Naples '44: A Wartime Diary

Volunteers from the Armed Forces in World War II found to possess

linguistic qualifications were frequently directed into the

Intelligence Corps. At the end of this fortnight,

trainees considered to have shown promise were interviewed by the

selection officer, who went through a pretence of discussing with them

their future.

What the trainee did not realise was that, however encouraging the report

on the major's desk, his fate had been instantly settled from the

moment of the officer's first quick scrutiny of his face.

The selection officer believed that blue was the colour of truth.

To the blue-eyed trainees, therefore,

went the responsible and sometimes glamorous jobs,

while the rest were tipped into the dustbin of what was then called

the Field Security Police.

The escape from this predicament was a posting to an overseas section,

employed primarily as linguists, to bridge the gap between

the military and the civilian population.

On the 1st of September 1943,

I was posted to 312 Field Security Service,

who had been temporarily attached to headquarters staff of the American

Fifth Army. On the 5th of September,

we sailed in the Duchess of Bedford to join the invasion convoy

bound for Salerno.

This was the greatest invasion in this war so far,

probably the greatest in human history.

The sea was crowded to the horizon with uncountable ships,

but we were as lost and ineffective as babes in the wood.

No-one knew where the enemy was,

but the bodies on the beach at least proved he existed.

-MALE VOICE IN A SEA OF NOISE:

-There was fighting on the beach

and there was fighting up ahead,

and there was fighting in the harbour and on the banks.

For a while, it didn't matter whether you were in the infantry,

the air forces or the navy.

The fire was hot all around. We could hear big navy guns and the

anti-aircraft guns and the roaring of the dogfighters out at sea.

-Out of the range of our boats...

-VOICE BECOMES INDISTINCT

MELANCHOLY PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

At about 11 o'clock, an excited American officer

dashed up in a Jeep.

We'd been issued with a Webley pistol and five rounds

of ammunition apiece. Most of us had never fired a gun.

With these weapons, we were ordered to assist in the defence of army

headquarters against the Mark V and Tiger tanks that were now

rolling towards us.

What this officer did not tell us was that he and the rest of

the officers were quietly pulling out and abandoning their men.

HEAVY ARTILLERY FIRE

Outright panic now started

and spread among the American troops left behind.

In the belief that our position had been infiltrated by German infantry,

they began to shoot each other,

and there were blood-chilling screams from men hit by the bullets.

Then, at four o'clock, we started up our motorbikes, and by God's mercy,

avoiding the panic-stricken fire directed from cover at anything that

moved, reached this field,

with its rabble of shocked and demoralised soldiery.

We crouched in our slit trench under the pink fluttering leaves of the

olives, and watched the fires come closer and the night slowly pass.

We set out to explore a little of our immediate environment.

As the sun began to sink splendidly into the sea at our back,

we wandered at random through this wood, full of chirping birds,

and suddenly found ourselves at the wood's edge.

We looked out into an open space

on a scene of unearthly enchantment.

A few hundred yards away, stood in a row,

the three perfect temples of Paestum -

pink and glowing and glorious in the sun's last rays.

It came as an illumination -

one of the great experiences of life.

We were admiring the splendid husk of the Temple of Neptune when the

war came to us in the shape of a single attacking plane.

Hearing its approach, we crouched under a lintel.

The plane swooped, opened up with its machine guns,

and then passed on to drop a single bomb on the beach,

before heading off northwards.

One of my friends felt a light tap on a pack he was wearing,

caused by a spent machine gun bullet which fell harmlessly to the ground.

The experience was, on the whole, an exhilarating one.

We appreciated the contrast involved,

and no-one experienced alarm.

In our small way, we had become seasoned to the hazards of war.

Some delicate in-built mechanism of the nerves has accepted and

acclimatised itself to a relative loss of security and minor dangers.

MALE VOICE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE

We finally got through by Jeep to Salerno,

but found a battle still going on in the outskirts of the town.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

German mortar bombs were exploding in the middle of a small square,

only 100 yards from Security headquarters.

