Free Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby

the necessity of firing a shot or of laying down their lives, had issued too many such orders to too many troops who invariably ended up by having to lay down their arms ignominiously, in order to save their skins. These Italian soldiers would have been mad to die in defence of an empty building, and they didn’t.
    With my pack on my shoulder I hopped through the desertedcorridors towards the back door. On the way, amongst the debris on the floor, I found a little book with the Italian tricolore on the cover, entitled ‘Say it in Italian’ , or something similar, and I picked it up. By the time I reached the corner of the field where the rest of my company were, they were just beginning to move off through one of the several gaps which had been cut in the wire.
    There, the two parachutists were waiting for me. They looked enormous in their camouflaged smocks, in which they must have been roasting, but without which any parachutist feels naked. They had been relieved of their packs so that they could help me.
    They told me to take it easy and we went out through one of the gaps in the wire in the sweltering midday heat, and as soon as we were beyond it one of the British orderlies in the camp, a small, nut-brown man, a trooper in some cavalry regiment, came up and said, ‘It’s all right. You got a horse! Name of Mora, quiet as a lamb.’ And there she was, standing with a stolid-looking Italian soldier in the shade of some vines, taking mouthfuls of grass, swishing her tail at the flies, looking contented and well-fed. She was a little horse.
    The parachutists were delighted to have my weight off their shoulders. They hoisted me into the saddle, half-strangled by my pack strap which was twisted round my neck, and then the soldier led Mora forward, chewing a straw, happy to be seconded for this easy duty, free of the obligation to sell his life to no purpose, while the rest of the people in our company moved on ahead in the shade of the vines, picking great bunches of grapes and churning the earth into dust.
    For me the journey was a nightmare. Although the country was dead flat it was intersected by irrigation ditches (the same ditches that the escapers who had had themselves buried in the field had spoken of with revulsion after they were re-captured).The last thing one wanted in such country was a horse. The last thing I wanted anywhere was a horse. All I knew about horses was derived from a couple of ruinous visits to some trotting races at Heliopolis. I had never been on a horse in my life and I was terrified of them. And every horse I met knew it too.
    At the first ditch Mora stopped dead on the edge of it and refused to move backwards or forwards, more like a mule than a horse. Perhaps she was a mule. She took no notice of the blows which the Italian soldier was raining on her behind with a cudgel; and I was no help at all. Every time my damaged foot touched her it was agony.
    We seemed destined to remain there for ever, but something happened to make her utter a terrific snorting, whinnying noise, rear up on her hind legs and come down with her front ones in the slime in the bottom of the ditch with a resounding splosh, which catapulted me over her head on to the far bank and hurt my ankle dreadfully.
    ‘Bloody funny, that Iti must have struck a lighted cigarette up her chuff,’ someone said.
    ‘One way of crossing the Rubicon,’ someone else said who had had a different sort of education. Everyone who witnessed it was cheered by this spectacular happening.
    Then the parachutists picked me up and lugged me over a whole series of similar ditches while Mora, who had crossed them unencumbered, waited for me to catch up.
    Finally, we emerged on to a narrow lane. In a field to one side of it men and women wearing wide-brimmed straw hats were harvesting wheat with sickles. They stopped work as the head of the column approached and looked alarmed, but when they realised that we were unarmed prisoners from the camp