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Italy’s surrender precipitated a mass migration of British prisoners of war, set free from camps in the north of the country to undertake treks through the Apennines towards the Allied lines. A defining characteristic of these odysseys, many of which lasted months, was the succour such men received from local people. Peasant kindness was prompted by an instinctive human sympathy, rather than enthusiasm for the Allied cause, which deeply moved its beneficiaries. The Germans punished civilians who assisted escapers by the destruction of their homes, and often by death, yet sanctions proved ineffectual: thousands of British soldiers were sheltered by tens of thousands of Italian country folk whose courage and charity represented one of the noblest aspects of Italy’s unhappy part in the war. Canadian Farley Mowat arrived in the country with a contempt for its people, but changed his mind after living among them. ‘Now it turns out they’re the ones who are really the salt of the earth. The ordinary folk, that is. They have to work so hard to stay alive it’s a wonder they aren’t as sour as green lemons, but instead they’re full of fun and laughter. They’re also tough as hell … They ought to hate our guts as much as Jerry’s but the only ones I wouldn’t trust are the priests, lawyers, and the big shopkeepers, landowners and such.’

The wild Italian countryside and the hospitable customs of its inhabitants prompted desertions from the Allied armies on a scale greater than in any other theatre. The rear areas teemed with military fugitives, men ‘on the trot’ – overwhelmingly infantry, because they recognised their poor prospects of survival at the front. Thirty thousand British deserters were estimated by some informed senior officers to be at liberty in Italy in 1944–45 – the equivalent of two divisions – and around half that number of Americans. These are quite extraordinary figures, which deserve more notice in narratives of the campaign, though it should be noted that official histories set the desertion numbers much lower, partly because they omit those who, by a technically important distinction, were deemed merely to be ‘absent without leave’. In a rest area behind the front, Lt. Alex Bowlby chanced on a man who had quit his own platoon, dining with an Italian family. The errant soldier finished his meal, left the house and stole the bewildered young officer’s jeep before anyone thought to stop him. Amidst the chronic discomforts and terrors of the campaign, Bowlby noted that most of his men performed their duties at the edge of mutiny. One would-be deserter removed by the military police shouted back defiantly at his comrades, ‘I’ll be alive when you’re all fucking dead.’ Alexander itched to reintroduce the death penalty as a deterrent, and a British divisional commander, Bill Penney, agreed: ‘Shooting in the early days would probably have been an effective prophylactic.’ But capital punishment was deemed politically unacceptable.

Both the Germans and the Allies distributed broadsheets to the population, making competing demands for their aid. Iris Origo wrote: ‘The peasants read these leaflets with bewildered anxiety as to their own fate, and complete indifference (in most cases) to the main issue: Che sara di noi? – What will become of us? All that they want is peace – to get back to their land – and to save their sons. They live in a state of chronic uncertainty about what to expect from the arrival of soldiers of any nationality. They might bring food or massacre, liberation or pillage.’ On 12 June 1944, Origo was in the garden of her castello rehearsing Sleeping Beauty with her resident complement of refugee children, when a party of heavily armed German troops descended from a truck.

Full of fear, she asked what they wanted, to receive an unexpected answer: ‘“Please – wouldn’t the children sing for us?” The children sing O Tannenbaum and Stille Nacht (which they learned last Christmas) – and tears come into the men’s eyes. “Die Heimat – it takes us back to die Heimat!” So they climb into their lorry