Here, I saw an ugly sight,

a British officer interrogating an Italian civilian,

and repeatedly hitting him about the head with a chair,

treatment which the Italian, his face a mask of blood,

suffered with stoicism.

At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered

successful, the officer called in a private of the Hampshires and asked

him, in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner,

"Would you like to take this man away and shoot him?"

The private's reply was to spit on his hands and say,

"I don't mind if I do, sir."

The most revolting episode I have seen since joining the forces.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS

Kitted out temporarily as an American private with bucket helmet,

hip-clinging trousers and gated boots,

I picked up a lift in an American truck going in the direction of

Naples, which had fallen three days before,

and where I supposed my section would already be installed.

At Battipaglia, it was all change,

with an opportunity for close- quarters study of the effects of

the carpet bombing ordered by General Clark.

The general has become the destroying angel of southern Italy.

Here in Battipaglia, we had an Italian Guernica -

a town transformed in a matter of seconds to a heap of rubble.

An old man who came to beg said that practically nobody had been left

alive, and that the bodies were still under the ruins.

From the stench, and from the sight of the flies streaming like black

smoke into and out of the holes in the ground,

this was entirely believable.

GUNFIRE

Somewhere a few miles short of Naples proper, the road

widened into something like a square, dominated by a vast,

semi-derelict public building,

plastered with notices and with every window blown in.

Here, several trucks had drawn up,

and our driver pulled in to the kerb and stopped, too.

One of the trucks was carrying American army supplies,

and soldiers, immediately joined by several from our truck,

were crowding round this and helping themselves

to whatever they could lay hands on.

Thereafter, crunching through the broken glass that littered the

pavement, each of them carrying a tin of rations,

they were streaming into the municipal building.

I followed them and found myself in a vast room crowded with jostling

soldiery. Here, a row of ladies sat

at intervals of about a yard with their backs to the wall.

These women were dressed in their street clothes and had the ordinary,

well-washed, respectable shopping

and gossiping faces of working-class housewives.

By the side of each woman stood a small pile of tins,

and it soon became clear that it was possible to make love to any one of

them in this very public place by adding another tin to the pile.

The women kept absolutely still.

They said nothing,

and their faces were as empty of expression as graven images.

Once again, reality had betrayed the dream, and the air fell limp.

FAINT OPERA MUSIC

-ARCHIVE:

-On October the 1st 1943,

the armies of liberation entered Naples.

UPBEAT JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

CHEERING AND INDISTINCT CHATTER

WATER SPLASHES

The city of Naples smells of charred wood, with ruins everywhere,

sometimes completely blocking the streets,

bomb craters and abandoned trams.

The main problem is water.

Two tremendous air raids, on August 4th and September 6th,

smashed up all the services,

and there has been no proper water supply since the first of these.

PEOPLE CLAMOUR

To complete the Allies' work of destruction,

German demolition squads have gone round,

blowing up anything of value to the city that still worked.

Such has been the great public thirst of the past few days that

we are told that people have experimented with sea water

in their cooking,

and families have been seen squatting along the seashore round

weird contraptions,

with which they hope to distil sea water for drinking purposes.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of Italians,

most of them women and children,

were in the fields all along the roadside,

driven by their hunger to search for edible plants.

I stopped to speak to a group of them

and they told me that they had left their homes in Naples at daybreak

and had had to walk for between two and three hours to reach the spot

where I found them, seven or eight miles out of town.

I saw other parties netting birds

and these had managed to catch a few sparrows and some tiny warblers,

which they said were common at this time of year,

attracted by the fruit in the orchards.

Along the seafront at Santa Lucia,

a similar spectacle of the desperate hunt for food.

Inexplicably, no boats were allowed out yet to fish.

Nothing, absolutely nothing

that could be tackled by the human digestive system

is wasted in Naples.

There is a persistent rumour

of a decline in the cat population of the city.

-ALL:

-Ah...

-ARCHIVE:

-The purpose of AMG is to prevent chaos.

