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Etruscan Places by D.H. Lawrence (1932)

It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives lives by delicate sensitiveness… Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.
(Etruscan Places chapter 2)

Evil, what is evil?
There is only one evil, to deny life.

‘Etruscan Places’ was published posthumously (D.H. Lawrence died in 1930). In his biography of Lawrence, Anthony Burgess tells us it was meant to be much longer. Lawrence had been interested in the Etruscans since at least 1920. At the time they were known as the mysterious race that occupied northern Italy before the Romans obliterated them in a series of wars, wiping out their civilisation, leaving no written records, or traces of their language, or buildings. All we know is from their tombs which contain marvellous paintings and frescoes. For Lawrence they epitomised a primitive culture based on natural instinct, in touch with their pagan sensual selves, which had been wiped out by the force of abstract law and reason (the Romans).

This is obviously a grotesque distortion of the facts since, at the very least:

if crushed they were, it was by the Roman Republic, centuries before there was a Roman Empire (see Roman–Etruscan Wars)
the Romans were indeed an obsessively militaristic culture but at the same time they practiced a florid variety of blood-thirsty cults, traditions and ceremonies which you’d have thought Lawrence would have liked

But really what Lawrence does is reshape the Etruscans in his own image, as embattled outsiders fighting several types of ‘establishment’.

This is why the book opens with an attack on all the current historians of the ancient world, who Lawrence accuses of being in thrall to the glamour of Greece and Rome and downplaying all other cultures (one thinks of the Carthaginians in the same ‘victim’ category, but there were lots of others). And, as Burgess points out, when he writes of an empire which crushes scores of native peoples in the name of ‘freedom’ Lawrence is obviously at the same time referring to the British Empire, whose subjugation of native peoples around the world Lawrence deplored.

As history, then, the book is bordering on worthless. So wherein lies its value? Three things: 1) Lawrence’s as-usual thrillingly direct and vivid response to the Etruscan art he sees, 2) and spinning from that, the fantasias he builds up about Etruscan belief and religion, which all confirm Lawrence’s own worship of life and vitality which he projects onto ‘a vivid, life-accepting people, who must have lived with real fullness’.

And then 3) a surprisingly large part of the book has social history value as a nuts and bolts account of contemporary tourism in Italy. It takes the form of several trips or journeys he undertook with a friend, Earl Brewster (1878 to 1957) an American painter, writer and scholar, to key Etruscan sites which he describes in great detail. As such there’s a surprising amount about trains and hotels and taxis and walking through the landscape etc. So, for example, within a few pages, here he is having made it to the local train station for Cerveteri and having discovered there’s no taxi to the site so they’re just going to have to walk there.

A road not far from the sea, a bare, flattish, hot white road with nothing but a tilted oxen-wagon in the distance like a huge snail with four horns. Beside the road the tall asphodel is letting off its spasmodic pink sparks, rather at random, and smelling of cats. Away to the left is the sea, beyond the flat green wheat, the Mediterranean glistening flat and deadish, as it does on the low shores. Ahead are hills, and a ragged bit of a grey village with an ugly big grey building: that is Cerveteri. (p.99)

You have the feeling that although, in his books, essays and stories of the 1920s, Lawrence is liable to go off into the wildest fantasies about the male principle and the cosmos and the dark gods, about what he actually sees and hears and smells he is always obsessively, compulsively honest. And if this means being pretty unflattering about contemporary people and places, so be it.

1. Cerveteri

After a brief introduction satirising the Great Roman Empire, Lawrence sets off with his unnamed companion (Brewster), they arrive at Palo station, five miles from Cerveteri, which was the ancient Etruscan city of Caere, or Cere: ‘It was a gay and gaudy Etruscan city when Rome put up her first few hovels: probably.’ They have come to see the tombs.

First they have to trudge five miles along a hot dusty road to get there. Then there’s only one taverna and the food is disgusting. Eventually two boys are found to guide them to the necropolis. Apparently the Etruscans built in wood which is why their architecture has completely disappeared and been built over many times. They liked to build on the tops of hills or ridges, with a steep scarp slope and a hill opposite. The central place of the settlement was called the arx. On the hill opposite they built their necropolis, so the living could look across and see their dead.

There were loads of them. Every large tumulus covered several tombs and in the necropolis of Cerveteri there are hundreds of tombs and the same number in another hill on the other side of the town, and all filled with treasure to accompany the wealthy dead to the afterlife. And, in Lawrence’s hugely skewed opinion, for the Etruscans that afterlife was joyous:

And death, to the Etruscan, was a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. It was neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment. It was just a natural continuance of the fullness of life. Everything was in terms of life, of living. (p.109)

They trudge down into the ravine and up the slope opposite to emerge on a small plain. Being Lawrence, the best bit is a page-long hymn in praise of the pink and stinky asphodel. He is in a frisky combative mood, and so takes issue with an unnamed English scholar who can’t believe the ancient Greeks made so much of this stinky plant and thinks they must have really meant our own lovely daffodil. Which Lawrence mocks.

Trust an Englishman and a modern for wanting to turn the tall, proud, sparky, dare-devil asphodel into the modest daffodil! I believe we don’t like the asphodel because we don’t like anything proud and sparky. (p.104)

And you can hear Lawrence-the-embattled speaking. Just as, in the opening pages, he scorned English puritanism and then added, rather unnecessarily:

Who isn’t vicious to his enemy? To my detractors I am a very effigy of vice.

Finally they arrive at the avenue of mushroom-shaped burial mounds and Lawrence reminds us that he is quite the globetrotter:

There is a queer stillness and a curious peaceful repose about the Etruscan places I have been to, quite different from the weirdness of Celtic places, the slightly repellent feeling of Rome and the old Campagna, and the rather horrible feeling of the great pyramid places in Mexico, Teotihuacan and Cholula, and Mitla in the south; or the amiably idolatrous Buddha places in Ceylon.

They pick up a formal guide who takes them through the fence protecting the sites and into the tombs. He describes the layout and then, for the first time, intrudes his own hobby horse about the phallus.

Here all is plain, simple, usually with no decoration, and with those easy natural proportions whose beauty one hardly notices, they come so naturally, physically. It is the natural beauty of proportion of the phallic consciousness, contrasted with the more studied or ecstatic proportion of the mental and spiritual Consciousness we are accustomed to.

On to the tomb of the Tarquins, the family that gave Etruscan kings to early Rome. Writing carved into the walls but:

We cannot read one single sentence. The Etruscan language is a mystery. Yet in Caesar’s day it was the everyday language of the bulk of the people in central Italy–at least, east-central. And many Romans spoke Etruscan as we speak French. Yet now the language is entirely lost. Destiny is a queer thing.

The feel of the tombs encourages Lawrence in his enthusiasm for his version of the Etruscans:

There is a simplicity, combined with a most peculiar, free-breasted naturalness and spontaneity, in the shapes and movements of the underworld walls and spaces, that at once reassures the spirit. The Greeks sought to make an impression, and Gothic still more seeks to impress the mind. The Etruscans, no. The things they did, in their easy centuries, are as natural and as easy as breathing. They leave the breast breathing freely and pleasantly, with a certain fullness of life. Even the tombs. And that is the true Etruscan quality: ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life, no need to force the mind or the soul in any direction. (p.109)

But the really striking feature is the numerous phallic symbols, large and small, found in every tomb.

One can live one’s life, and read all the books about India or Etruria, and never read a single word about the thing that impresses one in the very first five minutes, in Benares or in an Etruscan necropolis: that is, the phallic symbol. Here it is, in stone, unmistakable, and everywhere, around these tombs. Here it is, big and little, standing by the doors, or inserted, quite small, into the rock: the phallic stone! Perhaps some tumuli had a great phallic column on the summit: some perhaps by the door. There are still small phallic stones, only seven or eight inches long, inserted in the rock outside the doors: they always seem to have been outside.

Whereas above the entrance to every female tomb was a stone chest or box. Lawrence immediately misreads and elides the technical arx with Noah’s Ark and with the female principle.

The guide-boy, who works on the railway and is no profound scholar, mutters that every woman’s tomb had one of these stone houses or chests over it – over the doorway, he says – and every man’s tomb had one of the phallic stones, or lingams… The stone house, as the boy calls it, suggests the Noah’s Ark without the boat part: the Noah’s Ark box we had as children, full of animals. And that is what it is, the Ark, the arx, the womb. The womb of all the world, that brought forth all the creatures. The womb, the arx, where life retreats in the last refuge. The womb the ark of the covenant, in which lies the mystery of eternal life, the manna and the mysteries.

And here we can see him Lawrentising the Etruscans, aligning them with his own cult of sex in its broadest sense, to mean the great archetypes of male and female. Lawrence freely speculates that it was this overt, blatant attachment to phallic religion which prompted the Romans to wipe them out, because the Romans were interested in only two things, power and wealth.

They hated the phallus and the ark, because they wanted empire and dominion and, above all, riches: social gain. You cannot dance gaily to the double flute and at the same time conquer nations or rake in large sums of money.

2. Tarquinia

At the end of their sightseeing they catch the bus back to Poli where they could catch an evening train back to Rome but they are aiming to travel on to the next site, at Tarquinia. With two hours to kill they walk the two miles to check out Ladispoli, a seaside place, some two miles away.

And speculates about when the Etruscans arrived from over the sea, and why, and who they found inhabiting the west Italian landscape, and where their language came from. it isn’t related to either Greek or primitive Latin. We don’t know and Lawrence is no expert. Instead:

That which half emerges from the dim background of time is strangely stirring; and after having read all the learned suggestions, most of them contradicting one another; and then having looked sensitively at the tombs and the Etruscan things that are left, one must accept one’s own resultant feeling.

Back at Poli station the master gives them a decent meal of cold meats, oranges and wine and they catch the train for an hours journey south to Cività Vecchia, which is a port of not much importance, except that from here the regular steamer sails to Sardinia.

Lawrence is made very cross by a sneaking spy-official who comes up to them in the street and asks to see their passports which Lawrence angrily refuses to do. When he says ‘there wasn’t even a war on’ you remember the very long chapter in his novel ‘Kangaroo’ which describes his repeated humiliation by the wartime authorities in England and realise how extremely touchy he is about the pathetic powers of petty officialdom.

They find a hotel. Next morning they catch the 8am train one stop to Tarquinia. Lawrence notes how the Fascist regime insists on the Italian roots of all names. He mocks the Fascist claim to be reviving the old Roman Empire.

The hotel they’re guided to is owned by a husband and wife but run by their hyper-active 14-year-old son, Albertino. They visit the local museum in the Palazzo Vitelleschi when it opens at 10 (given the Fascist salute by its two officials). Lawrence has strong opinions about museums i.e. they should be local, and local artefacts should not be hauled off to museums hundreds of miles away.

If one must have museums, let them be small, and above all, let them be local. Splendid as the Etruscan museum is in Florence, how much happier one is in the museum at Tarquinia, where all the things are Tarquinian, and at least have some association with one another, and form some sort of organic whole. (p.124)

And so to the tombs. The plus words, his value words, repeated in endless variations, are:

free-breasted naturalness and spontaneity
ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life
a certain naturalness and feeling
vital life
Etruscan vitality
the real Etruscan liveliness and naturalness.
life-significance
vigorous, strong-bodied liveliness is characteristic of the Etruscans
fresh and cleanly vivid
naive wonder
archaic innocence

Information about:

the arx, the high place, the inner citadel and holy place of the city
the early black ware decorated in scratches, or undecorated, called bucchero
the Etruscan lucumones, or prince-magistrates, were in the first place religious seers, governors in religion, then magistrates, then princes
the sacred patera, or mundum, the round saucer with the raised knob in the centre, which represents the round germ of heaven and earth.

3. The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 1

So they ‘did’ the museum in the morning and in the afternoon go with a guide outside the town to the famous tombs. These have a very different feel from the splendid spacious tombs at Cerveteri.

Here there is no stately tumulus city, with its highroad between the tombs, and inside, rather noble, many-roomed houses of the dead. Here the little one-room tombs seem scattered at random on the hilltop, here and there:

The guide takes them down into:

the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing
the Tomb of the Feast
the Tomb of the Dead Man
the Tomb of the Lionesses
the Tomb of the Maiden
the Tomb of the Painted Vases
the Tomb of the Old Man
the Tomb of the Inscriptions
the Tomb of the Leopards

Detail of the Tomb of the Leopards at Tarquinia, showing musicians ‘swiftly going with their limbs full of life, full of life to the tips’. Plate 9 of ‘Etruscan Places’

He gives detailed and sensitive assessments of the wall paintings in all these tombs, for example praising the delicacy of the way the figures touch each other.

He reflects on the local quality of Italian culture:

The Etruscans carried out perfectly what seems to be the Italian instinct: to have single, independent cities, with a certain surrounding territory, each district speaking its own dialect and feeling at home in its own little capital, yet the whole confederacy of city-states loosely linked together by a common religion and a more-or-less common interest. Even today Lucca is very different from Ferrara, and the language is hardly the same.

And:

To get any idea of the pre-Roman past we must break up the conception of oneness and uniformity, and see an endless confusion of differences.

Lawrence gives detailed verbal descriptions of ten tombs and persuasively describes how, each time they stumble back into the bright outside, stepping up from the entrances (all the tombs are carved in rock below ground level), each time the underworld of figures dancing or at feast become more and more real and the bright daylight world of indifferent grassy mounds and a dim view towards the sea, comes to seem unreal.

They finish for the day and trudge back to the hotel. Lawrence reflects on what he’s seen. As far as I know he is inventing when he writes:

Behind all the Etruscan liveliness was a religion of life, which the chief men were seriously responsible for. Behind all the dancing was a vision, and even a science of life, a conception of the universe and man’s place in the universe which made men live to the depth of their capacity. To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. (p.147)

This is very like the total animism he attributes to the native Americans the Hopi chapter of ‘Mornings in Mexico’ and Lawrence describes it for page after page.

He goes on about the Etruscan kings being ‘the life-bringers and the death-guides’, the role of the lucumo or religious prince, before waxing lyrical about the symbolism of the fish, different birds, the leopard, deer etc, the role of astrology, and so on. Within all life forms there needs to be a balance, apparently, between the fiery and the watery and much more in the same vein, which all ends with a thump when, out of nowhere, he suddenly has a pop at the great portrait painter of his day, John Singer Sergeant (1856 to 1925). Maybe there had been lots of coverage of his death as Lawrence was writing??

So the symbolism goes all through the Etruscan tombs. It is very much the symbolism of all the ancient world. But here it is not exact and scientific, as in Egypt. It is simple and rudimentary, and the artist plays with it as a child with fairy stories. Nevertheless, it is the symbolic element which rouses the deeper emotion, and gives the peculiarly satisfying quality to the dancing figures and the creatures. A painter like Sargent, for example, is so clever. But in the end he is utterly uninteresting, a bore. He never has an inkling of his own triviality and silliness. One Etruscan leopard, even one little quail, is worth all the miles of him. (p.156)

4. The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 2

Sitting in a café overlooking the town gates, Lawrence gives way to disappointingly tired, grumpy old man tropes, comparing a completely invented fantasy of the gaily dressed Etruscan workers dancing and singing their way back from the fields, with the modern-day scene of raggedy old peasants trudging besides carts and being questioned by surly customs officials, the Dazio men (anyone bringing any goods into any Italian town had to pay a tariff).

We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.

There are three Japanese staying at their hotel. A bit of comedy concerning the boy Albertino who is immensely amused by their difficulties using a dictionary, and who insists they’re Chinese.

Breakfast then Lawrence and Brewster collect their guide and set off to see some more of the tombs. There are about 27 in total, they’ve seen 12 so far. They fall in with a young German who’s just finished an archaeology degree, has come from seeing sites in Tunis, and is resolutely unimpressed by everything. Forty-year-old Lawrence categorises him under ‘young people today’ who, we’ve seen, he cordially laments.

Nicht viel wert! – not much worth – doesn’t amount to anything – seems to be his favourite phrase, as it is the favourite phrase of almost all young people today. Nothing amounts to anything, for the young. Well, I feel it’s not my fault, and try to bear up. But though it is bad enough to have been of the war generation, it must be worse to have grown up just after the war. One can’t blame the young, that they don’t find that anything amounts to anything. The war cancelled most meanings for them. (p.162)

Compare the post-war laments littered through Lawrence’s novel ‘Aaron’s Rod’ and the empty-headed young people in his novella, ‘The Virgin and The Gypsy’. And so they go on to visit:

the Tomb of the Bulls
the Tomb of the Augurs
the Tomb of the Baron

Again, Lawrence gives detailed descriptions of the paintings in each tomb along with his attempts at interpretation of the human poses and the heraldic beasts, tying everything into his conception of the Etruscan’s freshness and vividness, seeing things with the wonder of a child.

