October Men

'Indeed?' Boselli wasn't interested in anything Frugoni had done before he reached the mountains, but it wouldn't do to seem too eager to reveal that fact.

'No—we were in billets just outside Salerno—good billets, too. Then the bloody Germans turfed us out—turfed us all out, and disarmed us too. Shot two of the officers right in front of our billet when they wouldn't play ball, they did—

they knew what was in the wind right enough, the Germans did. What they called Panzer grenadiers— trigger-happy sods, they were. We reckoned afterwards that someone had told 'em the Yanks and the English were going to land there—

which they did, of course. . . .'

'But you stayed and fought?'

'Without our guns?' Frugoni started to laugh again, and then stopped as though he had remembered the more heroic dummy2

role he had to sustain now. 'No—'cause we wanted to, but without our guns, see, an' with the place crawling with German tanks—well, this mate of mine and me thought we'd have more chance up Naples way—'

More chance of getting home, more likely. In a word, Frugoni had deserted at the first opportunity.

'More chance of resisting the enemy?'

'That's right, sir. But when we got to Naples things were real bad there, I can tell you—they'd been fighting the Germans in the streets there, the people had. Even the little kids—they're bloodthirsty— and everywhere they'd blocked the streets with trams and lorries so the Germans were shooting everyone on sight, practically.' He shook his head unbelievingly at the memory. 'The main roads were jammed with supply columns heading south—there was no chance of gettin' through 'em—gettin' through to join up with some proper unit, I mean.'

Frugoni had jumped out of the frying pan into a very hot fire: he had escaped formal captivity with his regiment only to find himself in the midst of a popular insurrection. Even Boselli could remember the tales of Neapolitan carnage which percolated northwards as the enraged inhabitants of that dangerous city had turned on the Germans with medieval fury . . . tales of stranded tank crews parboiled and houses full of women and children put to the torch. It had been from such horrors that men like George Ruelle had risen.

dummy2

'So you headed for the hills?'

'It was the only thing to do, seein' as how things were, you see

—'

'And met the General.'

'Yes.' For one second Frugoni failed to keep the bitterness out of his voice. 'That was a bit of—luck—for us, of course.'

Of course! Twice the wretched man had fled from his duty, though each time in circumstances which would have daunted better men and for which Boselli could not in his heart wholly blame him. And all in order to fall into the clutches of the one man who would make very sure that he had no third opportunity of escaping! Fate had surely played a cat-and-mouse game with Private Frugoni.

'Number One on the Breda, I was for the General, Signor Boselli, sir.' All the whine and pretence had gone from the voice now; this at least was genuine. 'An' that's a rotten bad gun, too—the Breda 30—a proper swine to clean, with that oil pump in it. An' it's got no carrying handle, either: I'd like to make the silly fucker that designed it carry it up the mountainsides that I had to, carrying it like a bleedin' baby

—'

'That would be a responsible job, I'm sure,' Boselli cut through the old soldier's complaint. 'The General must have trusted you, then.'

'The General. . . .' The memory half strangled the words and then re-injected the old mendacious note. 'A major, 'e was dummy2

then, major in the Bersaglieri—'e made us jump, Christ 'e did, an' no mistake. We blocked the road from Campobasso for nearly a week—took a regiment of their Alpine troops, what they call Jaegers, to shift us. An' they wouldn't have done it then if the bastard hadn't let us down.'

It was odd, but under the hate which lay like a half-hidden substratum beneath the pretence of soldierly pride there was a thin vein of genuine admiration. It was probably true that—

The bastard?

That was the word which had been lodged in his mind like a tiny thorn under the skin: the General had used it yesterday—

had used it twice in one short space of time. And yet under ordinary circumstances his language was always notably free of such words—beyond an occasional 'for the love of God' in moments of exceptional stress the General's vocabulary was as disciplined as a priest's.

Boselli's own mind had been fully extended at the time, yet those two 'bastards' had pricked nevertheless; and more, there had been something curious about the sound of them—

the emphasis had been too evenly distributed, just as it had been in Frugoni's tone: too even and lacking in vehemence. . . .

And then he had it: it had quite simply been a name and not an epithet-not 'the bastard' but more precisely 'The Bastard'!

He examined his fingernails. 'You mean Ruelle?' he said dummy2

casually.

'Ah—I guess you've heard a thing or two about The Bastard, eh?' Frugoni leered at him. 'You'll 'ave to be careful puttin'