Therefore, immediately on occupying a country,

AMG re-establishes civilian government,

brings back order and law.

Field manual 27-5 has it in black and white.

"The object of civil affairs control through military government is to

"assist military operations, to further national policies

"and to fulfil the obligation of

"the occupying forces under international law."

There it is, on paper.

I arrived to find that we had been installed in the palace

of the princes of Satriano, at the end of Naples' impressive seafront,

the Riviera di Chiaia in the Piazza Vittoria.

The four-storey building is in the Neapolitan version

of Spanish baroque

and we occupy its principal floor at the head of a sweep of marble

staircase, with high ceilings, decorated with mouldings,

glittering chandeliers,

enormous wall mirrors and opulent gilded furniture in vaguely French

Empire style.

There are eight majestic rooms but no bathroom

and the lavatory is in a cupboard in the kitchen.

The view across the square is of clustered palms,

much statuary and the Bay of Naples.

The field security officer has done very well by us.

There were military units by the dozen all around Naples who wish to

employ Italian civilians

and all of these had to be vetted by us as security risks.

A suspects file had to be started and this was a job that fell to me.

The labour involved was immense and exceedingly tedious,

and was much complicated by the prevalence in Naples of certain

family names - Espositos and Gennaros turn up by the hundred -

and by the fact that material supplied by our own authorities for

inclusion in the official black book was often vague.

Quite frequently, suspects were not even identified by name but by such

descriptions as "of medium height," "aged between 30 and 40,"

"strikingly ugly," or, in one case,

"known to possess an obsessive fear of cats".

Life here promised to be hard-working, sometimes prosaic

and fraught with routines.

There is no notice in the palazzo to say who we are and what we are doing

here, so it's hard to understand why people assume this to be the

headquarters of the British secret police.

However, they do and we are beginning to receive a stream

of visitors, all of them offering their services as informers.

In the main, they are drawn from the professional classes

and hand over beautifully engraved cards describing them

as avvocato, dottore, ingegnere

or professore.

They are all most dignified, some impressive, and they talk in low,

conspiratorial voices.

Among the civilian contacts of these first few days,

my prize acquisition was Vincente Lattarulo,

a man steeped in the knowledge of the ways of Naples.

He proved to be one of the 4,000 lawyers of Naples, 90% of whom -

surplus to the needs of the courts - had never practised and who,

for the most part, lived in extreme penury.

Lattarulo had worked out a scientific system

of self-restraints.

He stayed most of the day in bed and, when he got up,

walked short distances along a planned itinerary,

stopping to rest every few hundred yards in a church.

He ate an evening meal only,

normally composed of a little bread dipped in olive oil,

into which was rubbed a tomato.

It appeared that Lattarulo had a secondary profession,

producing occasional windfalls of revenue.

He admitted, with a touch of pride, to acting as a zio di Roma -

an uncle from Rome - at funerals.

His qualifications were his patrician appearance

and a studied Roman accent and manner.

When the Neapolitans turn to familiarity in ingratiation,

Lattarulo shows a proper Roman aloofness and taciturnity.

This, say the Neapolitans,

who are fulsome and cloying in their greetings,

is how a real Roman gentleman speaks.

How lucky for all concerned that the liberation of Naples happened when

it did and the perfect weather of early autumn helped hardships

of all kinds to be more endurable.

From where I sat sifting wearily through the mountains

of vilification and calumny,

I could refresh myself by looking down into the narrow street

running along one side of the palazzo.

A day off on a remarkably fine Sunday for the season offered an

opportunity for further acquaintance with the neighbourhood.

This is inhabited to bursting point with working-class families,

whose custom it is to live as much as they can of their lives

out of doors -

for which reason this street is as noisy as a tropical aviary.

CHILDREN SCREAM AND MEN SHOUT

Quite early in the morning,

a family living in the house opposite carried out a table

and stood it in the street, close to their doorway.

There were a number of other such tables along the street

and constant social migrations took place,

as neighbours paid each other visits.