At one point Lawrence makes the typically sweeping claim that:

Greek myths are only gross representations of certain very clear and very ancient esoteric conceptions, that are much older than the myths: or the Greeks. Myths, and personal gods, are only the decadence of a previous cosmic religion.

And suddenly I thought of Robert Graves. Graves wrote numerous books imposing his eccentric views on the ancient world, and held increasingly dotty opinions about the ancient forces of the Mediterranean, famously settling to live in Majorca. What is the link between Lawrence and Graces, Mediterranean exiles, eccentrics, worshippers of the Life Force?

Lawrence waxes lyrical about how wonderful the world of the Etruscans must have been, when people or animals weren’t just individuals but symbols of cosmic powers. He sees this demonstrated in the paintings by the way the edges of the figures are soft, indicating the way they blur into the cosmos around them – in comparison with Greek or Roman figures who are much more precisely modelled, who have edges, who have lost their connection with the cosmos.

In the final, later tombs (the Tomb of the Typhon, the Tomb of the Shields), when Etrurian towns were falling to Republican Rome (Veii, the first great Etruscan city to be captured by Rome, was taken about 388 B.C., and completely destroyed) he sees a sudden falling off of the art. It becomes mannered and external, stylised and losing all the Etruscan freshness (p.172). The conquering Romans converted the king-rulers to local administrators and overnight the magic vanished.

For Lawrence, the culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans was about power and crushed the Etruscan joy of life.

The old religion of the profound attempt of man to harmonize himself with nature, and hold his own and come to flower in the great seething of life, changed with the Greeks and Romans into a desire to resist nature, to produce a mental cunning and a mechanical force that would outwit Nature and chain her down completely, completely, till at last there should be nothing free in nature at all, all should be controlled, domesticated, put to man’s meaner uses.

And he goes on to propose an interesting idea: that it was precisely when this freshness was being crushed, that the idea of hell arose.

Curiously enough, with the idea of the triumph over nature arose the idea of a gloomy Hades, a hell and purgatory. To the peoples of the great natural religions the after-life was a continuing of the wonder-journey of life. To the peoples of the Idea the afterlife is hell, or purgatory, or nothingness, and paradise is an inadequate fiction.

No point visiting any more of the tombs. The decadent, corrupt Roman vision has taken over. And yet in an act of historical injustice, it is these last, decadent tomb paintings, the ones of hell, that the historians who want to damn the Etruscans refer to as evidence of their morbidity. Lawrence damns the historians for being so hidebound by conventional praise of Rome as to be incapable of seeing the laughing, dancing freshness he has just described in such detail in the earlier, truly Etruscan tombs.

Having finished with the tombs Lawrence comments on the view. He imagines the Etruscans farmed the land in families, completely unlike the Romans who created luxury villas supported by the forced labour of hordes of slaves, locked up at night in barracks. But in the last century of the Republic the Romans realised more wealth came from trade and slowly abandoned the land (as all the poets of the Golden Age lament), paving the way – Lawrence says, with sweeping historical generalisation – for the Dark Ages.

5. Vulci

Apparently, ancient Etruria consisted of a league or loose religious confederacy of twelve cities, each city embracing some miles of country all around. Of these twelve city-states, Tarquinii was supposed to be the oldest, the chief city, Caere, was not far off, to the north, and Vulci was a dozen miles north of Tarquinia. So hither Lawrence and Brewster make their way.

They take another train, just one stop north to Montalto di Castro. Here there is a lot of faff with the malarial locals organising a lift in a cart the five miles to Vulci. It is a two-wheeled gig driven by a local youth and costs 50 lire to lumber them across the Maremma. What is the Maremma? I’m glad you asked.

We were on the Maremma, that flat, wide plain of the coast that has been water-logged for centuries, and one of the most abandoned, wildest parts of Italy. Under the Etruscans; apparently, it was an intensely fertile plain. But the Etruscans seem to have been very clever drainage-engineers; they drained the land so that it was a waving bed of wheat, with their methods of intensive peasant culture. Under the Romans, however, the elaborate system of canals and levels of water fell into decay, and gradually the streams threw their mud along the coast and choked themselves, then soaked into the land and made marshes and vast stagnant shallow pools where the mosquitoes bred like fiends, millions hatching on a warm May day; and with the mosquitoes came the malaria, called the marsh fever in the old days. Already in late Roman times this evil had fallen on the Etruscan plains and on the Campagna of Rome. Then, apparently, the land rose in level, the sea-strip was wider but even more hollow than before, the marshes became deadly, and human life departed or was destroyed, or lingered on here and there.

Now the Italian government was draining this huge area and bringing it back into cultivation. Lawrence questions the boy-driver, Luigi, about it, as they jog along in the very jolty cart over the rutted track. It’s a fascinating drive, with much comment on the wildlife and then on the history. A ruined castle guards the border between the Papal States and Tuscany. Lawrence tells us that it was occupied by Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, brother of Napoleon who lived here after the death of his brother, as an Italian prince.

When, in 1828, ploughing oxen fell through the surface of the earth into a tomb, Lucien ordered them all excavated. He instructed the excavators to preserve every bit of painted ware but ordered the coarse black Etruscan ware to be smashed, to prevent the cheapening of the market. So for months the work of digging up and smashing all Etruscan pots went ahead under the auspices of a watchman overseeing the work with a gun. It’s a wonder any old remains survive humanity’s short-sighted stupidity, isn’t it?

So the tombs were thoroughly looted and despoiled and this explains why there’s not much to see at Vulci. Instead this chapter is most about the nervousness of their ‘guide’ who turns out not to be sure where the tombs are, of the strange atmosphere at the castle, when half a dozen man arrive on bicycles. Turns out they’re labourers come to collect their pay. There’s a shop there but it’s closed so Lawrence has to shout up to a woman in a window and ask for a candle which she throws down. All strange and unnerving.

First they are taken to the river tombs which are empty apart from rubbish and damaged sarcophagi scattered randomly, some still containing bones. They are extensive, clammy and depressing. Emerging from these they ask the guide they picked up at the castle, 40-year-old Mario, to show them some tumuli like small hills, away over the heather. They have to scramble down underneath brambles and enter what turns out to be an endless labyrinth of passages which never arrive at any definitive tomb or central chamber. No paintings at all. Nothing.

6. Volterra

Volterra is the most northerly of the great Etruscan cities of the west. It lies back some thirty miles from the sea, on a towering great bluff of rock that gets all the winds and sees all the world, looking out down the valley of the Cecina to the sea, south over vale and high land to the tips of Elba, north to the imminent mountains of Carrara, inward over the wide hills of the Pre-Apennines, to the heart of Tuscany.

Lawrence and Brewster get there by train, then change to a cog-and-ratchet line where one carriage is pushed by a small engine behind to arrive at the little town with its one hotel. They discover there’s going to be a banquet that evening for a new governor who’s arriving for Florence, which prompts a little digression on Italian politics and what is (maybe) a shrewd insight into the Italian character.

It was a cold, grey afternoon, with winds round the hard dark corners of the hard, narrow medieval town, and crowds of black-dressed, rather squat little men and pseudo-elegant young women pushing and loitering in the streets, and altogether that sense of furtive grinning and jeering and threatening which always accompanies a public occasion–a political one especially–in Italy, in the more out-of-the-way centres. It is as if the people, alabaster-workers and a few peasants, were not sure which side they wanted to be on, and therefore were all the more ready to exterminate anyone who was on the other side. This fundamental uneasiness, indecision, is most curious in the Italian soul. It is as if the people could never be wholeheartedly anything: because they can’t trust anything. And this inability to trust is at the root of the political extravagance and frenzy. They don’t trust themselves, so how can they trust their ‘leaders’ or their party’?

Does this sweeping generalisation about ‘the Italian soul’ have any validity? Does it explain Italy’s notoriously fickle and unstable politics for more or less the last hundred years? Lawrence makes quite clear his political agnosticism. In the crowd of people awaiting the banquet:

The cheeky girls salute one with the ‘Roman’ salute, out of sheer effrontery: a salute which has nothing to do with me, so I don’t return it. Politics of all sorts are anathema. But in an Etruscan city which held out so long against Rome I consider the Roman salute unbecoming, and the Roman imperium unmentionable… But it is not for me to put even my little finger in any political pie. I am sure every post-war country has hard enough work to get itself governed, without outsiders interfering or commenting. Let those rule who can rule. (p.200)

They tour round the town, see the piazza and church and the old walls and, beyond them, the staggering views as the sun sets. Back to the hotel where all the waiters are so excited setting up the banquet for the new governor that they can barely get served.

Next morning to the local museum to see the unique ‘urns’, in fact sarcophagi, made from the local Volterran alabaster, easy to work and carve. So it’s the decorative statues atop the urns which appeal. Lawrence has a digression about the ‘perfection’ of Greek art which he finds too controlled, finished and soulless. Give him the more artless, vivid Etruscan carvings.

He has an interesting passage on the symbolic meaning of the beasts carved into many of the urns, ‘sea-monsters, the seaman with fish-tail, and with wings, the sea-woman the same: or the man with serpent-legs, and wings, or the woman the same’. These things are all coming up from the depths where ancient people thought lay the real powers of the world.

The portrait carvings of people on the lids of the sarcophagi are crude. The sarcophagi are small, often only two foot long, so the figures seem stunted or with unnaturally large heads and stunted bodies. Lawrence considers this a northern Etrurian style, lacking the energy and grace of the southern images, holding the seeds of the grotesque Gothic within them.

Only a couple of tombs are open but Lawrence didn’t see them. Most of the ones out in the fields have been flattened for agricultural land. One entire tomb has been transferred in its entirety to the garden of the Florence museum. Lawrence describes visiting it but this only triggers his usual lament about leaving antiquities where they are found.

Why, oh why, wasn’t the tomb left intact as it was found, where it was found? The garden of the Florence museum is vastly instructive, if you want object-lessons about the Etruscans. But who wants object-lessons about vanished races? What one wants is a contact. The Etruscans are not a theory or a thesis. If they are anything, they are an experience. (p.214)

Thoughts

The book is more genuinely about the Etruscans than Mornings in Mexico is about Mexico (seeing as nearly half the chapters in that book are set in the United States). It is more systematic and, as I’ve indicated, goes into great detail about what is to be seen. The original book contained 14 pretty good black and white photos of the wall paintings and urn carvings he describes. And yet…

I’ve been to many of the classic archaeological sites, to the pyramids, Luxor and the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, to Mycenae and Delphi in Greece, to Troy in Turkey, to our very own Stonehenge. At the time I overflowed with imagination, I knew all the stories and was entranced by their glamour. But now, reading this book, I found the entire archaeological content a bit tiring. I most enjoyed his descriptions of flowers and views and people: of the living, of life: the hyperactive 14-year-old hotel manager Albertino, the reluctant guide Luigi, the brash young women in the Volterra hotel giving Fascist salutes. Lawrence himself says something similar, all the way back in 1925.

Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won’t last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness.

I like to think of the little wooden temples of the early Greeks and of the Etruscans: small, dainty, fragile, and evanescent as flowers. We have reached the stage when we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realize that it is better to keep life fluid and changing than to try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments.

Everything is in flux. Accept it. Rejoice in it. This is Lawrence’s creed.

Slavery

I am against slavery, in all its forms, throughout history. As I’ve written in many posts, slavery was almost universal in all human societies until relatively recently, just as empires have been the most frequent ways for humans to organise their societies. They aren’t the exceptions, they are the (horrifying) rule. Doesn’t justify either of them, my blog just tries to place them in proper historical perspective.

Anyway, Lawrence makes a big deal throughout the book of really sharply distinguishing between Greek (too intellectual and finished) and Roman (too brutal and imperial) cultures, and his beloved Etruscans, overflowing with ‘free-breasted naturalness’ and so on.

But when he describes the wall paintings in the tombs of Tarquinia, he casually mentions the slave boys and slave men and slave women waiting attendance on The Rich in this free-breasted society and, grouch that I am, I have to point out that, like so many fans of the ancient world (Egypt, Greece, Rome) he sings the praises of an ancient culture and ignores the fact that it was built and maintained and fed by mass slavery every bit as evil as the slave systems created by the European nations and existing in the United States until 1865. Lawrence tries to make out that his Etruscan slaves were happier than the Roman type.

There is a certain dance and glamour in all the movements, even in those of the naked slave men. They are by no means downtrodden menials, let later Romans say what they will. The slaves in the tombs are surging with full life. (p.134)

And I sort of take the point, acknowledging the well-attested historical fact that there were thousands of different types of slavery, from being worked to death in silver mines, shackled to an oar in a galley, being whipped in a plantation field, through to being a scented secretary to a senator or maid to a fine lady. But still, still… I cleave to a simple principle: If you hate slavery in one incarnation, in one place – then you hate slavery everywhere, at all times. The Etruscans may have been the happy-go-lucky lovers of life of Lawrence’s dreams – but all these tombs celebrate filthy rich slave-owners. Yuk.

Cypresses

Off the back of these trips and his obsession with the Etruscans, Lawrence wrote a magnificent poem, cypresses. It was a stroke of genius to associate their entire lost culture with the dark and brooding trees, like tall dark flames, which you see in Italy, and then to interrogate them about their mystery. As you’ll see, towards the end he becomes more argumentative, reprising his defence of the life-loving Etruscans against the legalistic and militaristic Romans.

Tuscan cypresses,
What is it?

Folded in like a dark thought
For which the language is lost,
Tuscan cypresses,
Is there a great secret?
Are our words no good?

The undeliverable secret,
Dead with a dead race and a dead speech, and yet
Darkly monumental in you,
Etruscan cypresses.

Ah, how I admire your fidelity,
Dark cypresses!

Is it the secret of the long-nosed Etruscans?
The long-nosed, sensitive-footed, subtly-smiling Etruscans,
Who made so little noise outside the cypress groves?

Among the sinuous, flame-tall cypresses
That swayed their length of darkness all around
Etruscan-dusky, wavering men of old Etruria:
Naked except for fanciful long shoes,
Going with insidious, half-smiling quietness
And some of Africa’s imperturbable sang-froid
About a forgotten business.

What business, then?
Nay, tongues are dead, and words are hollow as seed-pods,
Having shed their sound and finished all their echoing
Etruscan syllables,
That had the telling.

Yet more I see you darkly concentrate,
Tuscan cypresses,
On one old thought:
On one old slim imperishable thought, while you remain
Etruscan cypresses;
Dusky, slim marrow-thought of slender, flickering men of Etruria,
Whom Rome called vicious.

Vicious, dark cypresses:
Vicious, you supple, brooding, softly-swaying pillars of dark flame.
Monumental to a dead, dead race
Embowered in you!

Were they then vicious, the slender, tender-footed
Long-nosed men of Etruria?
Or was their way only evasive and different, dark, like cypress-trees in a wind?

They are dead, with all their vices,
And all that is left
Is the shadowy monomania of some cypresses
And tombs.

The smile, the subtle Etruscan smile still lurking
Within the tombs,
Etruscan cypresses.
He laughs longest who laughs last;
Nay, Leonardo only bungled the pure Etruscan smile.

What would I not give
To bring back the rare and orchid-like
Evil-yclept Etruscan?
For as to the evil
We have only Roman word for it,
Which I, being a little weary of Roman virtue,
Don’t hang much weight on.

For oh, I know, in the dust where we have buried
The silenced races and all their abominations,
We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.

There in the deeps
That churn the frankincense and ooze the myrrh,
Cypress shadowy,
Such an aroma of lost human life!

They say the fit survive,
But I invoke the spirits of the lost.
Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,
To bring their meaning back into life again,
Which they have taken away
And wrapt inviolable in soft cypress-trees,
Etruscan cypresses.

Evil, what is evil?
There is only one evil, to deny life
As Rome denied Etruria
And mechanical America Montezuma still.

Genius.

