Still convalescing at home in the village of San Pietro in Casale, north-east of Bologna, William had in fact been on a train in the station at San Pietro when he heard the news of the armistice and had immediately taken himself to the nearest German unit in Poggio Renatico, a Luftwaffe base, and offered his services. Sent home again, he soon after met one of his former officers, who had also been wounded in North Africa. ‘Don’t join the Germans,’ he told William. ‘It’s ugly to fight in someone else’s uniform. Let’s hang on a bit and see what happens.’ William had done just that, and had soon learned that his old battalion commander, Major Fulvio Balisti, was back in Italy thanks to a prisoner exchange of badly and permanently disabled prisoners at the end of the North African campaign, and was serving as the new Fascist Provincial Head of Brescia. William had gone to see him and had immediately been offered the chance to stay in Brescia, serving with Balisti. However, he had also learned that the core of the surviving Young Fascists were now based in Maderno on Lake Garda, where they were serving with the personal bodyguard of Alessandro Pavolini, the Neo-Fascist Party Secretary in the newly formed Fascist Republic. Without much hesitation, William had gone to join them.
By May, William was a sergeant with the Bir el Gobi Company, as the bodyguard were known. Named after the Italians’ most famous stand in North Africa, they wore Italian grey-green uniforms and Fascist black shirts. It wasn’t soldiering as William had known it in North Africa, but he was happy enough – pleased to be with some of his old comrades and glad that his own sense of honour remained intact.
Others had been equally concerned about the betrayal and dishonour of the armistice, including Marchese Antonio Origo. At their beautiful country palazzo in the Val d’Orcia in southern Tuscany, the marchese and his wife, Iris, had spent the evening of 8 September in grim silence, listening with mounting unease to the locals rejoicing and lighting bonfires in celebration. Iris, on the other hand, had been more concerned about what would follow. She had been filled with a sense of foreboding, guessing – quite correctly – that Germany would continue fighting.
Iris had been born in England the daughter of an English mother and American father, and had had a particularly peripatetic yet privileged childhood. Around the time of her birth, in August 1902, her father contracted tuberculosis, and so the family had gone in search of warmer climes and clean air: Italy, then California, then Switzerland, then back to Italy again, where despite his TB, her father became American Vice-Consul in Milan. Iris was eight when her father died, but between holidays with her grandparents in Ireland, she remained with her mother in Italy. Her father’s wish had always been that she should be brought up in France or Italy or ‘somewhere where she does not belong’, so that she would grow up both cosmopolitan and free of the normal tug of patriotism.40
Consequently, she was still based in Florence when, in 1920, she was ‘launched’ as a debutante into Anglo-Florentine society. It was during this time that she met her future husband, Antonio, the illegitimate son of an Italian aristocrat and a man ten years her senior. They married in 1922 and a little over a year later bought a large estate south of Pienza and Montepulciano, in southern Tuscany, called ‘La Foce’. Antonio had no desire for either business or diplomacy – for which he was trained – and instead yearned to farm; and in this still wild but beautiful part of Italy, some sixty miles south of Florence and a hundred north of Rome, they realised they could create a new and worthwhile life for themselves.
The Val d’Orcia had, like many parts of rural Italy, been neglected over the centuries. Soil erosion and misuse had left large parts of the estate resembling a lunar landscape, but Iris and Antonio soon breathed new life into it, and by the late 1930s they had re-landscaped much of the land, established around fifty tenant farms, and introduced more modern farming techniques. While Antonio oversaw the running of his tenant farms, Iris set up a health centre and a school for the estate children, which also provided evening classes for the adults.
Antonio had never had much of a taste for politics, and consequently had never openly opposed Mussolini and the Fascist regime, nor had he denounced it; neither had Iris, although both had been privately opposed to the war. Their concerns had been the safeguarding of Italy, and more specifically, La Foce and all the people for whose lives they were responsible. At the outset of war, Iris had gone to Rome to work for the Italian Red Cross, but two years later, expecting her third child, she had returned home for good. Soon after, the Allies had begun regularly bombing Italian cities and so Iris and Antonio began taking in a number of refugee children, both orphans and evacuees, from Turin and Genoa.
With the war now having reached Italy itself, the futures of these children and the many families in Val d’Orcia had seemed under an even greater threat. In the days that had followed the armistice, the Val d’Orcia, as elsewhere, had been flung into a state of chaos. News had been scarce, with no guidelines about what to do or what the Italian people could expect. The gates of the nearby prisoner of war camp had been opened, and the neighbouring countryside had become flooded with POWs. On the morning of 8 September, there had been 79,543 Allied POWs interned throughout Italy. Two days later around 50,000 of them were loose in the Italian countryside in what had been the biggest mass-escape ever. Iris had found a large number in a creek near Castelluccio, hiding from any Germans that might pass by, and clearly feeling rather bewildered and unsure what to do next. She had given a British corporal a map and a few Italian phrases and then on her return home had met one of their contadini – peasant farmers – in his uniform and on his way back to his regiment from leave. ‘What am I to do now?’ he had asked her.41 He had just met a number of other soldiers, now in plain clothes, who had left their barracks in Bologna and Verona. All those able to run away had been doing so, he had been told, while the word on the street was that the rest had been rounded up by the Germans and packed off to concentration camps. Wild rumours and a mounting sense of panic had been rife. ‘Later in the day,’ Iris had noted, ‘yet other fugitive soldiers turn up.’42
By the beginning of May, the Origos, like the vast majority of Italians, were doing what they could to keep a low profile, trying to safeguard everything that was dear to them, and praying they would safely make it through the war. Yet Iris’s fears on 8 September had been well founded: Italy had become a place of suspicion and menace. ‘Nothing has been uglier in the story of these tragic months,’ she noted in her diary on 5 May, ‘than the avalanche of denunciations which have been showered on both the Italian and German officials. Professional rivalry, personal jealousy, the smallest ancient spite – all these now find vent in reports to the Fascist police, and cause the suspected person to be handed over to prison, to questioning by torture, or to a firing squad. No one feels safe.’43
Another doing his best to get by was Cosimo Arrichiello, who had been living in the small village of San Bernardo in the Stura Valley, south of Turin ever since fleeing the Pellizzari Barracks the previous September. He had been fortunate that the Bolti family had taken him in. Harbouring former Italian soldiers and Allied POWs was a crime punishable by death, yet there had never been any question of him being turned away. In return, Cosimo worked on the small family farm. For this, he was very thankful, and did his best not to let them, or himself, down.
He found the work extremely tough, however. A sickly child, he had not developed into a particularly physical person, and was far more interested in culture and the arts than sport and the great outdoors. Nor had he been a natural soldier, and in more than two-and-a-half years in uniform had barely moved from the barracks at Bra and had seen no action whatsoever. For a man who had been vehemently against the war from the outset, this lack of action had suited him well, and since his desertion he had had no further interest at all in fighting, whether it be for the Germans, the Allies, or the embryonic bands of partisans that had gradually emerged in the weeks and months that had followed the armistice.
Yet Cosimo had been luckier than many