People called musically to each other over great distances.

The poor and the rich in Arione live side by side,

constantly rubbing elbows while appearing to be hardly conscious

of each other's presence.

300,000 of the population of Naples inhabit bassi.

In the Vicaria district,

up to three people occupy every two square metres in the basso.

All things in Naples are arranged with as much civility as possible.

-Hello, Joe!

-Hello!

5.

Here, Joe! Come on!

Neapolitans take their sex lives very seriously indeed.

A woman called Lola, whom I met at a dinner party,

arrived at HQ and asked if I could help her.

It turned out she had taken a lover who was a captain in the Royal Army

Service Corps, but as he speaks no single word of Italian,

communication can only be carried on by signs

and this gives rise to misunderstanding.

I dance with you, but I won't let you sleep with me.

Who asked you?

-You don't want to sleep with me?

-I don't want to dance with you.

-Are you crazy?

-Hm.

Watch where you put your hands, GI!

My name is Yossarian.

Watch where you put your hands, Yossarian.

Would I agree to interpret for them and settle certain basic matters?

Captain Frazer turned out to be a tall and handsome man some years

Lola's junior.

She wanted to know all about his marital status and he hers,

and they lied to each other to their hearts' content while I kept a

straight face and interpreted.

She asked me to mention to him, in as tactful a way as possible,

that comment had been caused among her neighbours because he never

called on her during the day.

Conjugal visits at midday are de rigueur in Naples.

When the meeting was over,

we went off for a drink and Frazer confided to me that something was

worrying him too.

On inspecting her buttocks,

he had found them covered with hundreds of pinpoint marks,

some clearly very small scars.

What could they be?

I put his mind at rest.

These were the marks left by the iniezione reconstituenti -

injections which are given in many of the pharmacies of Naples and

which many middle-class women receive daily to keep their sexual

powers at their peak.

Lola had made him understand -

by gestures one could only shudderingly imagine -

that her late husband,

although half-starved and even when in the early stages of tuberculosis

from which he died,

never failed to have intercourse with her

less than six times a night.

She also had a habit, which terrified Frazer,

of keeping an eye on the bedside clock while he performed.

I recommended him to drink - as the locals did -

Marsala with the yolks of egg stirred into it

and to wear a medal of San Rocco, patron of coitus reservatus.

I want to marry you.

-Not possible.

-Why not?

-Because crazy.

-Why am I crazy?

Because you want to marry me.

Wait, you won't marry me because I'm crazy and you say I'm crazy because

I want to marry you, right?

-Si.

-You're crazy.

-Why?

Because I love you.

EXPLOSION BOOMS

A narrow escape today while motorcycling along

the Via Partenope.

I was riding towards the Castel Nuovo when I noticed a sudden change

ahead from blue sky, sunshine and shadow to a great opaque whiteness,

shutting off the view of the port.

The effect was one of a whole district blotted out by a pall

of the white smoke sometimes spread

from the chimneys of a factory producing lime.

On turning a bend, I came upon an apocalyptic scene.

A number of buildings, including a bank,

had been pulverised by a terrific explosion that had clearly

just taken place.

Bodies were scattered all over the street.

But here and there among them stood the living,

as motionless as statues and all coated in thick white dust.

What engraved this scene on the mind and the imagination was that nothing

moved and that the silence was total.

This turned out to be one of a series of explosions produced by

delayed-action explosive devices

constructed by the Germans shortly before their departure,

in each case

from several hundred mines buried under principal buildings,

a senseless massacre perpetrated on the Italian civil population.

A tremendous scare this morning

following information given by a captured enemy agent that thousands

of delayed-action mines would explode when the city's electricity

supply was switched on.

This was timed for two o'clock today.

An order was given for the whole of Naples to be evacuated and,

within minutes, army vehicles were tearing up and down the streets,

broadcasting instructions to the civilian population.

The scene as the great exodus started and a million and a half

people left their houses and crowded into the streets

was like some biblical calamity.