Credit

‘Etruscan Places’ by D.H. Lawrence was published by Martin Secker in 1932. References are to the 1975 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on March 5, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, History, Italy

Tagged 1920s, afterlife, Albertino, ancient world, Anthony Burgess, Archaeology, arx, astrology, British Empire, bucchero, Caere, Carrara, Carthage, Cecina, Cere, Cerveteri, Cività Vecchia, Cypresses, D.H. Lawrence, Dazio men, Earl Brewster, Elba, Etruria, Etruscan art, Etruscan museum, Etruscan Places, fascism, Fascist, Florence, John Singer Sergeant, Ladispoli, Latin, Lucien Bonaparte, lucumones, Montalto di Castro, mundum, Napoleon, necropolis, Noah's Ark, northern Italy, Palazzo Vitelleschi, Palo, Papal States, patera, phallic symbol, Prince of Canino, Robert Graves, Roman Republic, Roman salute, Roman–Etruscan Wars, Rome, Sardinia, Slavery, Tarquinia, Tarquinii, the Campagna, the Maremma, the Mediterranean, the Pre-Apennines, the Tarquins, the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing, the Tomb of the Augurs, the Tomb of the Baron, the Tomb of the Bulls, the Tomb of the Dead Man, the Tomb of the Feast, the Tomb of the Inscriptions, the Tomb of the Leopards, the Tomb of the Lionesses, the Tomb of the Maiden, the Tomb of the Old Man, the Tomb of the Painted Vases, the Tomb of the Shields, the Tomb of the Typhon, travel book, Tunis, Tuscany, Veii, Volterra, Vulci

Posted by Simon on March 5, 2025

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Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster (1905)

‘The whole thing is like one of those horrible modern plays where no one is in “the right”.’
(Harriet Herriton’s view, page 71)

This is E.M. Forster’s first novel and his shortest, 10 brisk chapters clocking in at a tidy 160 pages in the Penguin paperback edition. It concerns prim middle-class Edwardian Brits getting into trouble in Italy. It shows a set of English people who pride themselves on their detailed knowledge of Italy’s art and historical glories but haven’t a clue how to handle actual Italian people. On a superficial level it depicts the inability of people from two cultures to understand each other and so, in this respect, shares the same fundamental idea that underpins his mature masterpiece, ‘Passage To India’, 25 years later.

But that’s not really an adequate description because, pushing a little deeper, you realise that, right up to the surprisingly grim and tragic climax, it’s not just Brits versus Italians, it’s about all the characters’ inability to communicate with and understand each other.

The book is heavily dated in two ways, obvious and less obvious. First off, all the characters are Edwardian ladies and gentlemen whose lives and minds are hemmed in by conventions and constrictions which we have long since abandoned / moved beyond. Costume drama. Historical distance. The other way it’s dated is that, especially at the climax of the story, Forster isn’t quite up to managing the task he has set himself and so his prose, and his characters, lapse into heavily dated tropes of chivalry and honour and saintliness which remind us that Forster was much closer to Tennyson than he is to us today. (Tennyson died just 13 years before the book was published.)

Plot summary

1. Backstory

Lilia Theobald is the daughter of old Mrs Theobald and grew up in Yorkshire. Ten years before the narrative opens Lilia married Charles Herriton. He was the son of domineering Mrs Herriton, who is also mother to Harriet and, the youngest son, Philip, a huge fan of Italy, its Beauty and Culture etc. Mrs Herriton tried to deter her son from marrying Lilia and, when he disobeyed her, set about taming and reforming her. (There’s no mention of the husband of Mrs Theobald i.e. Lilia’s father, nor of Mrs Herriton’s husband. Forster’s families are generally matriarchies.)

At some point Charles got Lilia pregnant and she had daughter Irma. Then a bit later Charles died. This fact is told with no drama or emotion whatsoever as it is simply the background and setup to the main narrative. Now a widow, Lilia wants to move in with her mother (Mrs Theobald) but for reasons I don’t understand, perhaps simply to oversee her grandchild, this is blocked by interfering Mrs Herriton who insists that Lilia sets her up house close to the Herriton family in the Cambridgeshire village of Sawston.

2. Main narrative

The narrative proper kicks off when a solution to the ‘problem’ of what to do with Lilia has presented itself. Nice Miss Caroline Abbott who lives near the Herritons, is travelling to Italy for a year and needs a female companion. Perfect! Egged on by Philip (Mrs Herriton’s clever, pompous younger son who has himself been to Italy and raves about its art and culture etc) Mrs Herriton encourages Lilia to take this opportunity, to sell her house and hand over young Irma (‘Poor child. So vulgar’) to her (Mrs Herriton) and go off to Italy with Miss Abbott.

After a steady stream of unremarkable letters describing their tour of the Grand Sights of Italy, one fine morning the Herritons get a letter from Lilia announcing that she is engaged to be married. To an Italian! Outraged, Mrs Herriton despatches young Philip to find out what’s going on and stop it.

A few days later Philip arrives in the small Italian town of Monteriano where most o the the action is set, and is introduced to Lilia’s fiancé, Signor Carella. Lilia’s letter had given the impression he was an aristocrat, which was at least something for the snobbish Herritons to cling onto, but this turns out to be a deception – Carella is the son of a dentist, so you can imagine snobbish Philip’s horror! In any case, when they hear Philip is on the way, the ill-starred couple have hurriedly gotten married, which flabbergasts Philip but makes them burst out laughing at his folly.

Humiliated, Philip returns to England with the news and the Herriton family promptly cut off all contact with Lilia and also stop her communicating with her daughter.

The narrative then switches to focus on the slow unravelling of the cross-cultural marriage between Lilia and Carella, lingering on 1) the 101 cultural differences between a Brit and an Italian, between a Northern woman and a southern man:

No one realized that more than personalities were engaged; that the struggle was national; that generations of ancestors, good, bad, or indifferent, forbad the Latin man to be chivalrous to the northern woman, the northern woman to forgive the Latin man.

And 2) the specific failings of these two particular characters: Lilia soon realises she is totally isolated in an alien landscape and has few if any mental resources to fall back on, while Gino is influenced by his local friends (such as Spiridione) to assert himself as a man, an Italian man and a good Catholic, which means forbidding Lilia from leaving the house, and having an affair.

They had married in the spring and by the autumn the marriage has failed and Lilia makes the first of several attempts to run away. Forster tells us that both partners, for different reasons, become obsessed with having a baby, specifically a son. In a way this represents Forster turning the knife, pushing the unhappy marriage onto the next level of misery. To my surprise Lilia dies giving birth to the child and we’re only at the end of chapter 4. Farewell Lilia.

The Herritons are mildly upset by the news but Caroline Abbott is distraught at Lilia’s death, blaming herself for ever taking her to Italy. The Herritons resolve to forget the whole sordid affair and concentrate on bringing up the orphan Irma, now 9 years old. However this plan is scuppered when several postcards arrive from Italy, addressed to Irma and claiming to be from her ‘little brother’. Despite their attempts to intercept these, Irma gets sight of them and not only asks awkward questions about her little brother, but spreads the word at her school, telling her friends who tell their mums, and so the issue becomes a social problem for Mrs Herriton.

Domineering Mrs Herriton realises Something Must be Done and dispatches Philip the lawyer to go and meet up with his sister, Harriet (taking a holiday in the Tyrol) and, together with her, journey on to Monteriano and persuade Gino to part with the child and let him be brought back to England.

In the event, Philip and Harriet have a comically disastrous trip, becoming rapidly exhausted in the summer heat, losing things or leaving them at hotels and Harriet has a talent for opening train windows and getting smuts (small cinders from the burnt coal burned to drive the train) in her eye. With the result that the siblings bicker all the way. She is prim judgemental Low Church, he fancies himself as a Bohemian non-conformist.

Chapter 6

When they arrive at Monteriano after much squabbling they are amazed to discover that Miss Abbott has beaten them to it and is staying at the same hotel, the Stella d’Italia. Three Brits versus an Italian.

But things don’t go the way anybody planned. On the first day, when they go round to his house, they are told Gino is out, so they’re at a loose end; until they notice that a production of the opera Lucia of Lammermoor is on that evening and, on an impulse, decide to go.

This is an opportunity for Forster to describe the florid interior of an Italian opera house and to contrast the vibrancy of the production with those of the British or Germans. But in the final act of the opera Philip finds himself invited into a box where sit Gino and some of his friends where he is treated with great hospitality and embarrassed to raise the reason they’ve all come i.e. to deprive Gino of his son.

Chapter 7

Worse follows the next day when Miss Abbott decides to make an early assault upon Gino, before Philip’s scheduled meeting with him. To her horror she discovers that Gino is a loving doting father, more than that, he has a primeval pagan paternal connection with the 8-month-old baby. When Gino proceeds to bathe the beautiful bronze baby Miss Abbott feels as if she’s entered a Renaissance painting, is softened and hypnotised by the baby and completely forgets the point of her mission. Which is the moment when Philip arrives, puzzled to find her there before him. And then both men are puzzled when Miss Abbott, confused and upset by the crudeness of their mission and her failure, bursts into tears and goes running out.

Chapter 8

Cut to Harriet Herriton ranting at Philip, criticising him for failing to obtain the baby, criticising him for letting Miss Abbott go see Gino first, while Philip weakly defends himself. It is central to the plot that Harriet is a big graceless woman, in her thinking as her physique. She takes very literally the mission her mother has sent them on – to remove the baby from the Gino, who she is convinced murdered Lilia, which is so far from the truth (Lilia died in childbirth) as to be farcical if it didn’t turn out to have such tragic consequences.

Stung by his sister’s criticism, Philip tracks down Miss Abbott to the church of Santa Deodata where she appears to be praying. She, like Harriet, still believes they should take the baby back to England but is more human, realising how difficult it is going to be now she understands just how much Gino is attached to it. This chapter is designed to really bring out the differing attitudes of the three young English people, for Philip stands distinctly apart from the two women in his lack of involvement or commitment. To him the whole thing is a comedy which is doomed to fail and which should be enjoyed for the entertainment he provides. He is given a speech summing up his attitude:

‘Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them; I never did anything at school or at the Bar. I came out to stop Lilia’s marriage, and it was too late. I came out intending to get the baby, and I shall return an ‘honourable failure.’ I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed. You would be surprised to know what my great events are. Going to the theatre yesterday, talking to you now – I don’t suppose I shall ever meet anything greater. I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it – and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s good or evil. I don’t die – I don’t fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I’m just not there. You are quite right; life to me is just a spectacle, which – thank God, and thank Italy, and thank you – is now more beautiful and heartening than it has ever been before.’ (p.134)

During this conversation, which is really a debate between different attitudes to life, Miss Abbott comes to understand Philip more and Philip comes to really admire her. He is attracted to her. He even allows himself to think their relationship might develop into…you know… lurv.

Over lunch Harriet is rude to Miss Abbott who she thinks has gone over to the enemy. On the practical front they order two carriages for that evening to take them to the station. Both the women talk as if they will be taking the baby with them though we now realise Philip doesn’t think there’s a hope in hell of that happening and doesn’t care.

He felt little interest in the matter, and he was sure that he had no influence.

But he goes through the motions, keeping an appointment he’d made with Gino to meet him at the Caffe Garibaldi. Gino now finds the whole proposition of the Brits buying his son off him is funny and mocks Philip who doesn’t care. They have become pretty good friends and when Gino learns Philip’s leaving that evening he tells him to come back the following year.

He also informs him that he is planning to get married, to a not particularly attractive woman who, he thinks, will be a good mother to his son. Philip wishes him well and Gino invites him to be the boy’s godfather. Philip returns to the hotel, informs the two women of his total failure and they all pack. Soon it’s 8pm and the two carriages arrive. It starts to rain. Miss Abbott packs her stuff into one which sets off down the hill to the railway station but Philip is irked then worried when Harriet fails to show.

Then the village idiot appears in the pouring rain and hands Philip a note from Harriet telling him to get in the coach and meet at the town gate. This he does but when she clambers into the carriage he realises she is carrying a bundle in which is Gino’s baby. She had gone to his house to make one last plea and, finding him out and the maid, Perfetta, distracted, had simply wrapped the baby in some shawls and stole it.

Philip is still processing the implications of this theft which is likely to get them arrested and maybe prosecuted, and takes a turn in holding the little mite which he sees is crying, when, without any warning, the carriage they’re riding in is violently overthrown and he is knocked unconscious.

When he comes to he realises his arm is badly hurt, maybe broken, the lamps have been knocked out so they’re in pitch dark in pouring rain. Harriet is alright as is the coachman but the baby is nowhere to be seen. Philip has the presence of mind to tell the others to remain absolutely still and feels around in the dark till he finds the bundle lying across a deep rut in the road. When he examines the baby he realises it is dead!

Chapter 9

Turns out it was Miss Abbott’s coach which their coach collided with to cause the crash. Now all three Brits take the remaining coach back up to Monteriano. Here Philip takes the responsibility of confronting Gino and telling him the terrible news. Something happens to Forster’s prose. It becomes as overwrought as the subject matter. previously it had been enjoyably amiable and gently mocking. Now he’s created a melodrama and his prose and authorial attitude lose their poise to become more overwrought:

Round the Italian baby who had died in the mud there centred deep passions and high hopes. People had been wicked or wrong in the matter; no one save himself had been trivial. Now the baby had gone, but there remained this vast apparatus of pride and pity and love. For the dead, who seemed to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to transmute or to transfer, but well-nigh impossible to destroy. (p.146)

Gino, returning happy from the café, understandably fails to take in what Philip is telling him, that these English tourists, having failed to buy his son from him, stole him and, just down the hill a little way, were involved in an accident and now his son is dead. Although the narrative focuses entirely on the English characters, you can’t help feeling that Gino is the central character.

Anyway, he moves from disbelief through to mental disturbance – systematically tapping every surface in the little house – to sudden rage at Philip, seizes his broken arm – which makes Philip punch him as a reflect action – then following him into the baby’s room where Philip hides behind the bed but Gino finds him, kneels on him and starts to strangle him. Next thing we know Miss Abbott has arrived and pulled Gino off him and over to a chair. At which point Gino breaks and cries like a baby, Miss Abbott cradles him, and the narrative tone again stumbles, lurching into late Victorian sentiment crossed with Italian art connoisseurship.

All through the day Miss Abbott had seemed to Philip like a goddess, and more than ever did she seem so now. Many people look younger and more intimate during great emotion. But some there are who look older, and remote, and he could not think that there was little difference in years, and none in composition, between her and the man whose head was laid upon her breast. Her eyes were open, full of infinite pity and full of majesty, as if they discerned the boundaries of sorrow, and saw unimaginable tracts beyond. Such eyes he had seen in great pictures but never in a mortal. Her hands were folded round the sufferer, stroking him lightly, for even a goddess can do no more than that. And it seemed fitting, too, that she should bend her head and touch his forehead with her lips. (p.151)

Chapter 10

Cut to a new scene. Philip, Miss Abbott and Harriet are on the journey home, though still in Italy. Philip tells Miss A that this morning, as they left Milan, he received a letter from Gino, perfectly forgiving him. In this little exchange we learned that there was an official investigation and an inquest at which Gino lied to protect the English.

Forster ties up loose ends. Philip is now full-blown in love with Miss Abbott who is oblivious of the fact. He tells her he won’t go back to Sawston but will move to London and work. Incidentally, we discover that both of them have agreed not to mention that Harriet was responsible for the baby’s death. All that was hushed up in Italy and will be hushed up back in England.

The final scenes are just as extraordinary or weird or unpredicted as the sudden pointless death of the baby. Here, in the rattling train corridor, just as Philip is nerving himself to reveal that he loves her, Miss Abbott staggers him by revealing that she loves Gino. The two or three encounters they had have utterly bewitched her and she would give herself to him ‘body and soul’ in a flash, if he asked. Except being the obtuse son of a dentist he never did, and now here she is rattling back to England and to the stifling boring milieu of little Sawston where she will live out her life in dutiful service of the community and crush to death the mad passionate love which rages inside her.

This, as you might expect, has a devastating impact on Philip who, however, is an Edwardian gentleman, stifles his own deep feelings, and says the things he thinks will help her cope with her distress, as she gives in to a storm of tears.

Right to the end the novel is about misunderstandings and emotional repression.

Tropes, or types of content

So much for the story, the plot. But the narrative is also a vehicle for Forster to do quite a number of other things, to deploy and practice a number of novel-ish themes. These include:

Dissecting English snobbery

The character of bossy Mrs Herriton is enjoyably done. I liked the scene where she and her daughter a just planting out some peas when the post comes with the letter from Lilia saying she’s got engaged – with the result that the poor peas don’t get covered with soil and next morning the birds have eaten them. So carefully English.

The way she dominates and drives her children is entertaining (‘His mother knew how to manage him’), as well as how she plays and adapts to the changing social pressures evident in the little community (i.e. the other matrons) of Sawston so that, when little Irma spills the beans about her baby brother out in Italy, Mrs Herriton has to be seen to be doing something about it.

Showing off about Italy

There’s a long tradition of English novelists (as of English people) feeling compelled to show off their superior knowledge about the art and literature of Italy, along with their superior knowledge of the finest Italian wines and the best Italian restaurants and the tastiest Italian food to eat in each of the yummy Italian regions etc.

Actually Forster is lighter on this aspect than a determined show-off like Aldous Huxley, but still, fairly regularly, adopts the tone of the Italy Expert:

They clattered up the narrow dark street, greeted by that mixture of curiosity and kindness which makes each Italian arrival so wonderful.

