The Sound of the Hours by Karen Campbell

Author:Karen Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408857366
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-05-29T14:24:44+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

By the time the light rose fully, it was done. Smoke could be seen from miles away; it might have been chimney smoke. Or a bonfire. Or dust as the Panzergrenadiers rolled out.

All summer, the refugees had followed the hard mountain light. Old women, scared Jews. Babes in arms and children who could barely toddle, yet knew, instinctively, to be quiet. Hundreds of them, gathering in remote hamlets, trudging there on jagged roads which veered to the plunging edge and back. Far in the distance, a flash of sea. Viareggio was somewhere on that winding coastline. Older folk could remember trips there: looming promenades and art nouveau hotels.

Air-dropped leaflets littered the tracks. Full of exclamation marks. People of Italy! Help us help you! Work with us to block the Bosch retreat! The Allies have got your back!

La Resistenza handed them out. Men who knew the land, knew the locals; they could melt and drift like clouds. But they needed the folk around them too, for food, shelter, bandages, eyes. They needed people’s donkeys to tote their makeshift bombs; they needed women to walk through a German patrol, fuse wire hidden in their skirts. At the very least, they needed trust.

But Kesselring was clear. All resistance was to be punished.

Kesselring. A sharp sting of a word, which caught in people’s throats like phlegm. The steady summerlight shone on other leaflets. Traitors will be shot. Earth will be scorched. Ten Italians will die for every German killed.

Each cluster of hilltop towns had their band of partisans, and the folk who lived alongside. All that summerlight and weeping rain, turning on the earth as three thousand souls were slaughtered. Why would Sant’Anna be any different? Joe had thought it would. Why? Because it was beautiful and remote, clefted in the rock? Because the light was so high here it might have shone from God Himself?

The light had tumbled over the 16th SS Panzergrenadiers all summer, as they mopped up partigiani. It shone with them along the Gothic Line, the Apuan Alps, the Versilia hills. And it stared unblinking as the partisans fought back. With every indignity that was inflicted, why would you not? But the Nazis were so efficient, they went beyond being men of their word, and the light rose wearily on a day that required no German deaths at all, to provoke a massacre.

On a soft summer morning, four columns of Panzergrenadiers marched up the mountain to Sant’Anna di Stazzema. They arrived at first light. Villagers fired a flare to signal the usual unwelcome guests: folk hid their grain, took the animals inside. Some men and boys fled to the woods. It would be another rastrellamento. Because you don’t get reprisals for a thing you haven’t done.

Ah, but Kesselring was canny. Why wait for a partisan strike at all? If you have no villagers to shield the partisans, you have no village from which an ambush might be launched. Why had they not thought of this earlier? It seemed that retreat and the high mountain air were clarifying German minds.

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