Everyone had to be got away to the safety of the heights of the Vomero,

Fontanelle and the observatory overlooking the town.

This meant that the bedridden,

the dying and all the women in labour had to be coped with

in some way or other, not to mention the physically and mentally sick

persons in clinics all over the town.

I saw men carrying their old parents on their backs.

And at one moment, a single small explosion set off a panic,

with women and children running screaming in all directions,

leaving trails of urine.

At the Vomero, we took up positions at a spot on the heights where

the road had been intentionally widened to assist visitors

to appreciate the view, which was splendid indeed.

All Naples lay spread out beneath us like an antique map on which the

artist had drawn with almost exaggerated care the many gardens,

the castles, the towers and the cupolas.

For the first time, awaiting the cataclysm,

I appreciated the magnificence of this city,

seen at a distance which cleansed it of its wartime tegument of grime.

And for the first time I realised how un-European,

how Oriental it was.

A great silence had fallen and we looked down and awaited the moment

of devastation.

At about four o'clock, the order came for everyone to go home...

..the result of a carefully organised plot,

designed to cause the maximum disruption to the life of the city.

Lattarulo looked even weaker with hunger today than usual

and swayed from the waist,

eyes closed, even when sitting down.

After our chat, I decided to take him for a meal to one of

the side-street restaurants that have opened in the past few days.

We found the restaurant and took our seats among the middle-class patrons

who kept their overcoats on against the cold.

All the coats were made from our stolen blankets.

No attempt was made to isolate the customers from the street.

Ragged hawk-eyed boys,

the celebrated scugnizzi of Naples,

wandered among the tables ready to dive on

any crusts that appeared to be overlooked

or to snatch up leftovers before they could be thrown to the cats.

Once again, I couldn't help noticing the intelligence,

almost the intellectuality of their expressions.

No attempt was made to chase them away.

They were simply treated as non-existent.

Suddenly, five or six little girls between the ages of nine and twelve

appeared in the doorway.

They wore hideous straight black uniforms,

buttoned under their chins,

and black boots and stockings and their hair

had been shorn short, prison-style.

They were all weeping and, as they clung to each other and groped their

way towards us, bumping into chairs and tables,

I realised they were all blind.

Tragedy and despair had been thrust upon us and would not be shut out.

I expected the indifferent diners to push back their plates,

to get up and hold out their arms, but nobody moved.

Forkfuls of food were thrust into open mouths.

The rattle of conversation continued.

Nobody saw the tears.

They had been brought down here, he found out,

on a half-day's outing by an attendant who seemed unable

or unwilling to stop them from being lured away by the smell of food.

The experience changed my outlook.

Until now, I had clung to the comforting belief that human beings

eventually come to terms with pain and sorrow.

Now I understood I was wrong.

And like Paul, I suffered a conversion.

But to pessimism.

These little girls, any one of whom could be my daughter,

came into the restaurant weeping

and they were weeping when they were led away.

I knew that condemned to everlasting darkness, hunger and loss,

they would weep on incessantly.

They would never recover from their pain and I would never recover from

the memory of it.

-ARCHIVE:

-Naples was ripe for epidemic typhus.

The armies of Adolf Hitler had disembowelled the city.

We were stopped at a bottleneck caused by a collapsed building in

the Via Chiatamone

where a sanitary post had been set up.

And here every passer-by was sprayed with a white powder

against the typhus.

The news is that Naples is now officially suffering

from two epidemics...

..smallpox and typhoid.

People accept malaria as a matter of course in this town.

Epidemics, robbers, funerals followed by shrieking women,

deformed and mutilated beggars, legless cripples

dragging themselves about on wheeled platforms,

even raving lunatics they'd no room for in the asylum.

People walked the streets with handkerchiefs pressed over

their mouths and noses as they probably did in the days

of the plagues of old.

This morning I actually found myself in a little square tucked away among

the ruins, where women were dancing to drive the sickness away.

The war has pushed the Neapolitans back into the Middle Ages.