Signor Carella, with the brutality so common in Italians, had caught [the cat] by the paw and flung her away from him.

‘I’ll show you,’ said a little girl, springing out of the ground as Italian children will. ‘She will show you,’ said the Dogana men, nodding reassuringly. ‘Follow her always, always, and you will come to no harm. She is a trustworthy guide. She is my daughter/cousin/sister.’ Philip knew these relatives well: they ramify, if need be, all over the peninsula. (p.97)

‘He said he was sorry – pleasantly, as Italians do say such things…’ (p.103)

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty’s confidence. (p.107)

Gino had the southern knack of friendship. (p.153)

Every time I read these rather patronising generalisations about Italians (on virtually every page) I wondered what Italian readers made of them back then or make of them now. Did Italian intellectuals find it boring and tiresome that tourists from Surrey or Cambridge claimed to know more about their country, their history and their culture than Italians themselves?

Showing off about art

As with Italy, so with Italian art, English authors just feel compelled to show off their superior knowledge at every opportunity.

There she sat, with twenty miles of view behind her, and he placed the dripping baby on her knee. It shone now with health and beauty: it seemed to reflect light, like a copper vessel. Just such a baby Bellini sets languid on his mother’s lap, or Signorelli flings wriggling on pavements of marble, or Lorenzo di Credi, more reverent but less divine, lays carefully among flowers, with his head upon a wisp of golden straw. (p.126)

The author showing off not only his scholarship but also his exquisite taste in making so fine a distinction between Signorelli and Lorenzo di Credi (‘more reverent but less divine’).

Mocking showing off about Italy i.e. Philip

However, what makes Forster more interesting than the run of show-off novelists is that, at the same time as indulging it, Forster gently mocks the tedious English tendency of claiming superior knowledge about Italy. This is done in the essentially comic figure of young Philip, right from the first page described as ‘intoxicated’ by his memories of Italy, determined to be the suburban bourgeois Italy Expert, and so given lots of speeches where he mansplains Italy to everyone else:

Italy, Philip had always maintained, is only her true self in the height of the summer, when the tourists have left her, and her soul awakes under the beams of a vertical sun.

And:

‘I do believe that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her… Don’t, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.’

And:

‘When you know the Italians as well as I do, you will realize that in all that he said to you he was perfectly sincere. The Italians are essentially dramatic; they look on death and love as spectacles.’

What makes all this comic is that when Philip comes face to face with actual Italians he is either completely flummoxed, as when encountering Gino, or exasperated, as when trying to navigate their train system, or (rightly) suspects that he is being mocked by the townspeople of Monteriano:

‘Monteriano seemed in one conspiracy to make him look a fool.’

There’s a particularly comic moment when Philip recognises in Gino’s face the look of the kind of rough handsome Italian man he has admired on his aesthetic trips to Italy, admirable to look at… but not to have in the family! One of the broadly comic aspects of the novel is the way that the English characters love of all things Italian doesn’t extend to actual Italians, who are dismissed as unreliable, chaotic and ineffective.

So Forster has it both ways – as a narrator he professes Italian Knowledge while at the same time mocking characters who aspire to the same kind of hoity Italian Knowledge. Mirrors reflecting mirrors.

The (alleged) Italian attitude to women

Forster treats us to this slab of wisdom about Italian attitudes to men and women.

Lilia gathered somehow from this conversation that Continental society was not the go-as-you-please thing she had expected. Indeed she could not see where Continental society was. Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism – that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democracy of the caffe or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But is accomplished at the expense of the sisterhood of women. Why should you not make friends with your neighbour at the theatre or in the train, when you know and he knows that feminine criticism and feminine insight and feminine prejudice will never come between you? Though you become as David and Jonathan, you need never enter his home, nor he yours. All your lives you will meet under the open air, the only roof-tree of the South, under which he will spit and swear, and you will drop your h’s, and nobody will think the worse of either.

Meanwhile the women – they have, of course, their house and their church, with its admirable and frequent services, to which they are escorted by the maid. Otherwise they do not go out much, for it is not genteel to walk, and you are too poor to keep a carriage. Occasionally you will take them to the caffe or theatre, and immediately all your wonted acquaintance there desert you, except those few who are expecting and expected to marry into your family. It is all very sad. But one consolation emerges – life is very pleasant in Italy if you are a man.

Was it true then, in 1905? Was it true, generally, of Italian culture in the 20th century? Or is the point of this sweeping generalisation to describe the character of judgemental Lilia more than Italy? Is its main purpose to amplify and generalise out the crushing disillusion which she experiences? (see below)

Generalisations about life in novels

So I’ve considered generalisations about Italy and art and women. These are all clearly subsets or specific examples of the broader tendency of novels of the classical period to overflow with generalisations about life.

For centuries novels have been a channel for writers to pass on their supposed insights and wisdom about human nature and the human psyche. Judged by the standards of science or psychology, these are often of dubious truth or accuracy but then, quite obviously, a lot of the time these little life lessons aren’t to be assessed for their truth. Their purposes are 1) to reinforce the voice of the narrator, to build him up as someone blessed with insights and wisdom about life that the likes of you and I are not party to; and 2) to build up the atmosphere of the story. They do this by implying that this isn’t a story about 3 or 4 insignificant people but that these characters, actions and opinions somehow embody universal values or aspects of human experience. So the generalisations help to big up the author and his story.

As I mentioned in connection with Italy boasting, Forster isn’t an excessively didactic writer, but he does slip in his fair share of generalisations about human nature every two or three pages, things like:

Suffering, however, is more independent of temperament, and the wisest of women could hardly have suffered more.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.

Our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and – by some sad, strange irony – it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

The barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or – to put the thing less cynically – we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. (p.138)

These may or may not be ‘true’ but they 1) are a recognised part of the classical novel tradition; readers have paid their money and they expect a reasonable serving of wisdom sayings; 2) they make the author sound clever i.e. give him the authority which helps make the narrative more effective, makes us take it more seriously.

Ad hoc or partial generalisations

There is a third aspect to this which is 3) when the generalisation is clearly not expressed in the abstract as a universal truth, but tied to a certain situation or character. In this case it is a kind of implemented or dramatic truth, designed to shed light not on universal human nature, but on a specific character or incident or interaction of characters. Thus when Lilia reflects on her new husband’s status as the son of a dentist and Forster writes:

Even in England a dentist is a troublesome creature, whom careful people find difficult to class. He hovers between the professions and the trades; he may be only a little lower than the doctors, or he may be down among the chemists, or even beneath them.

The purpose of this little nugget is not to tell us anything about dentists but to give us a feel for Lilia and her snobbish sense of English social hierarchy. Slightly different but in the same ballpark is this one which opens chapter 4:

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say ‘yesterday I was happy, today I am not.’

On the face of it this is a universal wisdom saying of the kind I described earlier, but the real point is that this leads straight into a consideration of how Lilia became disillusioned with her marriage. Why not say that straight out – ‘Over the next few months Lilia became disillusioned with her marriage?’ Because Forster is gathering rhetorical weight or evidence to back up his characterisation and his story. He is invoking a kind of folk wisdom to give his story extra weight and depth. Just telling the facts is boring. The reader wants their money’s worth.

Also this kind of thing often acts as an introduction to a new scene, lofty generalisations before we descend to a new section of the narrative. They ease us into the specific situation. This is a very old technique in the novel. The most famous example in all English literature is probably the opening line of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ This isn’t famous because it’s true. It’s famous because it’s such a classic example of what I’m talking about, the sweeping generalisation about human nature or society which is used to introduce, ease and usher us into a narrative.

Anyway, this leads on to another logical category, which is where the author has his characters make great generalisations about life.

Novelist’s characters generalising about life

He concluded that nothing could happen, not knowing that human love and love of truth sometimes conquer where love of beauty fails. (p.71)

‘Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.’

‘There’s never any knowing – (how am I to put it?) – which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever.’ (p.136)

Sometimes the characters’ truth sayings are plausible in and of themselves but mostly they are designed to expand on and illuminate a character, and can do so in both a positive and a negative way:

‘Women… are never at ease till they tell their faults out loud.’

Evidently she had the usual feminine incapacity for grasping philosophy [thinks pompous Philip]

As we all do, characters in fictions tend to express general axioms as the basis for specific arguments, only in novels they do it more fluently and articulately than most of us manage in real life.

These generalisations, then, are not intended to hold true of the world, they are very clearly meant to demonstrate the characters’ foibles and imperfections. As in this Lady Bracknell-ish declamation by Mrs Herriton:

‘Then you were still infatuated with Italy. It may be full of beautiful pictures and churches, but we cannot judge a country by anything but its men.’ (p.73)

Conclusion about generalisations

When I read novels as a boy I furiously underlined these kinds of life sayings, convinced I was learning wisdom. Forty years later I have read thousands and thousands of the things and realise they are best accepted as purely rhetorical, serving various aims for the novelist such as introducing new scenes or themes, of illuminating particular characters through their own mouths, showing the basic principles they base their behaviour on and soon. Seen from this perspective, novels can be thought of as marshalling conflicting arguments and principles as much as contrasting characters. But none of the axioms have to be true to make the novel work as a fiction – they just have to be plausible enough to make the narrative go.

Puppets

Characters in a novel are obviously puppets of the author’s plan. Sometimes they hint that they’re aware of this. The issue comes into full view several times in relation to young Philip who is all-too-aware that he is a puppet to his mother, who is in many ways a stand-in for the scheming novelist himself:

[Philip] was sure that [Mrs Herriton] was not impulsive, but did not dare to say so. Her ability frightened him. All his life he had been her puppet. She let him worship Italy, and reform Sawston—just as she had let Harriet be Low Church. She had let him talk as much as he liked. But when she wanted a thing she always got it.

Philip saw no prospect of good, nor of beauty either. But the expedition promised to be highly comic. He was not averse to it any longer; he was simply indifferent to all in it except the humours. These would be wonderful. Harriet, worked by her mother; Mrs. Herriton, worked by Miss Abbott; Gino, worked by a cheque—what better entertainment could he desire? There was nothing to distract him this time; his sentimentality had died, so had his anxiety for the family honour. He might be a puppet’s puppet, but he knew exactly the disposition of the strings.

Forster’s amiableness

Forster’s distinguishing feature is his amiable good humour. He’s not exactly a humourist but most of the time he is drolly amused by his own creations and reading a novel by him is to enter into the same spirit of civilised good humour.

Gino’s father could have been given any profession, he could be an anonymous generic businessman. It is characteristic of Forster that he makes him a dentist because of its comic incongruity and because of the impact it has on Philip, the comic version of the pompous Italy-lover. Here’s Philip’s dramatic response to the news:

A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.

This is comedy at the character’s expense. Forster makes more of the scene of Philip confronting Gino, who bursts out laughing at his pomposity, than of the scene of Lilia dying and that tells you the kind of novelist he is – essentially comic, although of a very dry or ironic flavour.

There’s a moment when Philip forgets all about the baby he’s come to Italy to rescue because Caroline Abbott reports that Gino apologises for pushing him over and this pleases and flatters Philip’s vanity. He smiles and feels that all is well with the world again. And Forster is more than usually intrusive when he comments:

This admirable change in Philip proceeds from nothing admirable, and may therefore provoke the gibes of the cynical. But angels and other practical people will accept it reverently, and write it down as good. (p.103)

The description of angels as actual beings is, for a moment, reminiscent of Forster’s fantasy short stories, which often describe death and the afterlife with unnerving concreteness – but above all this little moment indicates how forgiving Forster is to his characters – he is humanely understanding of their weaknesses.

Lawrence versus Forster

Forster and his characters timidly dream about breaking free and living an untrammelled life, in the meanwhile mocking and sniping at each other for their petty vanities and snobberies, and breaking each others’ lives without meaning to. Lawrence’s characters do it. They really try to escape England’s stifling conformity. Which explains why Forster became a cosy member of the British establishment while Lawrence was driven into exile.

A sentence in the second paragraph of his first short story sums Forster up:

Ravello is a delightful place with a delightful little hotel in which we met some charming people.

He manages to make one of Italy’s most beautiful and historic towns sound like Dorking. There is something irremediably bourgeois, middle class and Little England about Forster. He can set stories in Italy till the cows come home but his mind is that of a timid vicar or maiden aunt, terrified of any lapse from the most repressed and timorous good manners.

Forster is what D.H. Lawrence had to flee England to get away from. Ghastly good taste and spiritual timidity.

Credit

Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster was first published in 1905 by Edward Arnold. References are to the 1982 Penguin edition.

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by Simon on January 15, 2025 • Permalink

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Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan (1978)

I was determined to pursue the matter to its illogical conclusion.
(Spike summarises his methodology in Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall, page 8)

I was getting twitchy, doing nothing positive for so long. I had started talking to myself and I wasn’t satisfied with the answers.
(Spike beginning to lose it, page 60)

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is the fourth of Spike Milligan’s seven (!) volumes of war memoirs. It covers the period from his regiment’s landing in Salerno, Italy, on 23 September 1943 to the date he was invalided out of the front line with nervous exhaustion in March 1944.

Longer, seriouser

Although covering a period of just under six months, the text, at 288 pages, is longer than the two previous volumes put together. Although the relentless gags and wisecracking are similar, the Hitlergams have, mercifully, ended (actually, he sneaks a few through, e.g. p.139) and there are far fewer visual elements i.e. photos, sketches, cartoons and so on, than in previous volumes.

There are still quite a few photos but they are documentary and factual, in the sense that they show members of his brigade, tanks, lorries crossing Bailey Bridges and so on. Mind you, although of military subjects, Spike still comes up with some funny captions. I laughed at the photo of squaddies working on setting up a Bailey bridge across a river where the caption tells us that ‘the ugly soldiers’ were told to face away from the camera.

But overall the tone is quite a bit more serious than in the previous volumes and quite a few passages are entirely serious in intent such as the description of: air attacks, of devastated Italian villages, of the fury of Allied attacks on German positions, the terrible scenes after a direct hit on a neighbouring battery, and so on. It has a permanent edge, a barely suppressed anger which I didn’t feel in the previous volumes (see final section, below, for examples) all building up to the intense and unhappy final passages of him being wounded and psychologically traumatised, returned to the front too soon, bullied for being a coward and then his final collapse.

Spike is peeved

The more earnest tone is set by the surprisingly cross preface or author’s note preceding the text. Spike had been really nettled by a review by Clive James of one of the previous books which jovially referred to it as ‘an unreliable history of the war’. This upset Spike who, in this preface, goes to great lengths to insist that, on the contrary, the text is very heavily researched and completely factual.

All that I wrote did happen, it happened on the days I mention, the people I mention are real people and the places are real…I wish the reader to know that he is not reading a tissue of lies and fancies, it all really happened…I’ve spent a fortune on beer and dinners interviewing my old Battery mates, and phone calls to those overseas ran into over a hundred pounds…Likewise I included a large number of photographs actually taken in situ…

He goes on to mention 18 former colleagues by name for their help with documents, maps, photos and recollections. There are lots of photos but, as I mentioned, most of them are documentary i.e. factual photos of individuals in his battery or contemporary scenes – the silly Edwardian photos with humorous captions which littered the earlier volumes have disappeared.

He also gives excerpts from Alf Fildes’s diary and regularly includes written anecdotes from his best mate Harry Edgington (e.g. pages 120, 142, 234). In fact he mentions ringing up Harry (who had emigrated to New Zealand) and also calling Ken Carter (p.232), to confirm specific facts and memories.

This irritated preface ends with another (i.e. they also appeared in the previous volumes) tribute to his mates and their ongoing closeness, mentioning their twice-a-year reunions, and the text is sprinkled with references to meeting old comrades at reunions or at other events, decades later. These links to old comrades matters a lot to Spike and their importance comes over with far more urgency, and need, than in the previous volumes.

Day-by-day diary format

As with the previous three, it’s done in diary form. But in line with his irritation Spike’s diary entries are given in capitals and preceded by MY DIARY just to ram home the message that it all actually happened.

So what we read is the daily account of how Spike and the boys lived, day to day, with very little analysis, little overview of the campaigns he took part in, no detachment or distance. Instead this happens, and they take the mickey out of it – then that happens, and they make gags about it – then this happens and they all have a larf about it, and so on, for a surprisingly long 288 pages in the Penguin paperback edition.

