LITMIR.BIZ

       Preface

      Anyone who reads this book is entitled to ask how anyone can remember events which happened twenty-eight years ago and, what is even more extraordinary and unbelievable, what happened on a particular day. It is, of course, impossible, except for some rare people who have the gift of total recall, which I do not possess.

      The events described fall into three distinct periods: the one in which I was captured; the time I spent as a prisoner of war; and the third period when I was free after the Italian Armistice. I find no difficulty in remembering being captured. It is something, as most people who have been captured would agree, that is such a disagreeable experience that one remembers the circumstances for the rest of one’s life. Neither does one forget what it was like to be a prisoner, although it is impossible to separate one day from another unless one keeps a journal, which I didn’t.

      The third period was the one which I really needed to remember in order to write this book, and I was able to do so because I kept a skeletal day-by-day diary, without naming people or places, and I used this record to write a detailed account of what happened while I was in a prison camp in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1944 soon after I was recaptured. This, although I didn’t think of it as such, was the first draft of the present book.

      The reader may also ask another, equally sensible question. Why have I allowed such a long time to pass before writing it?

      Not long after the war finished a minor flood of books about prison camps, escapes and life with the Resistance appeared. Some of them were so good – George Millar’s Horned Pigeon and Maquis for instance – that I felt that a book about an escape that was nothing but a mass walk-out from a camp and my subsequent experiences, did not seem exciting enough to write about – I myself didn’t even succeed in getting through the enemy line as so many people did. In fact I did not even attempt to. Nor did I join the Partisans. There were none to join at that time in the particular part of the Apennines in which I was hiding, anyway. Scarcely a help in producing an exciting book. I let the whole thing drop.

      I finally decided to write the book because I felt that comparatively little had been written about the ordinary Italian people who helped prisoners of war at great personal risk and without thought of personal gain, purely out of kindness of heart. The sort of people one can still see today working in the fields as one whizzes down the Autostrada del Sole and on any mountain road in the Apennines. If only I had been able to speak the language better at that time perhaps their qualities would have emerged more clearly than they do now.

      There are certain omissions and additions. In the Autumn of 1943 there were more prisoners of war in the part of the Apennines described in this book than actually appear in it. There have also been widespread changes in the names of people and places, and many characters are composite. As Belloc wrote in Cautionary Tales for Children:

      And is it true?

      It is not true.

      And if it were it wouldn’t do.

      If I have only succeeded in producing an inferior version of ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’, without the music and the song, then I can only apologise. I can’t give the reader his money back. Those who are bored by descriptions of abortive cloak and dagger operations should skip the first chapter.

      The peasants are the great sanctuary of sanity, the country the last stronghold of happiness. When they disappear there is no hope for the race.

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