Churches are suddenly full of images that talk, bleed, sweat,

nod their heads and exude health-giving liquors to be mopped

up by handkerchiefs, or even collected in bottles, and anxious,

ecstatic crowds gather, waiting for these marvels to happen.

Naples has reached a state of nervous exhaustion,

when mass hallucination has become a commonplace

and belief of any kind can be more real than reality.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

-ARCHIVE:

-The port was working again and supplies came flooding in.

Food, bombs, shells, tanks, plane parts, petrol, lorries,

supplies for peace and supplies for war.

The black market flourishes as never before.

65% of the per capita income of Neapolitans derives from

transactions in

stolen Allied supplies, and one third of all supplies and equipment

imported continued to disappear into the black market.

Every single item of Allied equipment,

short of guns and munitions, which are said to be

sold under the counter, is openly displayed for sale

in the Forcella market.

No feat, according to the newspapers and to public rumour,

is too outrageous for this new breed of robber.

Nothing has been too large or too small,

from telegraph poles to phials of penicillin,

to escape the Neapolitan kleptomania.

A week or two ago,

an orchestra playing at the San Carlo to an audience largely clothed

in Allied hospital blankets

returned from a five-minute interval to find all its instruments missing.

A theoretically priceless collection of Roman cameos

was abstracted from the museum

and replaced by modern imitations, the thief only learning,

so the reports go, when he came to dispose of his booty

that the originals themselves were counterfeit.

Now the statues are disappearing from the public squares

and one cemetery has lost most of its tombstones.

Even the manhole covers have been found to have a marketable value,

so that suddenly these too have all gone and everywhere

there are holes in the road.

-1.

-What do you say?

Well, let's give it to him. We'll have a try.

-Come on.

-There.

-All right.

-Let's go.

-Hey, come back!

-THEY SHOUT

Already at the end of February,

winter is slipping away and the onset of the melancholy of spring is

announced by the seller of broad beans, who passes under our windows,

always at dusk, with the saddest of cries.

"A fava fresca."

The warmth of the sun comes through and seeps into the cold walls and

the town wakes to new life.

On sale now - and only in this season - is a pagan springtime cake,

pastiera napoletana, made with soft grain of all kinds,

removed from their husks months before ripe

and cooked with orange blossom.

The Vico Satriano, the narrow street overlooked by one

side of our building,

hums with activity as a great, vociferous spring-cleaning

begins and unwanted objects of all kinds - chipped crockery,

broken vessels,

irreparable articles of furniture - follow the slops into the street.

Everyone shouts, gesticulates and sings snatches

of mournful love songs,

such as Ammore Busciardo - "Love The Traitor" -

and a boy has appeared in the street corner beneath us selling for five

lire a collection of 25 of the latest ballads,

all of them dedicated to romantic frustration.

A bad raid last night with heavy civilian casualties,

as usual in the densely populated port areas.

In Santa Lucia, home territory of the Neapolitan ballad,

I saw a heart-rending scene.

A number of tiny children had been dug out of the ruins of a bombed

building and lay side by side in the street.

Where presentable, their faces were uncovered and, in some cases,

brand-new dolls had been thrust into their arms

to accompany them to the other world.

One man climbed into the rubble and was calling into a hole

where he believed his little boy was trapped under hundreds of tons of

masonry, begging him not to die before he could be dug out.

"Hang on, son, only a few minutes longer now.

"We'll have you out of there in a minute.

"Please don't die."

MUSIC: Before It Gets Dark by Rigolo

Today Vesuvius erupted.

It was the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen

or ever expect to see.

The smoke from the crater slowly built up into a great bulging shape,

having all the appearance of solidity.

It swelled and expanded so slowly that there was no sign of movement

in the cloud, which by evening

must have risen 30 or 40,000 feet into the sky and measured many miles

across. The sky was fogged over and ash was falling, and

everything, the buildings, streets and fields,

was covered to a depth of a half-inch in a smooth grey pall.

