Past Lives: The comfort of strangers

A man was killed, property was badly damaged and the object of our pilgrimage was closed because 100ft chestnut trunks had crashed down around it. So we continued to the other and more famous site of the appalling carnage which took place in this corner of Lombardy on June 20, 1859.

And there, at Solferino, we came across a remarkable monument to the battle which laid the foundations of a united Italy ... and contributed mightily to the survival, to comfortable retirement in today's North Yorkshire, of old soldiers Ian English and Dominick Graham.

Solferino and San Martino each have an ancient church which some years after the fighting was turned into an ossuary to house the remains of thousands of the soldiers - the Piedmontese and French allies and their Austrian opponents - who died in the twin battles. Every wall, side-chapel, crypt and vault is packed with skulls and other bones. It was the church at San Martino, as well as a museum, which had been closed by storm damage.

But it is another memorial at Solferino which now invokes for me the indefatigable spirit of Mr English, who lives at Dale Cottage, Preston under Scar near Leyburn, and Mr Graham, of Hollins House, East Rounton, near Northallerton.

At the end of a long avenue, a wall is made up of 139 blocks of granite each bearing the name of a member country of the International Red Cross.

Both men, now in their 80s, have written very readable and often moving books telling how in 1943 - separately, but from the same PoW camp - they walked hundreds of miles through Italy before crossing the German front line to meet up with British troops advancing from the south.

Not only did Red Cross food parcels sustain them during months of imprisonment and the first days of their long treks to freedom, but their eventual triumph could not have been achieved had it not been for a reprise - 80 years on and this time throughout Italy - of the Solferino spirit which gave Henri Dunant his inspiration to found the Red Cross.

Dunant, a Swiss philanthropist and an observer at the battle of Solferino, was mightily impressed by the help given to the wounded of both sides by the local people. It gave him the idea of formalising such humanitarian actions to ease suffering in future conflicts. It was for this, and his role in establishing the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, that he was jointly the first winner of the Nobel peace prize in 1901.

Both Capt (later Maj) English and Capt Graham, then in their early 20s, make the generous and courageous hospitality they received from ordinary Italians during their months of hand-to-mouth journeying a theme of their books: generous because it was given mainly by peasants whose own impoverishment had been worsened by the war and courageous because these contadini risked their lives when they sheltered the Allies' escaped PoWs.

English and Graham had arrived separately at the Fontanellato prison camp for officers after being captured a few weeks apart in North Africa, the former as a Durham Light Infantry company commander and the latter as a Royal Artillery officer.

At Fontanellato, a former orphanage near Parma in central northern Italy, they were both members of the vigorous fraternity of a clique - which may be nearly the right word for this minority not always popular with fellow prisoners - dedicated to the planning and execution of escapes. Often, it was felt by those whose temperament inclined them to make the best of things while waiting for the war to end, gung-ho escapers merely provoked the indiscriminate wrath of the camp authorities.

But it is the duty of a British soldier to try to rejoin the war, English reminds readers early in his tautly-written book, aptly titled Assisted Passage: Walking to Freedom, Italy 1943.

Why? That the reason is not simply to cause his captors as much trouble as possible is stirringly demonstrated by postscripts to both books. English was back with the DLI in time for D-Day, going on to win a second bar to his Military Cross before being wounded for the second time in his war. Graham, who in 1940 had fought in Norway, also took part in the Normandy landings and in Germany the following year he too was wounded.

The latter's book, also gripping stuff and privately published in 2000, four years after his comrade's, is The Escapes and Evasions of 'An Obstinate Bastard'.

And, yes, Dominick Graham admits he can dig his heels in stubbornly when he has listened to all the arguments and still feels his is the sensible course of action; the quote in his title was overheard when, towards the end of their 600-mile hike to freedom crossing mountain ranges and fording rivers, he parted company with his two companions. The tussle was over which way to approach the German front line; in the event, there was a chance reunion two days later.

This meeting was one of many both soldier-authors had with friends they had known either in prison camps or before capture. At times, both books have about them something of the flavour of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy or Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time series.

Chaps from school turn up - Ian English had been head boy at Oundle - as do DLI officers captured in previous battles in the Western Desert, one of whom greeted English heartily: "Hello, Tubby! By Jove, you are not so tubby now."

One would not be too surprised if Widmerpool himself had emerged from an Appennine cave, whose tenancy he had secured by exerting subtle influence, with an offer of some black-market polenta.

Indeed, you are sometimes charmed into reading these books as stories about an enjoyable game, with descriptions of madcap schemes for escape, of disguises and of glorious top-of-world scenery as the young bloods progress along sunny mountain ridges far higher than any in Britain. Then you are brought down to earth by days when they are cold and soaked, summary executions and, especially from Graham, accounts of the many times he and other escapees came under fire from German patrols.

In September 1943, seven weeks after Mussolini was deposed ("Benito finito", crowed the prisoners' "news agency" within Fontanellato), Italy signed a separate peace with the Allies.

The armistice provided for the opening of PoW camps - something the Germans, with many thousands of troops in the country, immediately tried to prevent. They sought to move prisoners to the Fatherland.

Fortunately for our two heroes, the fair-minded Italian commandant at Fortanellato acted swiftly and co-operated with the prisoners' own command structure there: a German takeover squad found that the birds had flown.

Before going their separate ways in two and threes, some choosing to go north towards neutral Switzerland, the men gathered en masse in the woods - and it was there they had a foretaste of the help they could expect from the now virulently anti-Nazi majority of Italians. As well as food to supplement that saved from the Red Cross parcel sent weekly to the camp for every PoW, the locals brought large quantities of civilian clothes.

Nearly every night during their journeys, of three months for English's 500 miles but about half that for Graham's longer trek, the two officers were put up by Italians, usually in barns but once or twice in the luxury of a bed. Almost always a meal was provided. Only occasionally did they meet a wrong 'un or did the high risk of dire punishment by the Germans make these brave people refuse hospitality.

BOTH men had been on constant alert for chances to escape before Italy quit the war. Graham was among five men who on two successive nights got out of Fontanellato after hiding in a shallow trench dug, and covered over, during the prisoners' levelling of a sports field; his shabbiness after tearing his shirt on the wire fence gave him away to carabinieri who had earlier been fooled by his forged identity documents.

At a previous camp, he was quickly "back in the bag", as the PoW jargon had it, after crawling under an inner fence only to run into a sentry. His most dramatic failure came in a large sewage pipe, half-filled with filthy effluent, when his companion escapee received nasty burns when a naked-flame lantern - improvised from a Red Cross food tin - ignited marsh gas, causing a big explosion.

IAN English, son of a managing director of Heworth colliery, County Durham, returned to university after the war, and his Cambridge degree in agriculture led to a 30-year career as an adviser with Fisons. He is now aged 82 and with his Danish wife moved to Wensleydale 13 years ago from Hexham.

All 630 copies of Assisted Passage were sold. He has also written the history of 8 DLI and two years ago edited Home by Christmas, made up of contributions by former PoWs.

The collection has a chapter by Dominick Graham, who has had a lifelong interest in military history. His second wife was Lady Mary Bell, well-known in North Yorkshire farming circles, who died last year. Profits from his book will go to a trust which makes educational grants to descendants of Italians who aided PoWs.