It had been late in May. A German 88 mm. battery had established itself among the olive groves of — Santa Brigida. They were tired and desperate. The Garigliano had been crossed by the Americans little more than a week ago and there were reports of rapid progress by the Eighth beyond Cassino. They had lost two guns and over thirty men. The Commandant ordered Furigo to hand over all livestock, wine and grain. He took over the farmhouse as his headquarters. The barn and outhouses were occupied by his men. Furigo and his wife with their two daughters, the Gallianis with the ‘French’ girl, and these two women who were born in Itri and had worked on the farm since their husbands had been killed in the desert, were forced to sleep in the open.
The Germans fired their 88’s steadily until the following afternoon in an attempt to stem the crossing of the fosse. The two women described the scene volubly with many gesticulations. Repeatedly they pointed to the ruined bulk of Itri, the thick fortress walls of which towered above the valley farm, cracked and broken.
It had been blasted by bombers and ground to rubble by the artillery. From the shelter of a stone wall they had watched their little town gradually disintegrate and wilt away in great spouting billows of dust and debris. Then the roar of the guns had slackened and the chatter of machine guns and thud of mortars had taken up the symphony of death. The German battery brought their guns out of action, hitched up and began to move off. But before they went two soldiers began to throw petrol on to the straw in the barn and on to the door posts of the outhouses, and even the farmhouse itself. They set fire to the barn first and then one by one the outhouses.
But when they went to the house Furigo, who had built it with his own hands, rushed up to them, pleading. Galliani was with him. The soldiers thrust him aside and went to the little wooden porch of the house, one carrying a tin of petrol and the other a torch made of petrol-soaked rag tied to the end of a stick.
As the soldier with the can splashed petrol on to the wood of the porch Furigo seized his arm. He was crying, pleading, on his knees. The soldier brought his boot up sharply, catching the farmer on the chin. And as he fell back he tipped the rest of the petrol on to him. Without hesitation the other thrust the flaming brand against the wretched man’s clothing. Furigo rose with a terrible shriek — he was a sheet of flame. The women said that for a moment they saw him, running, lit up by the flames, his eyes wide, his mouth open, shrieking terribly. Then his flesh blackened and suddenly he had seemed to shrivel and collapse.
At the same time a shot rang out. Galliani, who had been struggling to prevent the soldier from setting fire to the wretched man, staggered and fell with blood oozing from a throat wound. Furigo’s wife, who had followed her husband, watched him burn alive and then with a shriek turned on the Germans and attacked them with her bare hands. They shot her too — in the face. Then they threw her body and Galliani’s into the porch and set light to it.
‘The smell of burned flesh was in the valley for days,’ one of the women said. Her eyes were dilated. She was reliving the ghastly scene as she told it to us.
‘And Signora Galliani and the girl?’ I asked.
There had been no work, no food but what they could beg from the Americans passing through. The Signora knew of a man who owned a farm at Percile up in the Abruzzi to the east of Roma. Early in July she and the girl had left Itri, walking north along the dusty road towards Rome.
I looked round the olive groves, so serene and quiet in the hot sun. It seemed incredible that these silvery-leaved trees had once been dumb witnesses to the horrible scene that these two women had described. I thanked them and gave them some money, and we went back down the track leaving a swirling cloud of dust rolling in our tyre tracks.
‘Fertile?’ Boyd asked as we reached the road.
I nodded.
The driver turned left and went down the valley to Fondi and Terracino. Round the towering quarry-scarred headland we launched out on the arrow-straight road that runs through the Pontine Marshes to the Alban Hills and the Appian Way into Rome. We stopped once near Terracino to get the dust out of our throats with cocomero, the red country melon of Italy that is full of pips and water, and again at Genzano where we had good vino bianco in a little trattoria perched high above a small lake clutched in the bowl of what had once been a crater.
The map which we had brought with us showed Percile to the east of Tivoli. ‘We’d better stay the night in Rome,’ I suggested to Boyd.
The Eternal City seemed strange without the mass of khaki that had filled its wide pavements to overflowing when last I had seen it. We came into the city by way of the Colosseum and that monstrous wedding cake of a monument that dominates the Piazza Venezia. The Via del Tritone, once the Broadway of Rome with more GI pick-ups to its credit than Shaftesbury Avenue before D-Day, looked comparatively deserted. There were fewer bicycles and fewer tarts.
I went straight to the Hotel de la Ville where I had stayed a night when it was crowded with British and American war correspondents just after the Fifth Army had entered the city. The Fascist name, Albergo Citta, had been dropped.
After booking a room on the seventh floor with a terrace, I fixed Boyd and the Italian driver up at a Swiss pensione opposite. Back in my room I was suddenly conscious of a sense of loneliness. I went out to the terrace and looked across the mellow brickwork of the ancient city to the great crouching bulk of St. Peter’s dome beyond the Tiber. Back in the dim past of the war I had stood on one of these terraces and looked across to the Gianicolo, and I had the same feeling now as then — of a city that was outside the reality of life.
Rome is a city, founded on religion, that has degenerated to a point where its people pay lip-service only to its five hundred churches and to the great sprawling palaces of the Vatican, living a life of pleasure in which any sense of responsibility to the world at large is totally lacking. That was what the war correspondents had told me that first night in the hotel bar. Whilst the guns were thundering at Trasimene and there was starvation in the refugee-crowded back streets, Rome society had talked mostly of parties and how nice it had been the year before when they could go out in their cars to villas at Frascati and Tivoli and Ostia for the hot summer months.
A girl came out on to the terrace of the neighbouring room and shot me a quick glance beneath a mop of dark hair. She wore a white evening gown cut low to disclose the swell of full sun-tanned breasts. She leaned upon the balustrade and looked down on to the roof garden across the street where people were sitting at ease in the evening sun watching two children playing hide-and-seek with shrill voices in and out of the green shrubs.
A thick-set man with an almost bald head came out and joined her on the terrace. They held hands for a minute or two looking out across the warm bricks of the ancient city to that monstrosity of white marble in the Piazza Venezia, that looks more like a monument to the fallen pretensions of fascism than a memorial to the dead of the First World War. Then they went back into their room.
That is Rome — old men, rich in corruption, and smart attractive women with no souls, offering their bodies in fee for security with side-kicks on the quiet for pleasure.
I turned back into my room, the sense of loneliness strong in me. It was a feeling that not even the exotic warmth of a bath could dispel. But as I lay relaxed in the soapy water with the sunlight slanting in through the open french windows, I understood the reason for it. For three months now I had been married to a ship. For three months I had been fully occupied, mentally and physically. I had been living with men who were alive and interested in doing a job. Now I was alone for the first time since my arrival in Trevedra — and I was alone in this pleasure city where people went to bed together too often and loved too seldom. When I had been here before the essential rottenness of its way of life had been half-hidden beneath the purposeful khaki figures of men who knew where they were going and intended to get there. Now Rome had been handed back to the Romans. The little men with bad teeth and a penchant for fish and chips and their big slouching, gum-chewing, hunker-squatting allies were gone. And I was in civvies instead of a naval uniform.