There was fear for the safety of military installations in areas such

as Portici and Torre del Greco,

which always suffer the worst effects of an eruption of Vesuvius,

and I was instructed to find out what the prospects were, if these

could in any way be gauged, of a worsening in the situation.

An increase in the violence of the eruption

and also of the population's fears

following the news that San Sebastiano was about to be carried

away by the lava stream and Cercola was threatened -

I was sent to get an on-the-spot report.

Sticky going all the way through the ash with several skids,

I was right under the great grey cloud,

full of swellings and protuberances like some colossal pulsating brain.

At the time of my arrival at San Sebastiano,

the lava was pushing its way very quietly down the main street,

and about 50 yards from the edge of this great

slowly shifting slag heap,

a crowd of several hundred people, mostly in black, knelt in prayer.

The spectacle of the eruption was totally unexpected.

I had been prepared for rivers of fire but there was no fire and no

burning anywhere, only the slow, deliberate suffocation of the town

under millions of tons of clinkers.

The lava was moving at a rate of only a few yards an hour and it had

covered half the town to a depth of perhaps 30 feet.

The whole process was strangely quiet.

The black slag heap shook,

trembled and jerked a little and cinders rattled down its slope.

Dominant in every way,

for sheer size and the number of persons supporting the platform,

of images confronting the eruption was that of San Sebastiano himself.

But wandering away into a side street,

I noticed the presence of another image also with numerous attendants,

which was covered with a white sheet.

This was an image of San Gennaro,

smuggled in from Naples on an outside chance that it might be

of some use if all else failed.

It is believed by Neapolitans of all political creeds and degrees of

religious conviction that the fortunes of the city

depend on the miracle of San Gennaro.

A good miracle is one in which the blood liquefies quickly...

..while the failure of the miracle is taken as a sign of the saint's

extreme displeasure and regarded as a catastrophe.

Fear is expressed that the blood of San Gennaro may refuse to liquefy

this year and that such a failure might be exploited by secret

anti-Allied factions and troublemakers to set off large-scale

rioting of the kind that has frequently happened in Neapolitan

history when the miracle has failed.

At about eight o'clock, the saint gave way to this new pressure and

the miracle took place.

# Jesce sole

# Jesce sole

# Jesce sole

# Nun te fa' cchiu suspira... #

The fragmentation of Italian politics in reaction to

the long-stagnant acquiescence under fascism continues.

There are now some 60 officially recognised political parties, having

memberships ranging from 100 or so to nearly two million.

Of all the emergent political forces, the most numerous,

powerful and rational outside Naples,

in which the urban subproletariat

is royalist to a man, are the Christian Democrats,

the Social Democrats and Orthodox Communists.

CHEERING

CHEERING

CHEERING

CHEERING

I am concerned at the increasing number of applications by officers

or other ranks to marry Italian civilians.

The Bureau of Psychological Warfare has just stated in its bulletin that

there are 42,000 women in Naples engaged either on a regular

or occasional basis in prostitution.

This, out of a nubile female population of perhaps 150,000,

seems incredible.

Three out of four of these girls I have interviewed will probably

cease to be prostitutes as soon as they can hope to keep alive

by any other means.

Nine out of ten Italian girls have lost their menfolk -

who have either disappeared in battles,

into prisoner-of-war camps or been cut off in the north.

The whole population is out of work.

Nobody produces anything.

How are they to live?

A circular issued by the general officer commanding is probably

the real reason

behind the sudden coming to an end of my investigation into the

suitability of marriages proposed between the British soldiery

and Italian girls in the Naples area.

In the first three months,

43 such vettings have been carried out

and in 12 cases the report has been favourable.

However this may be, I am out of it for good,

having been relieved by the field security officer of this particular

duty in so subtle a fashion that I am bound to suspect that after

a year of close contact with the seamy side of life in Naples,

he's been unable to avoid infection

by the deviousness of the environment.

Hello, Yossarian.

Huh.

-I didn't know.

-That I work for Milo?

Everybody works for Milo.

Yeah.

