets around that the Germans are on their way. Because Newby has a broken ankle he has to be abandoned and is hidden in a farmer's hay loft until an Italian doctor takes him to the hospital next to the orphanage. Here he is visited by Wanda, the daughter of a Slovene teacher, who gives him Italian lessons in exchange for English lessons and they fall in love. The Germans discover he is there but Newby escapes and is taken by the formidable doctor to hide in the woods. He is eventually taken to the house of an Italian family but they are afraid of what the Germans might do if his presence becomes known. They tell him to climb up to the house of Signor Zanoni which he does at night in the middle of an appalling storm. Zanoni eventually takes him a farmhouse in the Apennine Mountains where he spends some weeks paying for his keep by clearing the fields of stones. One Sunday Newby makes a trek higher up, falls asleep and wakes up to see a German officer looming over him with a pistol on his belt. The officer soon sees through his disguise as an Italian but is too civilised to take him prisoner.
Newby is nearly captured when the Tedeschi raid a ballo at another farm but manages to escape. With things now getting too hot, he makes his way higher up to stay with a shepherd who cures him of fever with a huge woollen vest and juniper-flavoured grappa. A village meeting decides to build him a "house", over a cave and camouflaged. It is October and for some weeks he is brought food by members of the two village families who know of his whereabouts. Wanda visits him briefly and gives him a package containing maps, a compass and other items to help him get to the coast from where he wants to head south in order to meet the advancing allied forces. On a reconnaissance to the summit of the mountains he becomes lost and is given a bed and food by an old man whom he had met previously. Newby returns to his cave and finds James, an old friend from POW camps, who has been living in the next door valley.
Eventually their presence at the cave is betrayed and they are forced to flee. They are taken to meet some would-be partisans and then are betrayed again by a villager and captured by a detachment of Fascist milizia. The book concludes with Newby's return twelve years later (1956) with Wanda, now his wife (they married in the spring of 1946), as they revisit the places and families in the story.