With the help of sympathetic locals, one of whom was later to become his wife, he spent a year in hiding, being recaptured only late in 1944. He subsequently married the girl who helped him to escape, and for the next fifty years, his wife Wanda was at his side on many adventures.

Love and War in the Apennines - Newby, Eric: 9780007367894 Love and War in the Apennines - Newby, Eric: 9780007367894

I don't know how Newby manages to give such a light, sometimes amusing, touch to serious privations, hardship and fear without being annoying. Your details from Facebook will be used to provide you with tailored content, marketing and ads in line with our Privacy Policy. Newby had been captured in a failed raid with the SBS, and by bad luck had broken his ankle a few days before release. After the Armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces in 1943, the author left the prisoner-of-war camp in which he had been held for a year, PG 49 at Fontanellato, and evaded the Germans by going to ground high in the mountains and forests south of the Po River. All these years later, it makes sense, now that I live in a similar area in the Tuscan Apennines that he describes so beautifully.

This memoir tells the story of his captivity, his escape and the subsequent period that he spent hiding in the inhospitable terrain around the village of Fontellanato. Taken to the mainland, he recounts the rather comical attempts of the Italian guards to deal with their prisoners.

Love and War in the Apennines - Wikipedia Republished // WIKI 2 Love and War in the Apennines - Wikipedia Republished // WIKI 2

Relying on his wits and the help of charismatic locals, he retreats to ever more remote locations in the Appenine Mountains to evade the advancing German military. Once free he is moved from place to place to evade capture by the Germans, giving a fascinating insight into life in rural Italy back then.This, you imagine, is where Newby learnt his compassion and his willingness to understand other people. His captivity by the Italians would not last - Mussolini was deposed shortly after his incarceration and he was liberated before the Germans could take over his prison.

Love and War (TV Movie 2001) - IMDb In Love and War (TV Movie 2001) - IMDb

As a narrative, it has the picaresque quality of The 39 Steps, or Rogue Male, with a fugitive darting from place to place, at the mercy of strangers. For me, this was probably the highlight of my reading experience along with the description of the clothing that the prisoners were wearing. It is this mutual understanding, this symbiosis, that underpins the emotion running alongside the pain in Love and War in the Apennines. Later, stranded in a canoe that was filling with water, he confesses: ‘I was frightened, more frightened than I had ever been. Based on the true story of a British soldier who must be left behind after being injured as the Nazis approach, he wanders throughout Italy trying in vain to make his way back to Allied forces, his country, whereever, and meets a young Italian girl who translates for him.In this region, people made mattresses out of leaf-covered boughs and cheese from ewe’s milk formed into little rounds.