Well, he told me to ask for number 33.

Mm-hm. 33.

10, please.

No towel, Yossarian?

PIANO PLAYS RAG

A most embarrassing episode happened today.

Mobs of youths began to assault girls found in the company

of Allied soldiers. The girls were chased and, when caught,

their knickers were torn off.

Soldiers who intervened to defend their girls were promptly beaten up.

The incident highlighted an unhappy and deteriorating situation produced

by the encroachment of the Allied presence on the emotional

and romantic life of the city.

Then the foreign soldiers came on the scene and were in immediate

collision with the local boys, who had no work, no prestige, no money,

absolutely nothing to offer the girls.

A British private, wretchedly paid as he is,

earns more than a foreman at the navali mechannica,

while an American private,

who can shower cigarettes,

sweets and even silk stockings in all directions,

has a higher income than any Italian employee in Naples.

Thus, the long, delicate,

intricate business of the old Neapolitan courtship,

as complex as the mating ritual of exotic birds,

is replaced by a brutal,

wordless approach and a crude act of purchase.

One wonders how long it will take the young of Naples

after we have gone to recover from the bitterness of this experience.

MUSIC: Parlami d'Amore Mariu by Mario Lanza

The fact is that we have upset the balance of nature here.

And I have arrived at a time when, in their hearts,

these people must be thoroughly sick and tired of us.

A year ago we liberated them from the fascist monster.

And they still sit doing their best to smile politely at us...

..as hungry as ever, more disease-ridden than ever before,

in the ruins of their beautiful city,

where law and order have ceased to exist.

And what is the prize that is to be eventually won?

The rebirth of democracy.

The glorious prospect of being able one day

to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men,

most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted

with weary resignation.

The days of Benito Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared

with this.

CROWD ROARS

CHEERING

BRASS BAND PLAYS

The thunderbolt has fallen.

Today I was ordered to prepare to leave immediately for Taranto

to embark on the Reina del Pacifico for Port Said,

where I am to pick up 3,000 Russian soldiers

who had been fighting with the Germans

and gone over to the partisans.

The Allied force headquarters' order reads,

"You will be away as long as necessary,"

but does not define the duties to be performed.

My intuition warns me that my stay in Naples has come to an end,

so I am left with only hours to spare and no time to say goodbye to

any of the friends scattered through so many towns.

There will be no time for a last glass of Marsala with any of

the scheming syndicates

or the Machiavellian chiefs of police who have always,

for all their innumerable shortcomings,

shown hospitality to me as a stranger.

There will be no time for a last coffee substitute in the Gran Caffe

in the Galleria to say goodbye and good luck to several girls who are

virtually fixtures at the place and bear me no ill will because I was

unable to help them to marry Allied personnel.

I realise that I have had my last meal at Zi Teresa's.

There won't be even a half-hour to spare for a dash up to the Vomero

for a last panoramic view across the gardens of the Villa Floridiana,

of the great grey and red city spread below,

presenting at this distance a totally fallacious aspect

of dignified calm...

..or for a final contemplation of the somnolent Vesuvius,

so changed in outline since its reshaping by the eruption.

A year among the Italians had converted me to such an admiration

for their humanity and culture

that I realised that were I given the chance to be

born again and to choose the place of my birth,

Italy would be the country of my choice.

Perhaps when everything is ready for the move-off,

at half past six tomorrow from the Stazione Centrale,

there will at least be a moment left to call on Lattarulo,

most faithful of my Neapolitan allies.

I know in advance that having staggered under the impact

of the news and then recovered with proper fortitude, he will whisper,

"I've got a treat for you."

This he will describe as caccia, game,

but it will be a muscled city pigeon netted on someone's roof.

He will dash out to find the neighbourhood girl, who will stew it

in garlic and herbs and serve it up on the great ancestral salver.

When it is time to go, he will take my hand and say,

"I'll be at the station tomorrow to see you off."

And I know he will be there, as promised...

..dressed in all the dignity of his zio di Roma suit

for such an occasion.