highlands led north to the Brenner Pass, there was snow and sleet and cruel winds to huddle the people into their houses. There were other reasons too. The Germans had taken possession: their soldiers patrolled through alternating ice and slush, as they guarded the railway line and the flow of supplies to the German armies in Italy. German edicts, German puppets, controlled the towns on the railway line. Allied bombing-planes attacked them. Far to the south, in Italy, there was drivingrain and earth so sodden that the fighting-fronts churned into delaying mud. The hope that October had brought had become as frozen as the earth from which the Dolomite Alps rose so steeply. The winter had been hard.
In the houses high on the Schlern it was whispered that the Allies couldn’t approach the Brenner until autumn now. Perhaps not even then. This spring would come too quickly to be of any use to people who waited four hundred miles north of the Allied lines. But hope was like the earth: it was frozen, but it was not dead. The old men, the gaunt-cheeked women, the remaining young men (who had escaped from the recruiting interest of any German ski-patrol by vanishing into the thick pine forests which fringed the mountains’ base), didn’t talk very much. But they had their own thoughts. They listened in to the forbidden Allied broadcasts, and they were making their decisions. Here was a third group of foreigners who would come to invade the Dolomites. Would they be like the Italians or the Germans, who, once they came to a country, claimed possession? Or were these foreigners, who called themselves “The Allies,” different? Were they really fighting for other people’s freedom as well as their own? After twenty-five years of Italian domination the people on the Schlern, like all the Tyrolese on the other Dolomite slopes, were waiting for the autumn of 1944. If it couldn’t be this spring which would end this waiting then let it be the autumn. It was more than a hope; in many hearts it had become a prayer.
The people went about their daily tasks as if there were no war. But they measured their food carefully, they listened eagerly to the radio, they hid their men from the German patrols, they pretended ignorance in reply to all the regulationsand proclamations of the newly named “Alpenvorland.” They never forgot that in the village of Kastelruth at the edge of the Schlern, where the road from the valley below came to rest on a gentle green slope, there was a token German garrison. They never forgot that these armed foreigners were there, not to give them a feeling of “protection,” as the Germans said in the best gangster fashion, but to police the Schlern plateau and keep it under informal observation.
The Germans didn’t expect trouble. The people of the South Tyrol were Austrians, after all. And Austria was now a part of Greater Germany. So the garrison was small, and its periodic patrols were less thorough as the winter severity increased. And if the Tyrolese up on this plateau had shown no response to the February proclamation, that all men between eighteen and fifty-five years of age must report to the German Military Headquarters in Bozen, then the Germans at Kastelruth blamed that on the slow and stubborn nature of the highlander. They would deal with him, once the more accessible districts of the South Tyrol had been brought into line. The Germans were quite content to play a waiting game.
But the peace of the mountains is a deceiving thing: the impassive face of the highlander is equally baffling. Neither the mountains nor the people who live among them are so simple as they look.
8
Peter Lennox watched the pools of green grass appear through the melting slush. With the same impatience, he had watched the first blanket of snow on the Schlern. But now there was a bitter feeling of failure added to the impatience, turning its edge to knife-sharp disappointment. The inactivity of the long winter months frayed
In the houses high on the Schlern it was whispered that the Allies couldn’t approach the Brenner until autumn now. Perhaps not even then. This spring would come too quickly to be of any use to people who waited four hundred miles north of the Allied lines. But hope was like the earth: it was frozen, but it was not dead. The old men, the gaunt-cheeked women, the remaining young men (who had escaped from the recruiting interest of any German ski-patrol by vanishing into the thick pine forests which fringed the mountains’ base), didn’t talk very much. But they had their own thoughts. They listened in to the forbidden Allied broadcasts, and they were making their decisions. Here was a third group of foreigners who would come to invade the Dolomites. Would they be like the Italians or the Germans, who, once they came to a country, claimed possession? Or were these foreigners, who called themselves “The Allies,” different? Were they really fighting for other people’s freedom as well as their own? After twenty-five years of Italian domination the people on the Schlern, like all the Tyrolese on the other Dolomite slopes, were waiting for the autumn of 1944. If it couldn’t be this spring which would end this waiting then let it be the autumn. It was more than a hope; in many hearts it had become a prayer.
The people went about their daily tasks as if there were no war. But they measured their food carefully, they listened eagerly to the radio, they hid their men from the German patrols, they pretended ignorance in reply to all the regulationsand proclamations of the newly named “Alpenvorland.” They never forgot that in the village of Kastelruth at the edge of the Schlern, where the road from the valley below came to rest on a gentle green slope, there was a token German garrison. They never forgot that these armed foreigners were there, not to give them a feeling of “protection,” as the Germans said in the best gangster fashion, but to police the Schlern plateau and keep it under informal observation.
The Germans didn’t expect trouble. The people of the South Tyrol were Austrians, after all. And Austria was now a part of Greater Germany. So the garrison was small, and its periodic patrols were less thorough as the winter severity increased. And if the Tyrolese up on this plateau had shown no response to the February proclamation, that all men between eighteen and fifty-five years of age must report to the German Military Headquarters in Bozen, then the Germans at Kastelruth blamed that on the slow and stubborn nature of the highlander. They would deal with him, once the more accessible districts of the South Tyrol had been brought into line. The Germans were quite content to play a waiting game.
But the peace of the mountains is a deceiving thing: the impassive face of the highlander is equally baffling. Neither the mountains nor the people who live among them are so simple as they look.
8
Peter Lennox watched the pools of green grass appear through the melting slush. With the same impatience, he had watched the first blanket of snow on the Schlern. But now there was a bitter feeling of failure added to the impatience, turning its edge to knife-sharp disappointment. The inactivity of the long winter months frayed
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