Gags

Kidgell looks pensively out towards Italy. ‘I was worried about the landing.’
‘Don’t worry about the landing. I’ll hoover it in the morning.’ (p.9)

‘I thought you were a champion swimmer.’
‘Yes, but you can’t swim in army boots.’
‘You’re right, there isn’t enough room.’ (p.9)

Lunch was a mangled stew, lumps of gristle floating on the surface. Edgington said if you held your ear to it you could hear an old lady calling ‘Helpppp.’ (p.13)

Budden tells us, ‘We’ll walk to HQ and get fresh orders.’
I tell him I don’t need fresh orders. I’m perfectly satisfied with the ones I’ve got. (p.29)

Edgington is speaking heatedly. It’s the only way to keep warm. (p.68)

Ernie Hart was a nice lad with a quiet sense of humour, so quiet no one ever heard it. (p.123)

Outside I rubbed my hands with glee. (I always kept a tin handy.) (p.245)

Incidentally the boys themselves are aware that many of these gags are corny or stretched. He often recalls the bit of repartee then writes ‘(groans)’ afterwards (pages 102, 218).

‘I’m too bloody tired to smoke,’ he said.
‘Try steaming,’ I said. ‘It’s easier.’ (p.253)

They were joking on the battlefield, whistling to keep their spirits up, trying to encourage and cheer each other up and fairly often it seems stretched and contrived. I’ve pointed out in some of my reviews of thrillers that many of the classic thriller writers of the 50s and 60s carried the intense atmosphere of the war, its threat and peril, into civilian life; their protagonists carry it around with them. In the same way, maybe, we can say that Spike carried the rather desperate gagging which kept him and his mates going through the war into his civilian career, to great effect in the Goon Show but with diminishing returns after that.

(Incidentally, more, if very casual, information is thrown on the origin of the term when Spike tells us that it was a common nickname for Gunners like himself to be referred to as Gooners or just Goons. And at one point he parodies someone referred to as Florence Nightingale, saying they were more like Florence Nightingoon, the Lady of the Lump, p.135.)

(A few days after reading Spike I was reading Fitzroy Maclean’s war classic, Eastern Approaches’, and came across references to him and fellow members of the SAS listening to Tommy Handley and It’s That Man Again on the wireless and went to listen to some on YouTube. It’s immediately obvious that Handley’s humour uses the same kind of bad puns and deliberate misunderstandings as Spike – ‘I’ve been taking a walk, and if anybody else wants to take it, they can have it. I’ve finished with it’ – making me realise that Spike was peddling the same kinds of gags into the late 1970s that he’d grown up listening to in the 1930s. A proper appreciation of where he was new or innovative would have to start with a really thorough understanding of the British comedy landscape of the 1930s, something which is way beyond my scope.)

(Deliberately?) bad proofreading

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is written in a deliberately flaky style. Lots of the sentences contain three or four or five clauses just separated by commas which would be better broken up into shorter sentences by full stops. There are unnecessarily hyphenated words, unnecessarily capitalised words:

He stayed for launch, a lovely Stew (p.108)
Bentley has diagnosed his own illness as Malaria only to have another doctor diagnose it correctly as Jaundice. (p.136)

Both together:

In the dark night the war went on, being able to sleep peacefully, dry, snug and warm was I suppose, Luxury. (p.144)

There are occasional grammar errors (‘This bloody army were food mad!’, p.98) and erratic typographical gaps or breaks between main text and quotations (from other people’s diaries or letters etc). And regular outbreaks of multiple exclamation or other punctuation marks:

An OP has been established on Monte Croce. Not again! Rain!!! Where does the stuff come from?? (p.104)

The overall effect is of deliberate scrappiness, like a scrapbook, like a kind of student mag or fanzine, as if this adds to the spontaneousness and wackiness of the text, as if breathless sentences and random capitals make it all more wacky and humorous.

Same goes for the misspellings. He talks about ‘the Scotts’ (p.47) or a ‘recoco chair’ (p.67), describes his Major playing the clarionet (although that one’s debatable, p.82), refers to ‘the Bosche’ (p.94), writes ‘Above us the battle was going on full belt’ (p.278). My point being some of these are such egregious errors no professional proofreader would have missed them, so it must have been a conscious editorial choice – all of it, the caps, the misspellings, the bad punctuation, the random caps…

Maybe the manuscript arrived like this from Spike and the editors decided to leave them in to increase the sense of wackiness and improvisation. But then the whole thing was supposedly ‘edited’ by Jack Hobbs, so it was clearly a high-level decision to let it be like this.

Sex

They’re young, fit, healthy men so they think about sex all the time, a great deal of the banter is about sex and, being men, this means rude observations about the size, shape and state of each other’s penises. Any woman – our nurses or Italian civilians – will be mercilessly ogled.

‘Buon giorno, Maria.’
She smiled and blushed, the innocence of Italian country girls was something to see. Something else to see was the top of her stocking tops when she bent over. (p.171)

Travelling on the back of a lorry, the sight of a pretty girl immediately erupted into mass drooling until she was out of sight. (p.194)

There were loads of pretty girls who came under fire from the tailboard. The cries ranged from ‘I can do you a power of good, my dear’ to the less poetic ‘Me give you ten inches of pork sword, darlin”. (p.218)

Not just unacceptable but illegal, these days.

There are the usual half-disguised references to masturbation, which must have been rife (and again I refer the reader to Eric Newby’s mention of men masturbating every night in his prisoner of war camp) (pages 154, 265).

There’s a running joke that Edgington doesn’t join in chatting up every ‘bird’ they see and certainly doesn’t go to the two brothels described in the text; instead he writes long letters to his sweetheart back home, Peg, the joke being that the more he writes the more he remembers having sex with her, the more aroused and frustrated he becomes, for example pages 86 and 87:

At the mention of Peg his eyes went soft and his trousers boiled.

Some of the sex slang was new to me. A simple-minded soldier refers to squeezing liquid mud through the holes in a hessian sack so as to create little worms of mud spaghetti as ‘sexy’. To which:

‘Sexy?’ said Bombardier Fuller. ‘You must be bloody hard up for it if you get the Colin’ watchin’ that.’ (p.130)

‘Get the Colin?’ Later he refers to vaseline by its navy nickname ‘starters’, as in ‘a pot of starters’ and goes on to explain that if the reader doesn’t understand this they should contact Royal Navy PR, as ’70 per cent of the officers are Gay up there’ (p.137). So he is aware of homosexuals, I had been wondering (and p.158).

Race

Spike refers to Indians as wogs (pp. 16, 133) and to Black people using the n word (pages 133, 195) and ‘coon’ (as in ‘Coon-type singing’, p.265) – though not all the time, he also refers to Blacks as ‘negroes’ (p.182) or ‘coloured’. In other words he used (or was depicting) the idiom of the time. It feels done without malice, because (re. ‘wogs’) he was raised in India and liked the culture and people and (re. the n word) he was a massive fan of Black jazz music. Still, the modern woke reader should be warned.

The politically correct would also be incensed by the three or four times the lads do cartoon impersonations of imagined Black servants on a southern plantation from a Hollywood movie (‘Gone with the Wind’ had been released just four years earlier, 1939). Thus, when his mate Edgington turns up at a new billet:

‘Welcome home, young massa,’ I said. ‘De plantation ain’t been de same widout you.’ (p.254)

It’s the idiom of the day and it’s spoofing a popular movie (1943) but it does, admittedly, have an extra edge of satire or sarcasm or needle. Given a choice Spike always prefers the slangy or disrespectful term for anything (the Germans, the army, officers, soldiers as a whole, the Brits, himself, anything if it’ll raise a laugh). It was part of the humour of the day, but double edged. He can never mention Gunner Kidgell without called him ‘short-arse Kidgell’. And he refers to the Italians throughout as ‘Itis’.

Spike is also very aware when people are Jewish and, again, invokes stock stereotypes of Jews i.e. being tight with money or being in the rag trade in the East End (pages 160). I think I remember from the 70s that calling someone a ‘Jew’ was an insult indicating that they were tight (with money). Unacceptable these days, and has been for some time. He mentions someone being Jewish or Jews in general, often emphasising their alleged tightness with money, on pages 160, 193, 198, 202, 223, 258, 271, 274.

At one point an attack by German Messerschmitts forces him and comrades to run naked from showers and jump into nearby slit trenches for protection. But what bothers him is not the risk of getting killed but that he left all his money in his battledress hanging up outside the shower. The second the danger’s over, he goes running back.

Thank God! Money was safe! I just have Jewish blood. (p.258)

Events

The journey aboard ship from North Africa to Italy. Landing on Salerno beach, unopposed because it’s secure, but with the wreckage of fierce fighting all around. Journey up into the hills and then a long slog of positions taken up by his artillery battery, Battery D.

Almost immediately he comes down with sand fly fever and is taken off to hospital for a week long interlude of clean sheets, decent food and pretty nurses. But he starts to go round the bend with boredom and is relieved to be one day collected by a truck and taken back to his mates on the battery. Here, as in every memoir I’ve ever read about war, it’s about friendship, mateship and camaraderie rather than any grand cause.

The new-found seriousness extends as far as an argument he gets into with a northerner who sings the praises of Gracie Fields and George Formby who Spike cordially loathes, explaining that he is a devotee of the Marx Brothers and Bing Crosby (p.54). (Regarding styles of humour, later he hears a broadcast by ITMA and thinks ‘corny bastards’, p.256).

There’s still quite a lot about music, they hear the kind of big band jazz they like on the radio, in an Italian church they discover a piano and play Cole Porter (in fact they perform and sing some Cole Porter but then the Italian priest sings plays and sings some Verdi opera thus trumping them). Othertimes they perform with what they have, including one night they have a little performance with an ocarina, guitar and shaken matchbox, with the others joining in banging mugs (p.138).

He visits the ruins of Pompeii (pages 51 to 53).

Spike’s job

I’d read his descriptions of his duties in volume 2 but it was only in this one that it was made unmistakably clear that Spike’s job was ‘wireless operator’ for an artillery battery (p.46) i.e. laying (or retrieving) phone cables, then using radio sets to co-ordinate with other observation posts to target artillery fire accurately at enemy positions, as described pages 76 to 77.

His battery constantly move to new positions as the front line advances, and enemy planes fly over and occasional shells land nearby but he is repeatedly grateful that he’s not in the poor infantry, sent forward into withering machinegun fire.

The Germans slowly retreat into the mountains which the poor bloody infantry have to storm while Spike’s battery and many others lob shells up into the mountains. The main event is the rain: it rains incessantly, the tents, the men, their uniforms and equipment become sodden. The artillery stands become so sodden that the guns slip backwards or sideways when they fire. All their efforts become devoted to trying to find somewhere dry to shelter and sleep.

Maybe the most vivid scene, possibly the longest lasting all of three pages, is his vivid recreation of a concert he and his mates organised and staged on Christmas Day 1943, giving us the full list of acts, an impressive series of farcical performances and musical interludes.

Just days later they’re given four days’ leave in Amalfi which seems like Disneyland after the muddy farms they’ve been staying in. Memorable evening, standing on the garden terrace watching night fall over the bay, and then onto a cafe kept by a Cockney-speaking Italian momma who lays on an unprecedented feast.

In Amalfi he’s invited into a brothel and initially refuses all offers, preferring to sit relaxed, drink and get pissed, until – according to his account – the lady of the house dragged him into a bedroom and not only screwed him but paid him.

On 5 January they are moved to a new forward position just outside the village of Lauro.

15 January a direct hit on a gun emplacement, exploding munitions and burning four gunners he knows to death, with many other burns casualties. Happens in the middle of the night, Spike is up and running round helping as best he can.

He develops piles (‘the curse of the Milligans’), goes see the medical officer (MO) but there doesn’t seem to be any treatment short of having them operated on and removed. They go from painful to actively bleeding. Normally irrepressibly chirpy, this throws him into a depression (p.271).

The climax, Spike is wounded

On 20 January 1944 Spike is in pain from bleeding piles, depressed, and hasn’t had much sleep for two nights when a lieutenant asks for a volunteer to go and replace a signalman up at Tac HQ, which is near the front lines, also where their commanding officer, now regularly referred to as ‘Looney’ Jenkins, is based. Very reluctantly Spike volunteers and sets in train the sequence of events which will see him wounded and invalided out.

Alf Fildes drives him to Tac HQ which entails crossing the makeshift bridge across the river Garigliano, shrouded in camouflage smoke because the Jerries are throwing over lots of artillery. They pull up outside a cluster of farmhouse buildings which is Tac HQ. All round are dead German bodies no-one’s had time to bury.

the moment Spike arrives Major Jenkins puts him on the headphones and keeps him at it for 17 hours without a break (‘the bastard’), monitoring and sending radio signals, he even has to argue for permission to go for a piss. Machinegun bullets whine over the roof and shells land, some scarily close, shaking the buildings. His piles start to bleed and he feels at the end of his tether.

Then Jenkins orders him and three colleagues to go forward, under fire, to the observation post (OP) carrying batteries and a new 22 wireless set. They cross a field containing a recently hit Sherman tank, scramble up a gully full of cowering infantry and emerge into the open to climb up the hillside, tiered for agriculture, as machine gun bullets and mortars land all around.

They all throw themselves to the ground then Spike remembers lying on his front, then a terrific explosion and he’s lying on his back, regaining consciousness, seeing red, strangely dazed (p.278).

He knows if they stay there they’ll be sitting ducks and turns and scrambles back down the mountain. Next thing he knows he’s talking to Major Jenkins crying his eyes out – the major tells him to get his wound dressed and he realises he’s wounded in the right thigh, couple of inches long quarter of an inch deep, but it’s not the wound, it’s the shaking and the crying – he’s put into an ambulance, given pills, in a gesture of kindness he’ll never forget, comforted by another wounded man – then he’s on a stretcher, loaded into a Red Cross truck – arrives at a camp and tent and bunk…

Next morning he’s woken up by an American band playing reveille – an orderly tells him he’s at camp 144 CS and has been categorised as suffering from Battle Fatigue – bereft of any kit he goes to the American camp where, true to form, the Yanks are fantastically generous, giving him a towel, razor soap etc and Spike starts crying Thanks – it’s not the wound that bothers him it’s the way he can’t stop crying…

He’s taken to see a psychiatrist who’s an army captain who tells him, rather threateningly, that he will get better, understand? He’s given a hot dinner and more tranquilisers –

On 27 January, just a week later, far from rested and recuperated, Spike finds himself back with his battery, still in the same position outside Lauro but he feels broken…

I was not really me any more

The spring that made me Spike Milligan was gone (p.284)

He has stopped crying but can’t stop stammering – Major Jenkins gives him a dressing down for being a coward and he is stripped of his one stripe i.e. demoted from Lance Bombardier back to Gunner. He is taking the pills prescribed him at the hospital which deprive him of his old personality.

I am by now completely demoralised. All the laughing had stopped. (p.284)

In retrospect, Spike thinks that if they’d given him a couple of weeks rest he might have bounced back, but being sent straight back and then shouted at by the martinet Major finished him off. After a couple of days he can’t take it any more and is driven away from the Battery, no longer to serve, never to see his mates again…

I felt as though I were being taken across the river Styx. I’ve never got over that feeling. (p.285)

Psychiatric hospital

10 February 1944. He is sent to a proper hospital, bright, light, clean, airy, miles behind the lines. Psychiatric ward. About 50 patients, most doped to the gills. Silence.

He is seen by a Major Palmer, a tough former boxer who suffers no malingerers but who accepts he is in shock. He is sent to a rehabilitation camp north of Naples.

Final collapse

Cut to a month later, 9 March 1944. Spike is now out of his unit and far from the front. He is taken to a terrible muddy camp outside a suburb of Naples called Afrigola. He is given a job in ‘reception’ i.e. in a tent at the gateway to the camp where he asks the same questions of new arrivals, fills in and files their paperwork. The last paragraph of the book tries to put a brave face on it:

Will Milligan recover? Will he get back to the big time among the Lance-Bombardier set? Above all, will he lose the stammer that makes him take four hours to say good morning? All this and more in Vol. 5, Goodbye Soldier, to be serialised in Gay News. (p.288)

So he ends the narrative by trying restore the cheeky chappy, zany character of the preceding text but, well, it doesn’t work.

(Incidentally the last gag isn’t homophobia, I think, just surrealism. It’s an off-the-cuff gag citing just about the last place the memoirs of girl-mad shagger Milligan were likely to be serialised.)

Shall I read volume 5? Volume 4 is not as funny as its predecessors and, at 288 pages, turned into quite a grind. Plus I always knew it was heading for this sad denouement. According to the blurbs volume 5 is just as long at 280 pages, and devoted to Spike’s personal battle with depression and psychiatric problems… Not a thrilling prospect, is it?

Class animus

Spike really hates their new commanding officer, the over-officious unbending Major Jenkins, ‘Fuck him’ (p.128) and this dislike curdles into outright hatred, citing everyone under Jenkins’ command who gave him the nickname ‘Loony’ for his impenetrably stupid orders.

