They ascended the mountains behind La Spezia above five thousand feet, about ten miles from Garbugliago, a long hike through green sward, a mass of grass and roots, hellish to walk through when wet, and it took a good part of the day. The Widow Murro had given them directions and sent word to the commandant of the band that they were coming, and she had vouched for them.
On an easy stretch, Fred said to Dante it would be a difficult time. “There"s hard fighting coming.”
Fred had lived through the horrors of the BEF evacuation from Dunkirk, and gone up against the Germans and Italians in North Africa, and he knew how well German soldiers fought.
After the armistice, the Italian Army had fractured. Men scattered across the country. Soldiers vanished as snow from a pitched roof bathed in w
