Escapades in Italy

Press, 16 July 1983, Page 18

Escapades in Italy

Love and War in the Apennines. By Eric Newby. Picador, 1983. 224 pp. $7.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Stephen Erber) Before Eric Newby decided upon climbing adventures in Nuristan which he detailed in “A Short Walk in the

Hindu Kush” he had, strangely enough for a man of adventurous disposition, worked in the world of womens’ fashion. Before the Second World War he had worked in advertising, and then as a seaman on a clipper (a stint he describes in “The Last Grain Race”). Without knowing any more, one would guess that his war time activities were similarly eventful and adventurous. From the account given in this book, they were for the first couple of years. Newby served as a commando, or irregular combatant, with the Black Watch, and this book opens with a disastrously unsuccessful mission in which he was engaged in Italy. Newby was captured. This is his account of his first experiences as a prisoner of war, his subsequent escape and his recapture. Mainly it is about his period of freedom from captivity which he achieved after Mussolini’s fall.

It is a sad fact that, by and large, adventurers and travellers are very good and resourceful at adventuring and travelling, but somewhat indifferent at writing about it. Not so Eric Newby. All of his accounts, ol whatever journeys he has made are irresistibly funny and successfully told. This account, largely of the shelter and protection given him by the Italian peasants, is no different. It is a most exciting story, cheerfully and affectingly told, and it is all the better for the author not luxuriating, with the benefit of hindsight and travails past, in the supposed romance of his adventures. Newby was in no doubt that he has had a bad time, and that the lot of the Italian peasant was mean, hard and likely to be visited with death for assisting escaped prisoners.

Newby does not try to show himself as having been brave, remarkable or generous in spirit, but tries (successfully) to ascribe those qualities to those who helped him. In that process we see those qualities reflected in himself and in the woman he met at this time and later married (hence “Love and War ...”). Books of this quality at such an affordable price are altogether a rare occurrence today.