He enjoys retailing stories of officers making wallies of themselves, like the officer who very grandly swanked into view of the battery, took out a shooting stick, unfolded it, sat squarely on it, and then it sank slowly into the quagmire till he fell on his back in the mud. How they laughed (p.76).

He is also thrilled to bits when the officers’ mess catches fire and gleefully describes how hated Major Jenkins runs into the flames to retrieve his belongings into a pile which some of the men (who all hate him), as soon as his back is turned, promptly throw back into the fire (p.152).

He contrasts Churchill meeting Roosevelt in the warmth and Cairo in some luxury hotel with the plight of him and his mates, living for weeks in soaking tents, wearing sodden clothes which start to fall apart and riddled with lice.

(Anti-officer stories or reflections on pages 164, 165, 202)

Spike doesn’t need to comment when he and a few comrades, who are billeted in farm outbuildings covered in centuries or ordure lay a phone line up to headquarters and open the door to the officers mess to find it a cosy clean billet with a warm fire and the officers all swigging whisky and laughing (p.195). The class resentment bubbles off the page.

Seriouser

I mentioned that, although Spike continues to blitz us with gags, he also shares quite serious opinions, much more so than in the previous three volumes:

We drive through Sparanise, badly shelled and bombed, some buildings still smouldering. The inhabitants are in a state of shock, women and children are crying, men are searching amid the ruins for belongings or worse, their relatives. It was the little children that depressed me the most, that such innocence should be put to such suffering. The adult world should forever hang its head in shame at the terrible, unforgivable things done to the young… (p.80)

This reminded me of the description in ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’ of a German artillery attack on the Italian town of Termoli which wiped out a civilian family except for the little boy who was running round screaming with his intestines hanging out of a terrible stomach wound, till SAS hard man Reg Seekings grabbed him and shot him dead on the spot.

Any leader who declares war, whether in Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, is committing to blowing up little children and should be damned forever.

Half a dozen times he refers to coming from an Irish family and having been raised a Catholic but, in the face of the suffering he’s seen, he has suffered a fairly predictable loss of faith:

A Catholic priest visited us this evening and asked if anyone wanted Confession and Holy Communion. I nearly went but since the war started my belief in God had suffered a reverse. I couldn’t reconcile all the killing by two sides who both claimed to be Christian societies… (p.83)

Undertones of madness

Because I know this is the volume which ends with him getting invalided out with shell shock or PTSD, I noticed the increased number of references to madness littered throughout the text. If he’d been a literary author i.e. one who carefully planned his narrative and effects, I’d say he had carefully seeded the notion, or references to different types of madness, in a cunning preparation for his eventual collapse. In practice, the text is so chaotically assembled I doubt there was that much calculation. Conscious or not, they’re there.

At one point there’s a shortage of fags and Spike goes four days without a puff. The pupils of his eyes dilate and ‘I spoke in a high strained voice on the edge of a scream’ (p.48).

‘There’s a bloke in a truck waiting for you.’
‘Is he wearing a white coat.’ (p.60)

Inside the farm an Italian an Italian baby was crying and the mother was trying to calm it in a hysterical high-pitched shriek. (p.63)

From the distant hill we hear the dreadful sound of Spandaus and Schmeisers that are spraying the early morning with bullets, and I can’t but wonder at the courage of these lads in the Guards brigade going forward into it. What a terrible, unexplainable lunacy. (p.75)

‘How?’ said Gunner White looking down at the brown sea of mud, ‘how can we get out of this before we all go stark ravin’ bloody mad?’ (p.82)

And on pages 200, 204, 228, 229, 265, 272…

‘See?, we’re not the only ones who’ve lost our marbles,’ said Edgington. (p.228)

‘Your power to bend words will one day end you in the nick, nuthouse or graveyard.’ (p.229)

On page 193 the boys discuss the random theory that Hitler was driven mad due to piles. In which case a tube of Anusol would have prevented the whole war.

There are also rumbling references to suicide. They are kept so long at a position on the hill in the endless rain that Milligan wonders if some of the men will commit suicide to escape and, in fact, a soldier at HQ does (p.178).

Part of it is the cognitive dissonance of war. He and his mates enjoy a hot meal, stew and potatoes, huddled round a fire in their freezing dugout. Down in the plain they hear a sudden outbreak of machinegun fire, first theirs, then ours (they can recognise the different makes of machinegun by the sound). Down there, two patrols have clashed and are murdering each other.

I slide another spoonful of dinner in. I really can’t get it all together, us dining, them dying… (p.257)

You can hear the mental strain, the same insanity of war which Kurt Vonnegut struggled to manhandle into the fantastical storyline of Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller transformed into the masterpiece of bureaucratic craziness, Catch-22.

Il Duce

Volume 3 is named after Montgomery who is never actually mentioned in the text (just in one picture caption). Mussolini, by contrast is, I think, mentioned three times, pages 55, 63 and 197.

Evelyn Waugh

Why has he got it in for Evelyn Waugh? There was a fantasy scene depicting Waugh getting drunk and buggering Randolph Churchill in the previous book. In this one he envisions Waugh, pissed off his face, standing up during an air raid in Yugoslavia shouting abuse at Randolph Churchill (p.175). Are they symbols, for Spike of upper class privilege.

Angry or grumpy?

When does justifiable anger against the world morph into sounding like a grumpy old man? At what point do you cross the line from righteous indignation to sounding like a tirade in the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, homes for people who can’t adapt to a changing world? Spike and this book are a kind of test bed for that question.

Pity the children

One morning after roll-call I was exploring the environs of the camp when I discovered the remains of what had been a big bonfire. The surviving pieces were interesting: Fascist uniforms worn by schoolchildren during indoctrination training, Bambini della Lupa (Children of the Wolf) and along with them were little wooden rifles and kindergarten books praising Mussolini, Il Duce nostra Buona Padre … etc etc. How in God’s name can adults do this to children? To pervert their minds… (p.56)

And the passage quote above, from page 80.

General misanthropy

During the brief R&R in Amalfi they watch fishermen kill octopuses they’ve captured by turning them inside out.

It was obscenely cruel, but then Man is. (p.238)

Reunions

The reunions with his old army pals were obviously important to Spike. He goes out of his way to mention, in his irritated preface, that he and his comrades have not one but two reunions a year ‘something no other British Army unit have’, before spelling out that he’s referring to D Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery. And he repeats this again at the very end when he’s spelling out what esprit de corps means, how his mates had it and their hated CO, Major Jenkins, absolutely didn’t (p.285).

He tells us that in December 1976 he organised a reunion at the Medusa Restaurant of those involved in the fighting in and around Steam Roller Farm, 26 February 1943. Strikingly, they invited one of the Germans who’d been fighting opposite them to the meal (p.63).

On a particularly freezing wet night one of the lads. Gunner Trew, asked for a sip of Spike’s tea and ended up draining it.

Now, whenever there’s a reunion, I walk straight up to him and say ‘Gi’s a sip’, take his beer and drain it to the bottom and say ‘Remember Italy’. (p.89)

Vindictiveness

This points to another aspect of the text which feels new, which is that Spike never forgets a grudge. The Trew story is, if you read it briskly, funny – but it chimes with other places which aren’t funny and where resentment smoulders on after 35 years. For example, he doesn’t let up in his criticism of their unbearable commanding officer, Major Evans.

In another, surprising, passage he has it in for his Dad. He says that his Dad’s letters from home become an increasing pain in the arse. This is because his Dad relentlessly nags him to reply to his Mum’s letters. But Spike insists to the reader that he does answer all his Mum’s letters. He goes on to tell us that, after the war, he sent every letter to his Mum registered post and kept the receipts and pasted them into a book and showed his Dad the book – at which he claims his Dad said the book could be a fake! It reveals Spike’s inability to let it go.

And he also emphasises to the reader that it cost him a ‘fortune’ in registered letters, an indication of his own ‘tightness’ with money which, as we’ve seen, he tends to attribute to Jewish people. (Compare the phrase in the preface which emphasises that calling up old comrades who live abroad, to check the facts, ‘ran into over a hundred pounds’. Money was obviously an issue for Spike who never really made it big, not ‘big’ like his frenemy Peter Sellers.)

Post-war sadness

A number of remarks are more redolent of 1970s Britain than 1940s Italy, especially the references to Britain going down the tubes, no longer being ‘Great’ and so on. Daily Mail territory.

…even today the indoctrination goes on. China. Russia. Out own democracies corrupt with pornography and Media Violence… (p.56)

Combined with the sense, which comes over in the references to contemporary reunions, that they will never recover that carefree esprit de corps, they will never be so young or so free again, which takes shape as quiet despair at the dullness of suburban life. For example, they bunk down in an abandoned farmhouse and Spike records the graffitti including ‘The Tebourba Tigers’.

The latter refers to the name they conferred on themselves after a savage action at Tebourba in Tunisia. Where are those tigers now? Watching telly? Washing up?… (p.67)

At moments like this the book reflects the general sense of frustrated malaise widespread across the Britain of the 1970s, see the Reginald Perrin novels, or the exasperated frustration at the start of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or any number of 70s sitcoms like Rising Damp. ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,’ as Pink Floyd sang in 1973.

And then throw Spike’s own, personal, depression into the mix. It doesn’t explicitly appear that often in this long text, but it’s a strong, depressive tone which flavours the whole thing.

The ugly English

Related to the sense of Britain going down the tubes and the dullness of suburban life goes a passage about the sheer crapness of English ‘cuisine’.

the Anglo-Saxon will devour stale bread, bully beef, hard rolls, food boiled to death and obliterated with artificial seasoning – yet delightfully cooked octopus in garlic? No! You are what you eat, that’s why we all look so bloody ugly. (p.238)

Similarly, tea. I, personally, hate tea but the soldiers lived for mugs of the sweet brown dishwater. But even so:

As I walk I sip the life-giving tea – why do we dote on tea? It tastes bloody awful, it’s only the sugar and milk that make it drinkable. It’s like fags – we’ve got hooked… (p.261)

Emigration

All this explains why he sympathises with the idea of emigrating away from poor old Britain…

His brother Desmond is 17 and has a crappy job. No wonder he emigrated to Australia p.263

The Russian threat

It’s not untrue but Spike’s warnings against Russian threat reminded me of another radical turned grumpy old man, Kingsley Amis, who wrote several novels warning against a Russian conquest of Britain p.249

Other complaints

He complains that in a village they came to, the British were allowing suspect collaborators to be kept packed in the tiny local police station in inhumane conditions.

Why this situation was allowed to exist can only be put down to the wonderful ‘I’m alright, Jack’ attitude of the British. We are not cruel but, by Christ, sometimes we come very close to it. (p.251)

He describes a local woman cook, Portence, who helps out in the cookhouse, working from dawn till one in the morning and then compares her with:

some of the soppy females of today who get a charlady to clean their flat of three rooms while they phone their friends and eat chocolates. (p.252)

These examples go to show, I hope, that although there are still loads and loads of quickfire gags, there is also a lot more moaning and complaining about the modern (1970s) world. That’s what I meant by the way his anger against a world which started a world war and destroyed entire cities and killed so many civilians and good blokes and damaged little kids forever morphs and mutates into general ranting against the modern world, modern women, modern TV and porn and video nasties etc etc, into a general rant.

Some of the rants can be funny. Many are interesting as examples of social history. But between the rants and the grim descriptions of (distant) battles and death, it feels like we have travelled a long way from the relative innocence of the first volume, Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971).

Credit

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1978. References are to the 1978 Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971)
‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’: A Confrontation in the Desert (1974)
Monty: His Part in My Victory (1976)

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by Simon on May 10, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Autobiography, Italy, Second World War, War

Tagged 56th Heavy Regiment, Alf Fildes, Amalfi, Antisemitism, Anusol, Bailey Bridge, Bambini della Lupa, Battle Fatigue, Bing Crosby, Cairo, Catch-22, Children of the Wolf, Christianity, Churchill, class consciousness, Class War, Clive James, Cole Porter, Daily Mail, diary, Disney, Eric Newby, Ernie Hart, Evelyn Waugh, Fitzroy Maclean, Florence Nightingale, George Formby, Gone With The Wind, Gracie Fields, Gunner Kidgell, Harry Edgington, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Hitler, Hitlergams, homosexuals, Il Duce, It's That Man Again, Italy, Jack Hobbs, Jazz, Jews, Joseph Heller, Ken Carter, Kingsley Amis, Kurt Vonnegut, Lauro, Looney Jenkins, Major Jenkins, Marx Brothers, masturbation, Messerschmitts, Monte Croce, Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall, North Africa, Peter Sellers, Pink Floyd, Pompeii, Psychiatric hospital, psychiatry, race, racism, Randolph Churchill, Reg Seekings, Reginald Perrin, Rising Damp, river Garigliano, River Styx, Roosevelt, Royal Artillery, Salerno, Second World War, sex, Slaughterhouse-Five, Sparanise, Spike Milligan, Steam Roller Farm, Tac HQ, Tebourba, Termoli, The Goon Show, The Tebourba Tigers, Tommy Handley, Tunisia, VERDI, war, war memoirs, Yugoslavia

Posted by Simon on May 10, 2024

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Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby (1971)

Eric Newby (1919 to 2006) was a much-loved travel writer, author of such British travel classics as ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ (1958) and ‘Slowly Down the Ganges’ (1966). In 1971 he published this classic wartime memoir.

It describes how:

serving in the Special Boat Section, he was captured during an operation off the coast of Sicily in August 1942. He was then held at prisoner of war camps, first in Chieti, a few miles inland from Pescara on the Adriatic coast, and later at Fontanellato, near Parma
after the Italians made peace with the Allies in September 1943, he escaped from the camp by the simple expedient of walking through the now-unguarded gates
he was helped to hide for 6 months from the occupying Germans in the Apennine mountains, initially by a Slovene anti-fascist woman, Wanda Skof, her father the schoolteacher, a doctor, and then by a whole succession of colourful villagers and characters

Newby would later marry Wanda and she became the lifelong companion of his travels and adventures.

Newby’s core quality is a wonderful, self-mocking sense of humour; every turn of events is an opportunity for an amused, ironic remark or insight. Add to this his great way with natural descriptions of landscapes and weather, and then his acute descriptions of the many people he meets through the course of his adventure, and it makes for an extremely interesting, sometimes dramatic, but above all charming book.

The 298-page book is divided into 17 chapters.

1. Operation Whynot

Very detailed description of the secret small-scale operation during which Newby was captured on 12 August 1942, in the Bay of Catania off Sicily. He and five other members of M Detachment of the Special Boat Service had been taken into the bay by submarine (the Una commanded by Pat Norman, p.15), then manhandled inflatable canoes into the sea and rowed quietly to the beach. The plan was to attack a German airfield four miles south of Catania and take out as many of the 50 to 60 Junkers 88 bombers parked there as possible. The mission was lent urgency because a massive fleet of merchant ships had just entered the Mediterranean with the aim of sailing to British-held Malta to provide vital supplies to the besieged island (p.16).

They actually made it to the airfield when they encountered an Italian patrol, shots were fired, at which the airport alarm and all its floodlights went on. Now way they could cover the half mile to where loads of Ju 88s were lined up so they aborted, ran back to the beach, through the barbed wire, reclaimed their canoes and headed back out to sea.

But they completely missed the rendezvous point with the submarine (which, turned out, not only turned up and waited, but came back at the same time for several days in the hope of meeting them). Instead the seas got rough, the canoes swamped and sank and they were all pitched into the freezing water, clinging to various bits of wreckage.

Thus they were in very poor shape when they were discovered by a small Sicilian fishing fleet and dragged aboard the little fishing smacks about 8am. Newby’s attitude, tone of voice and wry humour are established on the opening page:

I remember lying among the freshly caught fish in the bottom of the boat, some of them exotic, all displaying considerably greater liveliness that we did… (p.13)

The most Newby aspect of the entire account is that one of his party brought along their pet dog from Malta (in the submarine, not on the actual airfield mission), a dachshund named Socks who disappeared for long period, returning bloated with food and her long underbelly soaked in oil which she invariably rubbed all over Newby’s uniform when he jumped up to lick him.

The fishermen handed the captured Brits over to the Italian army, who put them in prison, interrogated them etc, till a German officer arrived and insisted they be properly fed and given dry clothes. Eventually they were shipped over to the mainland and taken under armed escort to a POW barracks in Rome.

Newby found Rome beautiful. He quite liked being alone in a cell. This was his first time in Europe. He was just twenty-two years old (p.34).

2. Grand Illusion

Cut to a year later (September 1943) and Newby is being held in what had been built as an orphanage or orfanotrofio attached to a convent, but was still not finished when war broke out. It was a three-storey building so unstable that if anyone jumped up and down the entire facade wobbled. It was in a village called Fontenallato.

