Reading Those Classics #13

Classic War Memoir. Author Hood was an English major and instructor at the University of Edinburgh from 1924 to 1938, and so received training in close reading, creativity, problem-solving, writing skills, logic and rhetoric, critical thinking and how to research and analyze information. He also studied Italian. With that skill set, he ended up in espionage during WWII. Naturally.

Pebbles in My Skull - Stuart Hood

He served in the 8th Army as an intelligence officer near Cairo. But in 1942, about the worst year of the war for the Allies, he was captured at Mersa Matruh as the hard-pressed British armies retreated across El-Alamein.

Hood was transferred to an Italian POW camp for British officers at Fontanellato near Parma. Hood escaped in September of 1943 into the nearby Emilian Apennines, then southward into Tuscany. Luckily he was a quick study, able to get along in the many different dialects he met. He could communicate with all the people he met during his year on the run in Italy

Instead of organizing the other escaped POW's into partisan units, he laid low in Lombardy and Tuscany He asks himself, partly in shame, “Why did it take me from September 8th 1943 to August 15th 1944 to recross the line to reassume my identity, step out of limbo?”

This account is singularly unromantic. No allure of combat between worthy foes. The Germans take monstrous reprisals against villagers. The peasants who helped Hood and the partisans were running risks of arrest, imprisonment, torture and execution. The peasant partisans helped him mainly because they wanted the Germans out of their country. They had only vague notions of what countries made up the Allies and what their beef with Germany was.

The partisans were bitterly divided because of political and personal differences. There are no heroes and in the fighting Hood sees little reason. This book is a meditation on war’s bad choices and their effect on individuals. Near the end of the book he wonders about the future with the German priest who gives some general advice about dealing with people, “You must be prepared for disappointment, not expect too much and accept goodness, when you meet it, as a manifestation of Grace.”