‘Love and War in the Apennines’ by Eric Newby

Eric Newby was 18 when he sailed into Belfast, completing a circumnavigation aboard one of the last tall ships hauling cargo when World War II broke out. He thought he might write up his adventure for a magazine, but he enlisted instead.

By 1942, Newby was a 22-year-old lieutenant in the Special Boat Service, an elite branch of the Black Watch stationed on Malta, when he and his team of three were sent by submarine with a couple of folding kayaks to attack a German air base on Sicily.

If that sounds suicidal, his fate was made all the more clear to Newby when the manager of the Malta officers’ club tracked him down to collect an open bar tab before he left, correctly assuming that he would never return.

And that’s just the first chapter.

It sounds very heroic, but no one was more surprised than Newby himself when his team managed to actually blow up some things on Sicily, only to be later fished out of the sea during a botched escape. It was a pleasant surprise, he recalled from the depths of hypothermia, since he expected to be immediately shot as a saboteur. But he was captured by Italians, instead of Germans, and he concluded their hearts just weren’t in it.

Instead, Newby and several hundred other prisoners of war found themselves moved to Fontanella, in Northern Italy, where they were unexpectedly — and mistakenly — freed after the Italian armistice in 1943. There was much confusion among their elderly jailers, who were delighted to be relieved of a degrading duty, and the prisoners themselves, young men in their prime who had no idea what to do.

As so often happens in moments of manly crisis, women stepped in to assist the guileless boys.

The prisoners had made a pastime of flirting with local girls during their incarceration, whistling, hollering, and dropping suggestive notes from the parapets of their keep to the population of local females as they went harmlessly about their daily errands in the lanes below. These same men were stunned when the teenage girls they’d ogled from afar revealed themselves as members of the resistance, with plans and means for their escape before the Germans came for them.  

While most soldiers headed for the coast and the British fleet, Newby was invalided by a broken ankle. One girl he’d admired from afar, a Serbian teenage refugee named Vanda Škof (he called her Wanda), took a liking to him despite himself and, against the better judgment of her family, moved Newby by car, bicycle, and mule into the Apennine mountains, where he lived in haylofts, caves, and under trees for months, working for remote farmers in exchange for food and shelter.

What is remarkable about this odyssey, beyond Newby’s warm descriptions of places and people and the scant food they shared with him — and the evidence of his own fortitude that he, being British, never mentions — is the courage of the local populace, including Wanda. Any one of them would have been tortured to death by local militia for assisting a fugitive POW, but they did it anyway. Whatever fear they once had of the fascist government had long since turned to loathing for its blatant corruption, coupled with the conscription of their own boys to face miserable fates in distant lands.

One old farmer, long past fear after missing his own son on the Eastern Front, warned Newby: “They will come for you in the winter, when there is no place left to hide.” And he was right. There was no more cover when the leaves fell, and the snow revealed his tracks. Another local farmer turned Newby in, and he spent the rest of the war in POW camps in Czechoslovakia and Germany.

Twenty years later, Newby had a chance to meet the man who betrayed him when he and Wanda returned to the Apennines to buy a crumbling farmhouse, which they spent the next two decades renovating (See “A Small Place in Italy,” 1994). Newby declined the invitation, but was told the man had only wanted to protect his village from retribution in case the fascists found Newby first. He had refused the reward out of shame.

Newby went on to become one of the premier travel writers in the golden age of the genre, and finally got around to recounting his round-the-world voyage (“The Last Grain Race,” 1956).

It will come as no surprise to certain readers that Wanda became a major character in some of Newby’s later work, as both an essential and at times unwilling companion. In a tale of an ill-advised journey down the Ganges in 1963, Wanda confesses that she has never been more unhappy in her life — including as a starving refugee on the run from Nazis — than when she is with Newby. And then she brews a pot of tea from the sacred and all-healing river water, which they mix with rum to toast their good fortune on reaching the Bay of Bengal.