The Italian guards are relaxed, the food is OK and supplemented by Red Cross parcels and stuff bought off the black market. There’s cheap if risky liquor available. Newby tells a typical story about the first lieutenant-colonel who became senior officer and hosted a big party on his first night, with lots of illegal booze. Finally he declared the party over, rose, and opened the door to a tall cupboard, striding inside as if into his bedroom. Because, when he pulled the door shut behind him, he wedged his thick coat in it, it took the others some time to free him, by which time he was fast asleep and sleeping.

The prisoners were forbidden to look out of any of the windows facing into the road into the village. If they did so the Italian guards fired at them, and the walls opposite the windows were studded with bullet holes.

For some reason local pretty young women made a point of promenading past the prison, to the great joy of the young men inside who risked death by bullet to get a sight. This leads to the subject of sex and Newby points out that most of the men were probably too undernourished to perform. In the absence of women there was always masturbation, which he describes as ‘pull our puddings’, something difficult to do in a dormitory of 26 men, packed close and illuminated by searchlights, although some of them revived the ancient skills of subterfuge perfected at boarding school.

To my surprise there’s an extended passage which expresses considerable dislike for the public school senior ranks who dominated life in the prison. Newby calls them ‘the OK people’, who’d all been to the same schools, were members of the same clubs in London, were officers in the best regiments, knew each other’s families and treated all outsiders like muck (pages 47 to 49). The passage includes bitter memories of privileged boys being pushed in prams in Hyde Park or hogging all the toys at Hamleys (‘Go away,’ he said, ‘It’s my rocking horse.’) The ‘OK people’ i.e. the nobs, rarely if ever read, or discuss anything except each other’s fabulous families, but they do gamble – on anything, for any stakes.

The orfanotrofio was more like a public school than any other prison camp I was ever in. If anybody can be said to have suffered in this place it was those people who had never been subjected to the hell of English preparatory and public school life; because although there was no bullying in the physical sense…there was still plenty of scope for mental torment; and although the senior officer thought he ran the camp it was really run by people elected by the coteries, just like Pop at Eton, where so many of them had been. (p.55)

All the prisoners mock and joked about the ‘Itis’ (Newby’s spelling of what, according to the internet should be spelled ‘Eyeties’ i.e. slang abbreviation for Italians) but really it just channeled and controlled their frustration at being locked up.

In fact Newby philosophically comments that the prisoners were in fact more ‘free’ than they ever would be again, free from money, worries about careers, free from having to work, for responsibility for dependents and so on.

(The chapter is titled ‘Grand Illusion’ because a new commanding officer arrives who instils discipline and makes it resemble the prisoner of war camp in the 1937 French movie La Grande Illusion.)

3. Armistizio

On 25 July 1943 Mussolini was dismissed from power by King Victor Emmanuel. He was arrested, imprisoned and moved from place to place. The king appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio as the new prime minister. On 3 September 1943 Badoglio agreed to an Armistice between Italy and the Allies. The formal announcement was made on the radio five days later and plunged Italy into chaos. The complicated diplomatic and military manoeuvres are laid out on the Wikipedia Armistice of Cassibile article.

The only impact this made on the orfanotrofio was the guards stopped shooting through the windows and their daily escorted exercise marches came to an end. That evening the entire camp held a massive party with booze bought and smuggled in on the black market.

There was a couple of days of wild rumours that the Allies were landing in northern Italy leading to massive breakthroughs and that the war would be over in a week. In fact it was to last nearly two years more. What happened is the Germans turned on their former allies and seized positions all across Italy.

4. The Ninth of September

Their Italian captors let the entire camp population leave. They just walked out the door. All except Newby who hobbled. Just a few days earlier he’d managed to trip and fall down the grand staircase at the centre of the orfanotrofio and break his ankle. Now, as everyone walks out the building and through the previously guarded wire fences, Newby has to hobble, supported by two reluctant paratroopers. They’re only too happy to hand him over to a (small) horse secured for him by a British orderly and named Mora. Characteristically: a) Newby has never ridden a horse before (unlike the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ OK people inside the camp) b) he’s terrified of horse and c) the landscape is criss-crossed by irrigation ditches so terrible terrain for a horse to cross.

Pretty quickly the horse goes front legs into a ditch pitching Newby over its neck. I was surprised that his class consciousness surfaces even here.

‘Bloody funny, that Iti must have stuck a lit cigarette up her chuff,’ someone said.
‘One way of crossing the Rubicon,’ someone else said who had had a different sort of education. (p.64)

He’s still in the general procession of escaping prisoners, looking like a troop of lunatics he once came across in Surrey. Later they discover that:

some lorryloads of Germans, probably feldgendarmen, military policemen, had arrived at the camp, had fired a few rounds in the air, the Italian soldiers had capitulated immediately, the colonello had been arrested and the Germans had taken him away as a souvenir of their visit. (p.66)

The senior British officer in the column of escaping prisoners tells Newby that he can’t spare the men to help him hobble along and so he’s arranged for him to stay with a local farmer while the column heads off. So Newby is hidden in the hayloft of the first of a long line of Italian peasants. He hears the distant roar of traffic and wonders if it’s Germans on the Via Emilia (the modern A1 that runs between Piacenza in the north-west to Parma to the south-east). In the evening the farmer and his wife give him a hearty meal of home-made pasta and cheese and wine, the first of many flavours of the real, rustic Italy which Newby was to come to love.

An Italian translator from the orfanotrofio turns up and shares the latest news that the Germans are approaching in force from the north. Looks like the Great Liberation will be pushed back a bit.

5. Interlude in an Ospedale

Next day an Italian doctor comes and tells him he needs to go to hospital to have his ankle fixed. So Newby changes into Italian farmer clothes given him by his hosts and drives off in the doctor’s car. But not before one of the many land girls who had begun to arrive at the farm takes his notice, mainly because she’s blonde not dark-haired, and then comes over to the car to promise to visit him in hospital. It is Wanda, his future wife.

So he is driven back into Fontanellato and admitted to the Ospedale Perachi only a few hundred yards from the orfanotrofio. Wanda comes to visit, introduces herself and sets about giving him hilariously bad Italian lessons in her heavy Slovak accent. She pronounces his name ‘Hurrock’ (p.73).

She was wearing a white, open-necked shirt and a blue cotton skirt. She was brown, she was slim, she had good legs, she had ash-blonde hair and blue eyes and she had a fine nose. When she smiled she looked saucy, when she didn’t she looked serious. (p.76)

Newby describes the staff at the hospital, strong nurses with no false modesty about stripping him and putting him into regulations pyjamas, a formidable matron, a silent consultant.

That evening German bombers drop leaflets telling the population the capitulation of their country is a disgrace and the Germans are coming to provide freedom and security. Wanda had told him he was right next door to the maternity wing of the hospital and the screams of a woman giving birth keep him up till late.

For some time life in the hospital is peaceful and quiet. Wanda comes every afternoon for more bad Italian lessons and gossip about how his former prisoners are doing. She thinks he should head north to Switzerland.

Wanda describes how Slovenia was annexed by Mussolini in the 1920s who forbade the use of the Slovenian language and deported all Slovenian teachers to Italy (p.80).

The radio gives the news: on 12 September Mussolini was rescued from prison by German paratroopers. 14 September news that the Germans had launched a fierce counter-offensive against the Allied landings at Salerno (as described by where . 16 September all Italian officers and men were ordered to present themselves in uniform at the nearest German headquarters.

The newspapers carry a threatening announcement from the head of the SS who has now taken control of Parma, just 20 km to the south.

6. Back to Nature

Newby realises he has to get away. But he’s left it late and now two carabinieri have been stationed outside his hospital room to guard him.

With one of his meals come detailed instructions on how to escape. he had been pretending to have diarrhoea and keep having to go to the toilet until his guards stopped paying attention. That evening he squeezes through the toilet window, shimmies down a drainpipe and goes stumbling and hopping across fields to the rendezvous point a kilometre away. Here he is collected by the doctor who has been treating him and another middle-aged man. It is Wanda’s father. They refer to each other as dottore and maestro, respectively.

We set off at a terrific rate on a road which had all the qualities necessary to produce a fatal accident. (p.90)

They drive for miles before giving him a full set of clothes, a knife and dumping him in a wood telling him he’ll be found by a middle-aged man named Giovanni. They tell him he’s near the river Po, then drive off, leaving him to stumble into the wood armed with a sleeping bag and a bottle of mosquito repellent.

7. Down by the Riverside

After a rough night in the woods, Newby blunders down to the river and has a revelatory view of the mighty River Po. Back in the woods he falls asleep and is roughly woken by Giovanni who takes him to a rock overlooking the river and treats him to home-made soup and pasta, slices of unsmoked ham and home-made wine. Giovanni explains the geography of the Po, its regular flooding, its shifting estuary.

Wanda arrives by bicycle and brings bad news. Field Marshall Kesselring has set up his base in the castle at Fontenallato. If he’d remained at the hospital he would have been sent to a POW camp in Germany. Worse, some British escapees were found and arrested at a farm and one of them had kept a diary including the names of everyone who had helped him. Idiot. Cretin.

Giovanni and Wanda’s father dig a kind of grave for Newby, line it, make him lie in it, then cover it with planks and soil, leaving a breathing hole, for him to hide in that night. Next morning he’s woken and dug out and still stiff from being cooped up Newby stumbles to the doctor’s car.

Newby discovers he’s not the only passenger as there’s an ancient man, bent over, dressed all in black, who appears to be deaf and spends a lot of the journey quietly chuckling to himself, ‘Heh, heh, heh’ (p.108).

The doctor drives them along a country road till it joins the Via Emilia only to discover a vast armoured column is driving along it. Trying to look Italian in his Italian clothes, Newby is bricking it as the doctor overtakes the column slowly and sensibly.

Eventually they outdistance the column, drive along open roads and arrive in the city of Parma where the Fiat promptly breaks down and the doctor spends some time under the bonnet fixing it. Despite some German traffic cops being about nobody interferes with them, the car is fixed, and they drive through Parma towards the mountains.

8. Haven in a Storm

The doctor drops Newby with the Baruffas, farmers in the foothills of the mountains, telling him he’ll be safe there. It’s all smiles and handshakes but the minute the doctor has driven off Senor Baruffa tells him he must leave. Now. Straightaway. They are terrified of reprisals. They tell him he must go to the farm of Zanoni, further up the valley beyond the mill. And with that, throw him out into the farm courtyard just as a ferocious rainstorm starts.

Newby trudges up along the cobbled track that leads beside the overflowing stream as the storm howls around him and brings him to the bubbling frothing watermill. From there a path leads further up the hill to a house which was more like a stone hut built against the mountainside. He knocks and enters a dark and smelly cowshed to find Signor Zanoni. This dirt-poor farmer takes him into the main ‘house’, more like a cavern, feeds him and lets him sleep in the only bed.

It’s the dark and stormy evening of 25 September 1943 and Newby spends the night in the most comfortable bed he’s ever slept in, before or since (p.118).

Next morning Zanoni informs him that the Germans have installed a new Fascist government in Italy and it is offering 1,800 lire for the capture of Allied prisoners. That’s about £25 at contemporary rates, a fortune for these peasants. Then again he explains the typical Italian attitude which is not to try too hard; most of the country’s officials know the Allies will eventually win the war at which point there’ll be a reckoning for anyone who gave away hiding soldiers.

The thin signora beings him coffee made from acorns and their own home-cured ham but he realises these people are very poor and making a real sacrifice. He has to leave soon. It’s a Sunday and all through the day neighbours drop in for a chat and socialise and he has to remain deathly silent upstairs.

9. Appointment at the Pian del Sotto

Next day he tells kindly Zanzoni that he really must leave, he wants to stay somewhere he can earn his keep through labour. After running through possible candidates Zanoni’s wife suggests old Luigi who lives up on the Pian del Sotto.

So Zanzoni takes him a long roundabout walk through old oak forest, cutting his way through the dense brambles, heading further up to the treeline and to a three-storey concrete house, the Pian del Sotto, owned by Luigi. He’s in the kitchen with his flat-chested wife Agata, Rita the skinny daughter, an Amazon woman helper Dolores, and a chunky young labourer Armando. Zazoni negotiates terms in heavy dialect. Eventually Luigi agrees to take him on as an unskilled labourer, given room and board.

Kindly old Zanzoni says he’ll tell Giovanni back in the plain that he’s OK and with that turns and leaves. Luigi immediately tells Newby to start clearing the fields he can see from the house of all their rocks and stones.

10. Life on the Pian del Sotto

A warm-hearted, humorous description of the very basic life with Luigi’s peasant family, up at 6 for coffee and dried bread before the back-breaking work of the day begins. The crushing boredom of spending all day excavating stones from fields, loading them into the cart, dragging the cart to a cliff and tipping then over the edge. At 10am the merenda when everyone has woken up and is lively. It is here that the women in the household discuss their dreams and interpret them with the use of a popular guide.

Dinner after which the conversation, strangely enough, turns to London, or what they call la citè d’la fumarassa, which they all know is packed with peasouper fogs, streets clogged with hansom cabs, and the gruesome murders of Jack the Ripper solved by Sherlock Holmes.

A feature of the house is the ferocious, angry demented hound, Nero, which barks like mad and makes a lunge for Newby every time he goes in or out of the house. He takes to throwing the contents of his chamber pot at it every morning.

11. Encounter with a Member of the Master Race

One of the girls brings a letter back from the village written by Wanda and addressed to ‘Enrica’ which tells him in code that her father and Giovanni have been arrested, and warning him not to go on any long journeys i.e. not to try and escape north to Switzerland.

Sunday comes and while the rest of the family head down the mountain to villages, Newby chooses to spend the day hiking higher up the mountain, discovering the circular areas of soil cleared by the seasonal charcoal burners. It’s a wonderful walk beautifully described up – especially a couple of pages itemising all the different types of funghi he sees about which he knows absolutely nothing – through the thinning tree cover and then out onto a steep downland of cropped grass and across to an immense cliff. The sun is out, it’s warm and mazy and he lies down and falls asleep in the meadow.

He’s awoken by a German soldier in uniform. After he gets over the shock he realises the German means him no harm. In fact he is an eccentric figure, a keen butterfly collector who has got a rare day off and come up to the meadows armed with a butterfly net. He speaks good English and quickly spots that Newby is English. He introduces himself as Oberleutnant Frick, Education officer. He offers Newby a cool quality bottle of beer from Munich and speaks quite candidly, saying it is horrible to be hated simply for being German. He advises Newby to spend the winter where he is rather than head south where the fighting is going to become very hard. When Newby asks him about the fighting in Italy Frick says they can hold the Allies till the spring, probably the summer, but it is not here the war will be won or lost, it is in Russia where German losses are catastrophic. Then he shakes hands, makes a formal goodbye and runs off to catch butterflies.

When Newby arrives back at the house he discovers the arrival of the Oberleutnant created a mass panic among the villages, many of which conceal not Allied POWs but deserters, who all promptly headed for the hills. Then Newby produces the backpack full of fungi which he had collected up the hill, leading the women to scream at him to take the poisonous ones off the table, and Luigi to tick him off for collecting fungi which, it turns out, belongs to an old farmer who’s paid the commune for the right to pick them from a certain part of the wood, which is therefore his fungaia. The women cook the edible ones and they all enjoy them for dinner.

Newby’s decided not to head south, after what the German told him. He asks when the snow comes and Luigi says the first snow comes in November but the Big Snow comes at the end of December and then people can only get about on skis. Also he says, as the others go quiet, that’s when, wherever he’s hiding, ‘they’ will come and arrest him.

12. The Great Paura

Paura means fear as in ‘Ho paura’ meaning I’m afraid.

After a week or so Newby finally completes the task of clearing the rocks from the fields. The last massive boulders are removed by building fires next to or on them, then pouring icy water over then so they crack and explore and the fragments can be cleared.

One day as he’s heading to the primitive outside toilet Nero finally breaks his chain and comes bounding after him. Newby flees for a barn with hay piled against it and is scrabbling to climb the bales when two huge hands appear and yank him by his overalls up into the hayloft. It is the Amazonian landgirl Dolores and she promptly tells him to kiss her. Then to touch her. She had been working in the hot loft and had taken her jumper off to reveal a light slip. The reader can imagine the rest. They would have proceeded to sex is Agata hadn’t delivered one of her deafening yells to the menfolk to come and sort Nero out, which curtailed that adventure.

But a couple of days later the girls doll themselves up for a ballo down in the village and insist that Newby have a wash, shave, put on clean clothes and accompany them, which he reluctantly does, descending the steep cobbled path to the village with Rita and Dolores on each arm.

The ballo is in the hot kitchen of a village farm, music provided by old men playing a violin and an accordion and a drunken Dolores is coming on very strong when there’s a cry of ‘Germans! Germans!’ and the place empties in seconds.

Newby makes his way sideways, across fields and up towards the house and sees the entire village and the main path alive with torches. He climbs the ‘cliff’ which is made of clay and has gotten soft in the evening’s rain, and sees torches at the Pian del Sotto and is terrified that Luigi and Agata have been arrested or shot. He had always hidden a backpack ready to be grabbed at any moment and now he digs it out and then squats under the trees in the rain.

Some time later Luigi appears. He explains that it was a really big raid, a ‘sweep’ of the hills and villages looking for deserters. They knew he was here, a spy had blabbed, but Luigi and Agata lied and the searchers believed them. Now Luigi tells him he must climb through the woods to the meadows where he fell asleep and Frick found him, and go even higher till he encounters the lonely shepherd known as Abram. He shakes his hand, thanks him for clearing the rocks, and walks away, leaving Newby alone in the night in the rain.

13. Interlude in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land

So Newby climbs up through the woods, beyond the tree line and up the meadows, all the while feeling guilty that he ought to be heading south to try and hook up with ‘his people’ i.e. the Allied armies. Except he’s gotten used to living up here in the mountains which has taken the edge off his courage and motivation. It’s foggy. He hears the flock of sheep before he sees it and then looming out of the mist the big shepherd, Abramo, who ironically shows him his castello (a sheepfold made of stones linked by branches) and palazzo (a shepherd’s hut). Newby is actually in a bad way, soaked through and shivering, so Abramo dries him in front of the fire and gives him new clothes, plus generous helpings of home-made gin.

Newby is out of it for several days while the gentle giant cares for him. Once he’s on the mend, Abramo shares hare stew and home-made cheese. After a couple of days a small boy arrives with instructions to take him back down to the village which he does with an agility and speed Newby can’t keep up with.

He’s taken to a house he hasn’t seen before, a splendid medieval building, in which a committee of six men announce that, since their own sons are far away in prisons or fighting at the front or on the run, they will look after him as if he was their own son and look after him through the coming winter which otherwise he won’t survive. they are going to build him a secret dwelling.

14. A Cave of One’s Own

After a wonderful meal and then a heavy night drinking with the men, at 4am the next morning they head up into the hills accompanied by a mule carrying equipment and corrugated iron. They select one of many clefts in the cliff and then, with deep expertise, build a cabin, built back into the cliff overhand, with stone and wooden walls and a sloping ceiling so it’s invisible. The man who supervises the work is tall and handsome with a nose like an eagle’s beak, named Francesco (p.220). Then they go inside, make a fire, have a round of drinks, give him instructions about not going out during daylight, shake hands and leave. It is Wednesday 27 October 1943.

Newby calls it his cave. It reminded me of Robinson Crusoe’s fort by way of the cabin in the snowy woods Johnny Frizel builds for Edward Leithen in John Buchan’s Sick Heart River.

Newby can stand upright nowhere except by the (remarkably efficient) fire. Every day a messenger from the village comes, using the agreed password Brindisi, sometimes children but often black-dressed old grandmothers who brought sausage or eggs or soup and milk and acorn coffee. Extraordinary kindness and generosity.

Then he gets a message to go, two nights hence, on 16 November, to go to a hut he knows, a long convoluted journey through the impenetrable forest in the pouring rain, and here he meets Signor Zanoni who has brought Wanda. Hugs, kisses and lots of news. The Italian campaign is going badly, the Allies are stuck below Rome. The Germans have tightened control over Italy. Food is tightly rationed, petrol is becoming rare, she uses a bicycle.

In an earlier message he had learned that the doctor and Wanda’s father, the two men who got him out of the hospital, had both been arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned. Now she tells him the doctor faked appendicitis and then absconded from the hospital he was sent to is somewhere in the mountains, while her father got a job as an interpreter, having fought for the Austrians in the Great War.

There’s rumours of submarines picking up scattered groups of POWs and soldiers on the run off the coast which she’ll try to confirm. Then it’s time to go, they have last kisses and then he’s on his own in a cold hut and he bursts into tears.

15. Journey to the End of the Known World

Before she left Wanda had suggested Newby hike up out of the cleft he’s in, along a ridge to the spine or crinale of the mighty Apennines with a view to familiarising himself with the route and looking down over the mountains to the plains and the sea where, maybe, a mythical submarine might one day pick him up. She leaves him a densely detailed and almost indecipherable map.

Luckily the next visitor from the village with provisions happens to be Francesco, extremely intelligent and very experienced, who first tries to dissuade him from making the journey, and then gives him a very detailed account of what so look for.

Next morning at 5am Newby sets out with a backpack for the epic journey. There’s lots and lots of circumstantial description of the landscape and the route which, I think, you have to be a particular kind of person to enjoy. Takes him 11 hours to trek from the cave to the spine of the mountains. The view north is spectacular, he can see the Alps ranging east towards the Dolomites. But closer to hand he can see paths leading up from the plain to a crossing over the mountain, paths which are jam-packed with peasants struggling uphill bent under huge loads, bringing goods to trade and barter, which really brings home the deleterious impact of total war on ordinary impoverished people.

By now it’s getting dark and he retraces his steps to spend the night in an empty shepherd’s hut, well built to withstand the fierce winds.

Next morning there’s a dense fog and he can barely see 20 yards. This is why he gets lost. From the central spine of the Apennines countless ridges run off in both directions. In the fog he takes the wrong ridge heading north (i.e. back towards his valley, the villages and the cave) and has gone some way before he realises it as this new ridge starts descending far earlier than it ought. He ought to have retraced his steps back up to the spine and taken the correct ridge but, being tired and making poor decisions, instead he decides to descend the side of the ridge, into the river valley, and go up the other side onto ‘his’ ridge. What he hadn’t bargained for is the monstrous jungle of brambles growing under the trees. Huge entangled jungles of brambles twenty feet long with no paths or trails. He tries to cut his way through but loses his knife, tries to use his rucksack as a shield but it gets torn, his clothes are torn to pieces he is covered with cuts and bleeding all over by the time he emerges at a cliff looking down into the little stream at the bottom of the valley. Further dangerous teetering along the cliff edge before it becomes low enough for him to manoeuvre via rotting trees down to the valley floor. He wades along the freezing stream until the path up the other side becomes clear and sets about staggering up the other side.

As it begins to get dark he spies a hut on the hillside and makes for it, completely oblivious of security. An old man comes out to greet him well before he gets there and to his amazement it is the same deaf old man who sat in the back of the dottore’s car on that car journey to Parma and up into the foothills. A coincidence of Buchanesque proportions which makes you stop and wonder whether it’s made up, at which point you start to wonder how much of the account has been, well, embroidered if not plain invented.

The bent old deaf man welcomes him into his strange house, an Aladdin’s cave full of weird and wonderful contraptions which the man has obviously made himself, all the time keeping up a running commentary, in Italian, to himself.

Once they’ve eaten home-made chestnut polenta and a bitter salad, the old man sets off telling long rambling folk stories heedless of whether Newby is listening or not. In fact he nods off during the second one.

Next morning the old man shows him his extraordinary forge in which every implement is home made. He then gives him lunch and, just as Newby is about to broach the subject of moving on, the man puts on his coat, whistles for his dog, and sets off up the side of the valley

Two hours later they reach the top of the ridge and Newby recognises where he is. He tries to thank the man, who can’t hear him, and is wondering whether to shake his hand, when he turns and leaves.

A few hours later Newby is descending through the labyrinth of forest when he senses something is wrong. As he approaches his cave he sees there is smoke rising from the chimney. He hides his rucksack and lifts the rough sacking which forms the door. To his surprise he hears a posh English voice and is astonished to discover it is James, one of his friends from back at the orfanotrofio.

16. Gathering Darkness

James is a god friend, tall, burly with a ruddy complexion and a Roman nose, great at games, honest and sound. As he tells the stories of his hiding out Newby is a bit downcast to realise that James’s story is very like his i.e. his has not been such a unique adventure after all.

Francesco comes calling, tells Newby off for trying to cut through the forest from the wrong ridge, then tells him a lot more about the mysterious old man of the mountain who’s named Aurelio and is a legendary craftsman and storyteller.

Newby was to spend many weeks of November and December in the cave with James. The leaves fall off the trees making the passage of people to and from the cave more conspicuous. Then the snow comes. They amuse themselves reading passages from Surtees and Gibbon but are forced to spend all day inside, choking from the smoke from the fire. James develops impetigo, Newby gets a bad cough.

Then they are visited by three earnest young men with rusty guns who tell them they are forming a bande of partisans. They have a crack-brained scheme to blow up a petrol dump three days march away on the Via Emilia. James and Newby give a detailed analysis of why this is a dreadful idea but feel duty bound to help. The local people have put themselves out so much to help them it feels shameful and churlish not to act when asked. Luckily the three young zealots fail to turn up at the rendezvous they fix for a few nights later and they never see them again.

Then, a few days after the really heavy snowfall has blanketed the forest, freezing the stream where they get their water, Francesco arrives with bad news. The milizia are coming to capture them at 8pm that evening. They must leave the cave right away.

17. Beginning of the End

So they pack a bag – Francesco has brought them a sack of rice and 20 loaves of bread – and tramp through the thick snow up out of the forest to the hut of the shepherd Abramo, who we met several chapters ago. Here they say goodbye to Francesco and are handed over to a young guide, Alfredo, who takes them down into the next valley, freezing cold wind, stopping for cigarettes and once a fire and a meal, before carrying on, fording a river, on the run, carrying heavy bags in freezing conditions.

They climb again until they come across a group of charcoal burners, existing in a primitive baracca, all quite black with the smoke of their work. Newby had never met people quite so degraded and immiserated.

Alfredo hands them over to one of the charcoal burners, turns and goes back the way he came. The burner takes them onto a hut where they were meant to rendezvous with a bande i.e. partisans, but it is empty and abandoned, so they press on, the charcoal burner leaving them.

Almost at the end of their tethers they come across a haystore built into a slope of the mountain, force open the door and pass out. Hours later they are woken by a little boy asking who they are, who returns in a bit with a middle-aged man who is almost blind. To their inexpressible gratitude he says he will look after and feed them.

And so this man, Amadeo, looks after them, getting the barn made habitable with beds and a fireplace, and sending his children with food every day. In return he regularly comes and sits with them and asks questions about the great world which Newby and James do their best to answer.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day James and Newby are invited down to the village to festivities at the houses of various villagers, stuffed full of local food and then given the best Christmas present ever, a hot bath in half a wine barrel. And then Newby receives an unexpected bonus, a slip of paper with the simple message, ‘Kisses, Wanda’.

About noon on 29 December they are captured. The barn is surrounded by evil-looking troops from the Fascist militia, they are marched down the hillside and loaded into a waiting lorry, and taken off to a second period of captivity.

Epilogue

Surprisingly, Newby doesn’t describe anything about his second incarceration or his second liberation, not a thing. Instead he jumps to 1956 when he and Wanda, now married with two children, return to the scenes of his escapades. In fact the pair had worked in 1946 for a charity which sought to reward families who had helped Allied soldiers on the run. But it’s the later 1956 trip which Newby makes into a big set-piece, with him and Wanda revisiting the houses of everyone who helped them, and shaking hands and having reunions. Some of the old houses have fallen down, the charcoal burners have gone, everyone uses methane gas now. Electricity lines drape the valleys, roads penetrate higher, the sound of petrol-driven tractors from the valley, no more driving cattle-led ploughs like Armando did.

Right at the very end, old Francesco who helped him survive in the cave, takes Newby to one side and says he knows the identities of the man who betrayed them in his village, and the woman who betrayed them in the haybarn village. He assures him that both did it to protect their villages and their people and turned down the cash rewards the milizia offered. Does he want to know who they were? And Newby’s last word is ‘No’. There have been enough recriminations and vendettas. It was a long time ago. Forgive and forget.

Thoughts

What an amazing book, what incredible experiences, and what a moving tribute to the kindness and generosity of human nature. It made me overflow with feelings of gratitude and respect. What a wonderfully life-affirming book.

Newby and God

In the final passages where James comes to stay in the cave, Newby describes his friend’s straightforward Christian faith and contrasts it with his own more heterodox views:

James used to read out bits of the Bible, usually some bloodthirsty piece of Old Testament military history which he thought appropriate and would amuse me. He was a conventional Christian. Just as he had before the war, he used to go to church every Sunday in the orfanotrofio, and it would never have occurred to him not to do so. It was not just lip service to the established religion. He believed in the existence of God and the efficacy of prayer. I believed in God, and had done ever since I had been a sailor in a sailing ship before the war; but the God I believed in was neither beneficent nor hostile. As he was everything how could he be? And if he was everything how could he be moved by prayer? If it was a question of life and death you died when the time came for you to do so, peacefully or horribly. My time had not yet come when the foot of an upper topsail had flicked me off the yard, a hundred and thirty feet above the Southern Ocean in 1939; or that night in the Bay of Catania, or the following one in the fortress where they told us that we were going to be shot; but it could be any time. It might be quite soon now.

At one time I prayed that a bomb would not fall on the people in England I loved; but it seemed almost impertinent; better, if anything, to pray that bombs would cease to fall on anyone. To me prayer had no efficacy as a preservative, at the most it was a profession of love, a remembrance, a reminder that there had been a past and might be a future, and perhaps this was its vale. At this time, whether I was right or wrong, I felt clearer in my mind about these things than I have ever done since. (pages 274 to 275)

This is very eloquent but it’s not Christianity, is it, surely it’s stoicism? Surely the belief that the universe is equivalent to a God who is everywhere, and that our destinies are foreordained, without any reference to the Trinity, Christ or the resurrection, is textbook stoicism? See:

Newby’s humour

Newby is a charming narrator, a lovely man with an endearingly self-deprecating sense of humour.

I had a fatal aptitude for being good at interviews, the results of which I invariably regretted subsequently, almost as much as the interviewers. (p.127)

After what seemed an eternity the conversation rumbled to a close, rather like a train of goods wagons coming to rest in a marshalling yard. (p.134)

Credit

Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby was published in 1971 by Hodder & Stoughton. References are to the 1975 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on April 24, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Autobiography, Italy, War

Tagged Abramo, Adriatic, Agata, Apennine mountains, Armando, Armistice of Cassibile, Armistizio, baracca, Baruffas, Bay of Catania, Chieti, Christianity, Dolores, Eric Newby, Eyeties, Field Marshall Kesselring, Fontanellato, Fontenallato, Francesco, German army, Giovanni, Hamleys, Ho paura, Hurrock, Hyde Park, It is, Italians, Italy, John Buchan, Ju 88s, King Victor Emmanuel, la citè d'la fumarassa, La Grande Illusion, Love and War in the Apennines, Malta, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, masturbation, Mediterranean, Mora, Mussolini, near Parma, Oberleutnant Frick, Old Testament, Operation Whynot, orfanotrofio, Ospedale Perachi, Parma, Pescara, Pian del Sotto, POWs, prep school, prisoner of war camp, public school, pull your pudding, Rita, river Po, Rome, Salerno, Second World War, Sicily, Slovenia, Socks, Special Boat Section, SS, Stoicism, The Bible, the Dolomites, the milizia, Travel writing, Via Emilia, Wanda Skof, wartime memoir, Zanoni

Posted by Simon on April 24, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/04/24/love-and-war-in-the-apennines-eric-newby/

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Books & Boots

All posts in category Italy

Etruscan Places by D.H. Lawrence (1932)

1. Cerveteri

2. Tarquinia

3. The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 1

4. The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 2

5. Vulci

6. Volterra

Thoughts

Slavery

Cypresses

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Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster (1905)

Plot summary

1. Backstory

2. Main narrative

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Tropes, or types of content

Dissecting English snobbery

Showing off about Italy

Showing off about art

Mocking showing off about Italy i.e. Philip

The (alleged) Italian attitude to women

Generalisations about life in novels

Ad hoc or partial generalisations

Novelist’s characters generalising about life

Conclusion about generalisations

Puppets

Forster’s amiableness

Lawrence versus Forster

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Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan (1978)

Longer, seriouser

Spike is peeved

Day-by-day diary format

Gags

(Deliberately?) bad proofreading

Sex

Race

Events

Spike’s job

The climax, Spike is wounded

Psychiatric hospital

Final collapse

Class animus

Seriouser

Undertones of madness

Il Duce

Evelyn Waugh

Angry or grumpy?

Pity the children

General misanthropy

Reunions

Vindictiveness

Post-war sadness

The ugly English

Emigration

The Russian threat

Other complaints

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Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby (1971)

1. Operation Whynot

2. Grand Illusion

3. Armistizio

4. The Ninth of September

5. Interlude in an Ospedale

6. Back to Nature